Darren Shaw

Lost Boys Jul 2026

Listening To

  1. Lost Boys. If you don’t know already, I should have been listening to Phoebe Bridgers as she’s the best thing about the 2020s. The new song is great and has a video that could have been from late 90s MTV.

    Even better is the live version she did with a backing band of kids. Glorious. Be a leader like Phoebe.

  2. The second-best thing about the 2020s is Maggie Rogers. Surrender and Don’t Forget Me are both albums I listen to a lot, but I’ve only just come across this live version of Light On. Clever and joyful is a combination to aspire to.

  3. Whenever I hear I Do This All The Time by Self Esteem I hear Sunscreen by Baz Lurman.

Looking At

  1. Julie F Hill’s Through Machines & Darkness uses data to create art. In this case satellite data.
  2. I’ve come across Train Jazz before. I lost just as much time playing with it the second time.
  3. I’m a fan of Chris Guest’s Oil Paintings, they’re modern pinups that are as fun as they are glamorous. I love the consistency in the models he works with. And, although I’m biased, I do have a favourite.

  4. Keith Tyson is another artist I follow and is always inspiring. His Generative Universe obviously looks awesome.

Reading

  1. Consider Phlebas has been recommended to me multiple times. It’s 1980s sci-fi space opera revolving around AI. It was… okay.
  2. AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage. I’ve read the same article so many times that it’s taken me six months to get to this instantiation of it and I almost didn’t bother. But it did raise a point that you can’t (at least in the US) copyright AI generated content, which means companies (e.g. Disney) can’t use it because they’d have to give Avengers: Bring It On Again Too Fast Too Furious 2033 away for free. What? Interesting.
  3. Hybrid Search With Reciprocal Rank Fusion In Apache Solr. A deep cut for people who work with Solr. I think there’s something clever that could be done with this to combine different types of searches that all contribute to a page on an e-commerce or marketplace site.
  4. Fifteen Clocks. This is the sort of post I really love. Made me think about measuring time in a whole different way and inspired me to start playing.

Notes from 2026

Notes from 2025

Notes from 2019

Notes from 2018

Notes from 2017

Notes from 2016

Projects Photos

I Love Muted Tones

I've collected fashion and portrait pictures for years. I've got thousands. I have a good sense of what I like but what if I organise them by colour palette and model?

Algorithmic Twombly

My favourite things at the Louvre Abu Dhabi were Cy Twombly's Untitled I-IX paintings. They're structured but chaotic and beautifully imperfect.

Flow-vis for Net-A-Porter

What does a day's trading at Net-A-Porter look like? Taking inspiration from Formula 1's use of flow-vis paint, I came up with a visualisation for a YNAP hackday.

YNAP Hackday Poster

The most significant colours sampled from the product images of the top 1024 clothing products on Net-A-Porter, organised by hue.

Should Have Been Listening to Phoebe Bridgers

Spotify's Wrapped is very shareable but what if it took a longer term view? What if it considered the full thirteen years I've been with Spotify?

My Favourite Net-A-Porter Colour is Black

Net-A-Porter's Spring Summer 2022 marketing campaign, "Go for Bold", centred around a collection of colourful products. Marketing wanted to add a technology element and one idea was to use palettes as a route to finding products. Ultimately this was binned, but I built it anyway.

Has Roger Federer Perspired?

That Roger Federer does not sweat had become ingrained thinking, the sort of idea we were looking to challenge. Was it real or just a lazy cliche? We had IBM’s Wimbledon match data for all the top players and using Weather Underground we pulled in temperature data for those matches. This let us see the number of matches played by player and temperature.

Physical Web and Physical Meetings

As an experiment in using the Physical Web I wanted to create a voting system for physical meetings. A meeting would have a current question and attendees could vote with one click. There would be no entering URLs, downloading apps, or scanning QR codes.

Hello!

I'm Darren Shaw. I'm a software developer at Autotrader. Previously I worked at Zopa, Net-A-Porter and IBM. These are my side projects. Away from work I also play at being a portrait photographer.

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