Darren Shaw

Protect Your Shed Aug 2026

Listening To

  1. Tranceport by Paul Oakenfold. The legal version keeps coming on and off streaming services, so I bought the second-hand CD. I still have CDs. This, and the original Trance Nation compilation are the best late 90s dance albums.
  2. I bet Romy has the Tranceport and Trance Nation CDs. She has the best music taste. My favourite Boiler Room is Romy’s, but this Radio 1 Essential Mix is just as good. She’s better at picking what I want to listen to than Spotify’s AI. This mix includes Romy herself, Sugababes, Girls Aloud, Robyn, Mariah Carey, Everything But The Girl, Paramore, Ariana Grande, Ian Van Dahl, Rui Da Silva and even a few subtle bars of N-Trance.
    Funkytone · Radio 1 Essential Mix 2025-12-13 Romy
  3. Lainey Wilson. So much soul, so many hats. I love that she always looks like she’s come straight from the country version of 1998.

Watching

  1. The Drama. I’ll watch anything with Zendaya. This film has a great setup. You think you’re watching a romantic comedy until the twist comes. I’m not sure how you’re meant to feel about Zendaya’s character. I imagine people will feel differently, but I was on her side.

  2. Euphoria Season 3. Have you heard I’ll watch anything with Zendaya in it? Season 3 faced a lot of criticism and controversy. It’s not as good, or shocking, as the first two. But I love how beautifully made it is. Even films don’t look like films in 2026, but this is a TV series that still looks like a film.

    This scene is brilliant. The colours are great, it’s styled perfectly, each cut uses the other characters as frames and there’s just so many layers and interactions going on. Look at how Rue, Maddy and Lexi crouch (or sit) down so that the frame works with Cassie and the leaf blower girl in the background. I love the bit where Maddy doesn’t say anything but gives Rue, Cassie and leaf blower different individual looks and then makes the start your engine sign. It’s a work of art.

Wearing

  1. I keep reading about the 90s minimalism trend again and again. This is my favourite trend, but I’d prefer to see it in the real world than on the Internet.
  2. I can’t find long shorts I like. If I were a woman and was spending £1000, these would be perfect.
  3. All fashion magazines periodically do “my perfect white tee” articles. They always recommend Arket for quality, affordable options. Disagree. I’ve had three and they’ve all developed holes within months. The Uniqlo Supima cotton ones are much more robust.
  4. Some of my favourite fashion images this year have been in the Financial Times How To Spend It weekend magazine. There’s nothing fancy about this Daniyel Lowden image of Bruna Souza but I love it. Bruna Souza by Daniyel Lowden

Reading

I was on holiday this month and so I read quite a bit.

  1. Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke. This has got a lot of criticism but it was fun. Think of Inception but about social media tradwives. There’ll be a film.
  2. Down to Earth by Monty Don. Catching up on 40 years of missing gardening knowledge with books. What I’ll take from Monty Don is mainly, mulch.
  3. How to Art by Kate Bryan. There are few books I find genuinely inspiring. This has been one of them. I’m now forever browsing Avant Arte and JEALOUS.
  4. Craftland by James Fox. I thought I wasn’t going to enjoy this after the first couple of pages. Glad I kept going, I loved it.
  5. The summer that changed me was in the FT’s Life & Arts weekend supplement. Listicles got a bad name in the 2010s for being an easy way to write clickbaity posts, a quaint concern looking back from 2026. This is a listicle done well. FT’s journalists write a couple of paragraphs about a significant summer memory. Insightful nonsense that I love.
  6. The Factory Model: How Coding Agents Changed Software Engineering is similar to a lot of stuff written in the last year about software development and AI. But I enjoyed the new shape of high-leverage engineering section which lists the skills that continue to set the best engineers apart: systems thinking, problem decomposition, architectural judgement, specification clarity, output evaluation and orchestration skill. I’d add in product/problem understanding.
  7. Japanese symbols that speak without words introduced me to the Ba no kuuki wo yomu which translates to understanding the situation without words. It’s where something happens and everyone just knows the correct way to respond.
  8. I Could’ve Rickrolled the Entire FIFA World Cup because FIFA haven’t had enough drama this month.
  9. Boosted K-Nearest Neighbour Search described exactly the problem we’re trying to tackle at work but then said there’s not really an answer.
  10. Protect Your Shed. When I’ve worked in great development teams the engineers have always built their own sheds.
  11. The Economics of Software Teams is a clear-sighted way of looking at software development, but I don’t think it captures the cost of day-to-day firefighting for a team running their software in the real world.

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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