Darren Shaw

Lost Weekend Aug 2026

Listening To

  1. Lost Weekend by Phoebe Bridgers. The album I was most looking forward to this year. I love it. Kill Me is my favourite track. It sounds like Fake Plastic Trees if it were sung by The Cranberries, which is the world I want to live in. Here’s the video for I Can’t Wait.

Reading

  1. One Golden Summer by Carley Fortune. Prime beach read material. I read Every Summer After a couple of years ago and don’t remember anything about it other than it wasn’t as good as The Summer I Turned Pretty. One Golden Summer was so generic I kept trying to work out if I’ve somehow read it before. I’m really just looking for another Dawson’s Creek, The OC or Gossip Girl.
  2. The Swedish Art of Ageing Well. This is an autobiography by a normal person who has obvious but sensible advice. I don’t know how it ever got published but it was charming and refreshing in its mundaneness.
  3. Why play is the core of a meaningful life. It’s such a good read. The point of life is to play and it’s what still makes humans different to AI. The FT Weekend is £5.40. It’s the best money I spend every week (see two more references below).
  4. Nested Vectors Search In Apache Lucene. Work related. Possible solution to handling multiple versions of embeddings we’ve been thinking about.
  5. Don’t Outsource the Learning. There are so many Addy Osmani articles on AI I link to. I like the closing line of this one, I’ve started ending coding sessions with a simple question: did I learn anything today, or did I just close the issue?
  6. Shaping Product Understanding with Contrastive Reinforcement Learning. Etsy have some good nerd content. Another (maybe) work-relevant one.
  7. ‘Have I been influenced, or is this actually me?’ How personal taste fell out of fashion. This Guardian article made me think of the people I worked with at Net-A-Porter who really knew fashion and curation. If you dismiss taste as trivial, or see it as purely imitative, you are dismissing what it is to be a person. Could this be related to Eugene Rabkin’s Is the luxury world stuck on repeat? (also in the FT Weekend)? If nobody curates their own style, how could fashion not be stuck?
  8. The same issue of the FT Weekend had an article about On-Togther, a virtual co-working game/not-game. Which sounded a lot cuter and less nerdy than Second Life.
  9. Dancing with friends and enemies. Swarming algorithms seem to be getting attention like it’s 2001 all over again.

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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