Darren Shaw

Speed Sep 2026

Listening To

  1. Paul Oakenfold’s Radio 1 Essential Mix, from Space, Ibiza. I realise I’m approximately 27 years late to this. My favourite bit is the Radiohead Street Spirit remix.

  2. Kelly Lee Owens also uses a Radiohead remix (Everything In Its Right Place) in her Boiler Room, Manchester.

  3. I came across ME N Ü on Instagram. I thought they may be AI only because they seem too perfectly targeted to me. Their Tomorrowland 2026 set sounds a lot like something Romy would do. If they are AI? Whatever.

Watching

  1. Even the good 2020s action movies are pretty average. My favourite one from the ’90s is Speed. Keanu Reeves was so cool, Casio G-Shock and all. The engineering that went into filming the bus scenes is incredible. I love the bit where Sandra Bullock is driving the bus with a fake steering wheel, while the actual steering is done by a stunt driver on the roof.

  2. Speed came out in 1994. Other films released that year: Forrest Gump, The Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction, Leon, Four Weddings and a Funeral and The Mask. What was happening in 1994? If you didn’t want to go to the cinema you could have been home listening to Definitely Maybe, Dummy, Parklife, Illmatic or Music for the Jilted Generation instead.
  3. While we’re in the 90s, Mark McNulty’s 35 Summers In Clubland pictures are moreish. Is it the heavy drinking? The smoking? Or just nostalgia that makes everyone in the 90s look so healthy?

Reading

  1. Tim Harford’s Just how random is random? article on how humans can’t do random. We’ll pick heads more often. We’ll pick two-digit numbers where the first digit is larger than the second more often. We’re rubbish.
  2. Training AI to Paint with Code. This is interesting. I thought it was going to be something that I’ve been playing with, using an AI to generate p5.js code to then generate an image (a two-step process that makes me feel like I’m contributing). But this is on another level. Surya Narreddi is using AI to generate p5.js code to generate an image which AI then uses to judge against a reference picture to refine the code it’s generating. It is subtle, but generating the code to generate the image and then improving the code to make the image better feels more impressive than going directly to an image. And it provides scope for the programmer/artist to contribute.
  3. How to be less awkward. This will feel familiar to many computer nerds. It does to me. I admired many of the things about working with people in fashion. What I took as their confidence may have been an absolute lack of awkwardness.
  4. Search Quality Evaluation With LLMs: The Dataset Generator. Nerdy Solr stuff that I’m thinking about in the context of my day job. Lots more work-related stuff happening with Solr and re-ranking. Apache Solr 10 – What Is New For Vector Search And LTR, New In Apache Solr 10: Improved Filtering In Vector Search With ACORN, Late Interaction Comes To Solr and Colbert Comes To Apache Solr.
  5. Agentic Code Review. Code review is something I want to get better at. Everyone could. This made it more relevant and urgent.

Notes from 2026

Notes from 2025

Notes from 2019

Notes from 2018

Notes from 2017

Notes from 2016

Projects Photos

There's Still Time

I like the idea of playing with the representation of time and its passage. This is a work in progress.

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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