Darren Shaw

Look, headband Oct 2026

Listening To

  1. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and Jagged Little Pill. I’ve got a new CD player in my home office (CDs are making a comeback), which means I’ve been listening to old albums (mainly from the late 90s). Everyone talks about how good these records are. Agree.

Welcome to the AI Bitch

The more I do with AI, the less special I think the human brain is. I’ve read arguments that as clever as we think we are, we’re all just prediction machines too. I’ve read arguments that consciousness is just a trick to help us process that prediction. AI can never be creative? I asked ChatGPT, “What would Summer Roberts say if Blair Waldorf got in her way? Give me two options.”

  1. “Look, headband, I don’t know who you think you are in your little Upper East Side bubble, but I’m from Newport Beach and you are literally blocking my path to Barneys.”
  2. “I have zero time for your weird power trips. Go find your boyfriend with the scarf and bother him.”

“Headband”. Amazing.

Watching

  1. The Invite. From the moment I saw Alex in The OC I’ll watch anything Olivia Wilde is involved in. The Invite isn’t the best thing she’s done, but it’s good enough that you don’t notice it’s just one conversation between four people in a single room.

Reading

  1. Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. Everything you already know. Everything you already imagine. All in one place.
  2. 1996: My Backstage Pass to The Wildest Year of Britain’s Wildest Decade. This is pretty bland. It’s 90s nostalgia you already know about with little criticism. I did like all the “10 best” lists.
  3. Harvest. Minette Batters was the first female president of the NFU. I could have skipped the background/life story part, but the rest offered insight into how farmers think. I wish farmers with experience outside of farming were more vocal.
  4. Broken Country. I don’t think I liked the main character in the way you’re meant to. But I didn’t see the twist coming. Worth reading.
  5. The Names is another spin on the replaying your life theme I love. Dark, but a page turner.
  6. The agents are coming for the web and the web isn’t ready. This is a good summary of a problem that exists today and is getting worse rapidly. It may need reframing as a problem to be managed as we move to a new normal. The valuable reading is in the links.
  7. Also from RedMonk, Agents are choosing the software infrastructure now, and we’re not really ready. Just interesting. Totally different thinking.
  8. Do you even need a presentation?. I don’t see presentations sent as documents often now. Is that the culture in a different company or have things changed? In the consultancy part of IBM in the 2010s it was the primary means of communication.
  9. Agent Skills is my monthly recommendation from Addy Osmani. It’s an AI skills post, but it was a reminder of some of Google’s engineering practices: the Beyoncé Rule, DAMP over DRY in tests, ~100-line PR sizing, Code-as-liability.
  10. Work-relevant reading: Balancing Multiple Objectives in Generative Recommendations with Adaptive Decoding

Contributing To

  1. Apache Solr 10.1.0. Specifically, SOLR-18245, to return a reRankCutoff field. Work nerdiness that solves a problem for us.

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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