we can be in instant contact with each other wherever we may be where we can contact our friends anywhere on earth even if we don't know their actual physical location it will be possible in that age perhaps only fifty years from now for a man to conduct his business from tahiti or bali just as well as he could from london in fact if it proves worthwhile almost any executive skill any administrative skill even any physical skill could be made independent of distance i am perfectly serious when i suggest that one day we may have brain surgeons in edinburgh operating on patients in new zealand when that time comes the whole world will have shrunk to a point and the traditional role of the city as a meeting place for man would have ceased to make any sense in fact men will no longer commute they will communicate they won't have to travel for business anymore they'll only travel for pleasure i only hope that when that day comes and when the city is abolished the whole world isn't turned into one giant suburb

This is a bad YouTube transcription but it's still readable. It's an old clip from the BBC (1964) that I actually saw at the start of the Blackberry movie. What an insanely accurate prediction.

A tip for remote teams of 2-10 people. Create a personal “ramblings” channel for each teammate in your team’s chat app of choice.

Ramblings channels let everyone share what’s on their mind without cluttering group channels. Think of them as personal journals or microblogs inside your team’s chat app, a lightweight way to add ambient social cohesion.

People typically post short updates 1-3 times per week. Common topics include:

• ideas related to current projects
• musings about blog posts, articles, user feedback
• “what if” suggestions
• photos from recent trips or hobbies
• rubber ducking a problem

This is really cool and we probably should do this at work.

This year has been fucked.

It's a very blunt viewpoint but I think its the best way to describe things.

My mum has had a cancer battle in 2024 which led to her bladder being removed in January 2025. She's been incredible strong mentally and has recovered quickly but it was still a really scary time.

Me and Emma got married in February. It was the best day of my life.

We went on our honeymoon in March to Vietnam. Apart from getting really bad food poisoning it was a wonderful experience.

In April, Emma's dad had some health complications in China which led to a brain bleed. Me and Emma took some time off work and flew to Beijing to be with him and Emma's mum Annie. It was also a scary time but thanks to some high quality health care he pulled through. It was a reminder for why you need great insurance when travelling.

The happy side of this was that me and Emma had 2 nights in Hong Kong on the way home where we went to Disneyland.

May and June were generally normal. We tried to get back into routine and the normal swing of things.

On the 1st of July we received potentially the worst shock we've ever had with Boots' cancer. It was painful and mentally exhausting. It was the final straw of getting mostly bad luck this year.

And now we're in August. Boots is now in a better place where he's not in pain.

Me and Emma have to carry on with our lives.

But as they say in Dead Poets Society:

Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary.

Me and Emma have been doing some crazy planning with this in mind.

We initially thought about doing a big Australian road trip. Where we landed with this was:

• Buying a van proved to be very tricky, we tried to use Facebook Marketplace but actually finding something that worked for us in a limited time frame was tough
• The whole idea was very expensive and we would have needed to borrow some money
• We'd love to do this trip one day but the best way to do it is to buy "cheap" Toyota HiAce which is mechanically sound and then pay someone to fit it out properly, then hit the road with more confidence
• Working remotely for me would have been tricky being on the road so much, Starlink makes this easier but we would have faced some challenges

We had a reset and thought about what we both wanted. Emma wanted to go somewhere warm.

I looked at Google Maps and saw just north of Australia was Bali. It's warm, cheap and is still within the Australian timezone so I could work remotely for a short time frame. Me and Emma talked more about it and researched costs for Airbnbs. It was within our budget.

So our new plan is:

• We're going to Bali
• We leave on the 8th of September and will be back in ~3 months
• I'll work remotely, Bali is 2 hours behind AEST (3 when day light savings hits)
• Emma will take long service leave and do part time remote work in December
• We'll stay in 3 different Airbnbs across the 3 months in Canggu, Ubud and Uluwatu

So yes, this year has been fucked but it's also been a year of travel and challenge. I think this 3 months will be awesome for me and Emma.

I've been really enjoying my Pokemon Ruby play through in the past few weeks. It's been a nice distraction in my sad moments. It's again a reminder of how damn good these Pokemon games are.

This is my current squad.

It's a nice mix of dark/ghost, grass, psychic, water, rock/ground and fighting types. It is technically cheating but I like to use the dual type charts to figure out what's going to work well in battles.

The games pixel art is gorgeous and the music is sublime. In my opinion, it's one of the most incredible pieces of art ever created.

Again DHH is a bit of an asshole but some of his software engineering based views are interesting and challenge conventions. I have not watched the whole 6 hours of this!

DHH has some wild things to say but his push for Linux is backed by facts.

Linux has slowly been increasing in popularity in the USA. His reasoning around the Steam Deck as well as a couple of popular influencers for the growth in Linux is 100% a factor.

If I had the money to buy a new computer today I would very much consider a Framework and run Linux on it.

Great article on why fast matters in software. Linear is always a good example.

Fast eliminates cognitive friction. Raycast surfacing the right application before you finish typing feels like an extension of your mind. Superhuman's sub-100ms rule—plus their focus on keyboard shortcuts—changed the email game in a way that no one's been able to replicate, let alone beat. I recently used Mercury to pay another business that uses Mercury, and its instant settle felt surprising in a world where bank transfers usually take days.

This is because the effort to make software fast often requires stripping away non-essential features. Compare how fast a streamlined project management tool like Linear loads versus an enterprise app like Workday (or worse… Oracle). In a world obsessed with adding rather than refining, speed becomes the ultimate expression of respect. It says, "We've thought deeply about what matters and eliminated everything else."

There's still no Switch 2 game yet that I'm desperate to play. I still just want Metroid Prime 4 and Silksong. Both of these should be Switch 1 games.

This is the direction education is heading. Not getting the answer straight away but being "taught" the concept is a super cool use of AI.

I have a new synth setup.

Sadly my Yamaha Reface CS broke; the internal speakers stopped working and it would randomly turn off about 5 seconds in to powering it on. I looked into getting it fixed but the repair shops all seemed to be north-side of Melbourne (at least an hour drive from home) and it realistically could have cost anything to actually get things fully fixed.

So I decided to go with a more robust computer based setup.

Here is the list of what I now have:

• LPK25 MKII 25-key Keyboard Controller
• USB‑C to USB‑B cable
• Arturia Mini V4 (demo version currently)

The LPK25 is a small but mighty keyboard. It instantly connects to my Mac and I just needs some kind of software instrument to get up and running. The octave buttons work well which I'll likely need to use a bit given the small size.

What has been the biggest surprise for me is exploring different software instruments available on macOS. Whilst there are a lot of cheap options out there the quality of Arturia's software instruments immediately stood out to me after giving a few instruments a demo.

The sound of the Mini V4 is just magical; it sounds thick and warm just like a good synth should. I usually set the patch to default and then tinker from there. It's so fun messing with the different knobs. There's a lot for me to learn but there are a million tutorials.

Owning your own physical Minimoog Model D would be so awesome but also crazy expensive. So emulation is very much a better option for hobbyists.

In terms of my little art project replicating game music we are now full steam ahead. I also now have a subscription to musescore so I can access the sheet music I need.

On my Mac I can run Mini V4 as a plugin in GarageBand and record as MIDI. I do also love the flexibility Mini V4 gives you in that you can run it as a standalone app just for playing.

This does low key make me want to switch to Firefox. A lovely little write up.

One of the best games of footy I've ever seen. Melbourne just completed switched off and St Kilda came home like a steam train.

Something that stands out for me was how accurate Wanganeen-Milera's kicking was. Both set shots at goal were gun barrel straight. The way he was able to calm himself down after clunking some huge marks and slot the goals was unreal.

Looking forward to the DDF podcast tomorrow. Ollie looks up and about.

What a madman but also such an interesting story.

We are truly lucky in Melbourne to get beautiful crisp winter evenings where you can go and do things outdoors.

Also known as "Hairy Creature". This will be an emoji I'll use for sure.

I'm trying to get on a bit of a movement streak right now. I have 3 different activities that I want to do at least once per day:

1. Round of golf (at least 9 holes)
2. Pilates
3. Bike ride

The round of golf is what I've been doing for a couple of years now. I really just need to maintain what I'm doing or even cut back a bit.

Pilates has been a recent change and a nice little activity to do with Emma. I've found the classes hard but also very mindful. It makes you feel good at the end of the class but you're not completely cooked. My legs get very shaky on some of the exercises so I clearly have some work to do to build up strength.

I want to get my bike riding fitness up again. At some point in the next few months I'd like to do a big ride; at this stage I'm thinking from my place in Bonbeach to the Portsea Hotel. According to Apple Maps there seems to be a route where you can mostly take bike paths from my place. You go along the train line to Seaford cutting along Skye Road to the Peninsula Link Trail and this takes you to Mornington. From Mornington you ride along the coastal road. It's a 71km total ride which isn't too far.

It must be a crazy place to work at right now at OpenAI. From a human resources and political standpoint there is just so much going on.

The first thing to know about OpenAI is how quickly it's grown. When I joined, the company was a little over 1,000 people. One year later, it is over 3,000 and I was in the top 30% by tenure. Nearly everyone in leadership is doing a drastically different job than they were ~2-3 years ago.

An unusual part of OpenAI is that everything, and I mean everything, runs on Slack. There is no email. I maybe received ~10 emails in my entire time there. If you aren't organized, you will find this incredibly distracting. If you curate your channels and notifications, you can make it pretty workable.

Leadership is quite visible and heavily involved. This might be obvious at a company such as OpenAI, but every exec seemed quite dialed in. You'd see gdb, sama, kw, mark, dane, et al chime in regularly on Slack. There are no absentee leaders.

OpenAI uses a giant monorepo which is ~mostly Python (though there is a growing set of Rust services and a handful of Golang services sprinkled in for things like network proxies). This creates a lot of strange-looking code because there are so many ways you can write Python. You will encounter both libraries designed for scale from 10y Google veterans as well as throwaway Jupyter notebooks from newly-minted PhDs. Pretty much everything operates around FastAPI to create APIs and Pydantic for validation. But there aren't style guides enforced writ-large.

OpenAI runs everything on Azure. What's funny about this is there are exactly three services that I would consider trustworthy: Azure Kubernetes Service, CosmosDB (Azure's document storage), and BlobStore. There's no true equivalents of Dynamo, Spanner, Bigtable, Bigquery Kinesis or Aurora. It's a bit rarer to think a lot in auto-scaling units. The IAM implementations tend to be way more limited than what you might get from an AWS. And there's a strong bias to implement in-house.

The Codex sprint was probably the hardest I've worked in nearly a decade. Most nights were up until 11 or midnight. Waking up to a newborn at 5:30 every morning. Heading to the office again at 7a. Working most weekends. We all pushed hard as a team, because every week counted. It reminded me of being back at YC.

There's lots of really interesting nuggets in there.

Note: this piece is also a great advertosment for Codex. I really want to give it another go. Maybe I use the GUI this time rather than the CLI.

In the last couple of years I've played a bunch of games with fantastic sound tracks. The one's that come to mind are:

• Undertale
• Stardew Valley
• Pokemon Ruby
• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
• Super Metroid

What I'm thinking of doing as a little art project is recreating some of these tracks on my synth and actually recording them into Logic Pro as audio. A lot of these songs are chiptunes which was easy enough to replicate on a synth using the different waves.

I can also get the sheet music from musescore but it does seem like I'll need a subscription to get everything.

Nice little data visualisation from personal Strava data. Also very inspiring to keep a workout streak alive for so long.

Me and Emma are back to work this week.

Everything sucks and I think about Boots a lot but we have to move forward.

Some things keeping my spirits up this week are:

• Watching the Test cricket in England, was another cracking match at Lords
• Playing Pokemon Ruby for the first time in OpenEmu
• Watching Avatar: The Last Airbender for probably the hundredth time
• Thinking about and planning future travel plans, me and Emma are currently trying to figure out a way we can do a big Australia driving trip in a van
• Doing more pilates with Emma