Category: Writings

I have a confession: I love silence. I like hearing nothing except, maybe, birds, the wind in the trees, or the sound of my own brain trying to remember why I just walked into the kitchen. But apparently, silence is now considered dangerous, like asbestos or unsupervised children with glitter. Take the French Open. Tennis…

The day everything changed was November 30, 2022. That was when ChatGPT was unleashed upon humanity, and my daughters’ friends discovered they could get an AI to write their university essays while they sat around eating crisps and watching Love Island. Sure, we had “AI” before then: autocorrect, spellcheck, Siri telling us to turn left…

Let me tell you about my cat, Pom. Pom is technically a domestic animal, in the same way that lava is technically a building material. She is a small, fluffy tyrant with zero regard for international law, property rights, or upholstery. She looks like something you'd see on a greeting card, but do not be…

There’s that famous quote: “There’s the story you tell yourself, and the story the world tells about you.”Usually seen in moody typeface over a photo of someone hiking through fog, followed by a podcast ad. But behind the bumper sticker philosophy is something weird and true: we can’t stop telling stories. We explain life through…

The other night I was watching a documentary on Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Yes, I know how that sounds. But look, it was either that or scroll aimlessly on my phone for an hour while trying to avoid buying another guitar. So, documentary it was. And then this amazing fact popped out. Brunel, the legendary Victorian…

About 20 years ago, I started an MBA. I was one of those ambitious, eager-to-learn types — until the company sponsoring me went spectacularly bust halfway through the first module. No more funding. No more textbooks. Just me, a partially digested SWOT analysis, and a sudden abundance of free evenings. Back then, I thought I’d…

I have a friend called Jamie. No, not me. A different Jamie. I realize that’s confusing. This is like that time in school when there were two boys named Timothy and the teacher tried calling one of them “Timothy 2” to differentiate, and he immediately burst into tears. Anyway, Jamie (not me) is a walking,…

There’s a quote by the French philosopher Blaise Pascal that goes:“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Clearly, Blaise never tried doing this at a WordCamp. Or while slightly ill. Or while watching Interstellar in a hotel bed, drifting in and out of consciousness and wondering if…

After making over 500 YouTube videos and growing a channel to 150,000 subscribers, I’ve noticed a pattern. Especially with brands. They’re trying too hard to be perfect. Polished lighting. Studio voiceovers. Scripted everything. Sleek, corporate-designed animations. It looks great. But it doesn’t work. Not on YouTube. Because on YouTube, polish doesn’t build trust. In fact,…

by Me (a totally normal person who now owns multiple pulse oximeters) One morning, completely out of the blue, my heart decided to start improvising. You know how hearts usually go thump-thump-thump, nice and regular, like a dependable old wall clock or a well-behaved metronome? Mine went thump…thump-thump…pause…JAZZ SOLO! It turns out this was a…

Greg Isenberg recently posted something that caught my attention: "The fastest path to your first $10M today is not in the IDE. It is in the FYP." It was aimed at founders — but it has real implications for established brands too. As someone working on a platform like WordPress.com, I see this shift every…

The other night, I was talking to my daughter Lily. She’s in her second year of film school — passionate, creative, obsessed with cinema. But she was having a bit of an existential crisis. “What’s the point of learning all this,” she asked, “if AI is going to be able to make films better and…

Over the past few months, I’ve been deep diving into vibe coding — a faster, more intuitive way of building software that prioritizes taste, speed, and experimentation over bloated frameworks and traditional workflows. What started as a creative detour quickly turned into a revelation. Vibe coding isn’t just a new technique — it’s a mindset…