Adactio: Journal

Sarah Canary is an odd book, in the best possible way. On the one hand, it’s a relatively straightforward narrative. An adventure story set in the Pacific northwest in the late 19th century. The viewpoint shifts from character to character, with one exception. The inscrutable title character is a living macguffin that everyone and everything else revolves around. That all seems straightforward enough, but if you squint at the story just right maybe it’s a story from a very different genre…

I’m heading to Amsterdam for CSS Day. It’s one of those events I try my best to get to every single year. I have no doubt that this year will be brilliant as usual. There’s another event the day before CSS Day: The Web You Want: What would the web be like if it was up to you? There’ll be workshops and talks, all absolutely free. I’ll be giving a talk. It’s supposed to be about the web I want, but I’m going to do my usual shtick of looking back at the history of the web to see what kind of…

The Session existed in a very basic form since the late 1990s. It was just me posting a different tune every week. But The Session as it is today—a community website where everyone can add tunes—first went online on June 3rd, 2001. That’s 25 years ago today. Considering the typical lifespan of a web page, I’m proud of having a website still online and thriving a quarter of a century after launching it. At this point it’s fair to say that thesession.org is my life’s work. Though, really, I’m…

I few weeks back, I got an email with the subject line, Screenshot in an Exhibition: I am currently developing an exhibition celebrating the thriving folk musics of these islands for the Royal College of Music Museum and one of the showcases looks at the Sharing of folk music and collections. As an incredible and heavily used repository of tune collections, I would like to print a graphic screenshot of a page from The Session to demonstrate digital dissemination, sharing and preservation of…

Bhí me i Londain an deireadh seachtaine seo caite mar gheall ar an Gaeltacht cois Tamaise. Cúpla lá iontach ba ea iad! Bhí na ranganna ar siúl Dé Sathairn agus Dé Domhnaigh, ceithre huaire an chloig gach lá, i gColáiste na Rí. Bhí ceithre leibhéal ann—tosathóiri, meanleibhéal-iseal, meanleibhéal-ard, agus an ardleibhéal. Bhí gach rang lán le foghlaimeoirí. Roghnaigh mé an rang meanleibhéal-ard agus bhí an leibhéal foirfe. D’fhreastail Jessica ar an rang tosathóirí agus dúirt sí go raibh a…

I enjoyed Kim Curran’s debut novel, The Morrigan, so when I saw a copy of her brand new book in the local library, I snapped it up. Like The Morrigan, Brigid is modern retelling of Irish mythology, but in a very different time period. Whereas The Morrigan was set in a mythical time of the Fomorians and the Tuatha Dé Danann, Brigid is set in the relatively recent past of early Christian Ireland. I was curious to see which Brigid this book would be about: the pagan goddess or the Christian saint?…

When I told you about the schedule for UX London 2026, I said: After your afternoon workshop there’ll be one final closing talk at the end of each day before we head to the bar. These closing talks are a way of bringing everyone back into the same space after spending the afternoon in different workshops. It feels right to start the day and end the day with a shared experience. On day one, discovery day, the closing talk will be delivered by Michael Kibedi. It’s called Whose English gets to be…

Lesbian necromancers in space. That’s the usual pitch for Gideon The Ninth and it’s not wrong. Though there’s a lot more necromancy than space or lesbianism. The book begins in an environment fairly dripping with death, all bones and darkness. It sounds like it should be grim, but thanks to the sarcastic attitude of the protagonist, the tone is actually quite fun. Sassy goth; that’s how I would describe the general vibe. Once I settled into it, I found that tone thoroughly enjoyable. The bulk…

There’s just under a month to go until UX London 2026—exciting! You can peruse the full schedule if you need to decide wether you’re coming for just one day or for all three. The event is designed to flow together, from discovery day to design day to delivery day, but each individual day is also designed to be a standalone experience by itself. Day one on Tuesday, June 2nd has a focus on research: Maria Isachenko will talk about how You don’t need more research time: You need a system that…

In the latest issue of Matthias’s excellent Own Your Web series, he describes the recent betrayal by Google: The search engine no longer says “here, go read what this person wrote.” It now says “here, I’ve already read it for you.” The contract is broken. He’s absolutely right. But… Have you ever clicked on a result from a search engine? Unless you’re lucky enough to land on a nice personal website, you’re more than likely to be confronted with pop-ups to allow tracking, or a desparate plea to…

Nothing can travel faster than light. And if you manage to travel close to the speed of light, things get weird. Technically, we all experience time differently depending on how fast or slow we’re moving. But the differences are so imperceptible as to be non-existent. That’s how we can describe events as being “simultaneous”, even though according to Einstein’s theory of relativity, there’s no such thing. It’s thanks to these small relativistic effects that GPS works. But when you approach the…

After reading The Morrigan I was hungry for more retellings of Irish myths and legends. I tracked down the 1994 novel Finn Mac Cool by Morgan Llywelyn. When I was devouring modern retellings of Greek myths, I commented on an interesting difference in the tellings: The biggest difference I’ve noticed is the presence or absence of supernatural intervention. Some of these writers tell their stories with gods and goddesses front and centre. Others tell the very same stories as realistic accounts…

People talk about the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of large language models as though all tasks are comparable. But it strikes me that there are three broad categories of work that large language models are applied to: Compression. Transformation. Expansion. Compression is when you feed a large language model something big that you want to make small. Summarise this book. Give me the gist of this meeting. Large language models are generally pretty good at this, which makes sense given...

Times are tough out there. I know that a lot of people are looking for work, which can be a very stressful experience. One of the things that can make the job search stressful is uncertainty. There’s a real taboo around talking about salaries. This taboo ends up benefiting employers and punishing potential employees. There’s an information gap that can be exploited (see also: job postings that don’t list salary ranges). That’s why I’m always pleased when people voluntarily share their inco...

Sometimes I look back through my blogging archives and notice what’s changed over time. For example, I used to write quite enthusiastically about the arrival of a new operating system from Apple. That is no longer the case, to put it mildly. I’m currently holed up on Sequioa, trying to resist all the nudgings to “upgrade” to the tacky design nightmare that is Tahoe. I feel like the protagonist of Pluribus. I used to write about software I really liked. Sometimes it was software made by App...

Four years ago I wrote about something that has long puzzled me in the world of front-end development. Trust: The mindset I’ve noticed is that many developers are suspicious of browser features but trusting of third-party libraries. Developers are more likely to trust, say, Bootstrap than they are to trust CSS grid or custom properties. Developers are more likely to trust React than they are to trust web components. That post got some thoughtful responses but I never really unders...

People of Brighton, mark your calendars: Saturday, April 4th. That’s when Salter Cane will be playing in The Hope And Ruin. It’s not just Salter Cane though. We’ll be joined by Skyscrapers from Lewes, and The Equatorial Group from Eastbourne. We’ve played with them before, and they’re superb! Tickets are available now. They’re £8 in advance. It’ll be £10 on the door. So please get your ticket in advance! Doors are at 7:30pm. Skyscrapers will be on stage at 8pm, The Equatorial group at 9pm...

I was in the library the weekend before last when I spotted something on the shelf of recently-returned books. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. I knew the film adaptation was coming out later that week. Ideally, I’d like to read the book before seeing the film. It would be a race against time! The film would be out in days, and the book is over 450 pages long. Could this nerdy white guy rise to challenge and overcome the odds? As it turned out, it wasn’t all that arduous. Project Hail Mary...

You should come to UX London in the first week of June. Why? Because it’s going to be awesome, that’s why! You probably knew that already. You probably already decided to get a ticket because you’re smart like that. But don’t dilly-dally! Early-bird tickets are available now but in just over one week, they won’t be. So get your ticket by Friday, March 27th. If you get your ticket now, it’s a win for everyone. You get a cheaper ticket. We know for sure that you’re coming. Every time someo...

When I was summing up my reading habits in 2022 I said: I think the lesson this year is: you can’t go wrong with Octavia E. Butler or Ursula K. Le Guin. I stand by that. But maybe I’d recommend some Ursula K. Le Guin books more than others. A Fisherman Of The Inland Sea is a good collection of short stories. But it’s not a great collection of short stories. If you’re looking for a great collection of short stories, read The Unreal and the Real. When it comes to Ursula K. Le Guin, the...

On March 12th, 1989, Tim Berners-Lee submitted Information Management: A Proposal. This would form the basis of what became the World Wide Web. On March 12th, 2026, Web Day Out happened in Brighton. Coincidence? Yes. Yes, it is a coincidence. But it’s a pretty nice coincidence, you must admit. It was a day dedicated to the World Wide Web. Not just the foundational languages of the web—HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—but also the foundational ideas of the web. “Share what you know!” That was t...