Olly

I became a software engineer because I wanted to create products. Not because I wanted to write code.

Fakery used to be the exception you had to spot. Now authenticity is the exception you have to verify.— Kai, writing about the state of the internet today (via Dense Discovery)

I watched the Social Reckoning. I thought it was pretty good, but it quadrupled my dislike of Meta, which was pretty freakin’ high on the dislike scale already.Historians will look back on the social media age with horror.

Imagination is the new moat.

The Pagecord blog has had design overhaul. It's astonishing what CSS can do these days 🤩

If your man Peter is right here, and these numbers are from Companies House so I presume they are, then the average salary at OpenAI is over £2.3 million! 🤯This is complete madness, but it’s the gold rush to end all gold rushes so I guess they’re throwing everything at hiring all the people they believe can make them win. Whatever that means1.End of civilisation?

What could possibly go wrong?

I've redesigned the Pagecord sign up / log in screens to be a lot more fun. What do you think? 😊

John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame is back on X/Twitter. This isn't particularly interesting in itself, but there does seem to be a trend of notable people, who abandoned the platform post-Musk, returning.And I can’t blame anyone. The only network that compares to X, size-wise, is Threads — but Threads’s algorithm is weirder than X’s now, and the content I see there is relatively boring. My Threads timeline is full of engagement bait without being engaging. And if you want to judge a platform…

I'm considering making Pagecord invite only for November to eradicate spam signups once and for all. I mean, I'll probably get few legit signups but at this point I'm actually comfortable with that. If you really want to use Pagecord, you still can. Thoughts?

I mainly listen to albums, or LPs as they used to be called. Not playlists. I love albums! Loads of amazing albums get released each year, so why does Spotify make it so hard to discover them? To find new albums in Spotify I have to go to Seach > Music > New Releases, scroll down to "Hand-picked new releases" and then scroll down again to get past the AI playlists. This album list is not hand-picked of course, it's some weak-ass, AI-fed algorithm with an ulterior motive. Just like the…

It's silly how much I love using the Pagecord web interface for writing. There's room for improvement I'm sure, but it's almost perfect for my needs right now.

I've been riffing on a new Pagecord theme today as part of an improvement I'm making to the 'Cards' layout. I think it's pretty cool. What do you think?

Every day is all there is — Joan Didion

I use to DJ a lot. I mostly played what would be called "deep house" which was quite broad. Today there are countless micro-genres in music, and I've discovered "lofi house" is one of them. It sounds like deep house to me, but a bit more muffled. Still, I really like it and I'm really digging this album.https://open.spotify.com/album/0LE9cnyJGQr0yWT5IekjY7?si=0F4ret-iSJOss8RYogBIFw

I've redesigned my photography website. It now features my personal work as well as a page for my documentary and behind-the-scenes commissions. I'm really pleased with it. If you know anyone looking to document daily life at their company, or with a project, please put them in touch.https://ollyheadey.com

Fun or interesting discoveries I came across while wandering the web this month. AI is hard to avoid innit? 😬 The FT asks whether AI is affecting what people choose to study. Hard to plan your career when nobody knows which careers will still exist by the time you graduate. Bryan Cantrill has been a big influence on my career. Oxide’s guidance on using LLMs is worth a read. He followed it up with the revolt of the reader, about how readers can spot LLM prose and just switch off. Daniel Susskind…

I enjoyed this new documentary about AI. It’s a good primer for people who don’t really know too much about it. I can imagine those who are more well-versed being a bit more critical, but there’s only so much you can cover in 100 minutes. Also, it’s still all rather new and we have no idea where this story goes next, so it’s only a pilot episode really. The 26-episode box set AI version of the World At War in a decade or two will be the one to watch.

I got to interview Scott Chacon on stage at Turing Fest yesterday, talking about "Why GitHub Won". What a privilege, and what a super-cool guy Scott is. Total legend.

Programming frameworks come and go. They usually get slowly mothballed as developers move on to something new, shiny, simpler, faster, or more interesting. It’s not often they just… end. Like, that’s it, we’re done, it’s finished. Thank you and good night.I watched DHH’s latest Rails World keynote and I found it fascinating because this is kinda what he was saying about Rails as we know it – without actually saying it.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDjW_dRyKXYDHH declared that hand-crafting…

Alt text support coming to Pagecord soon thanks to Bruno Prieto's fine work! ✨

Experimenting with a design evolution... 👩‍🎨

iOS 27 with Liquid Glass dialled to max tinted is pretty great. The performance seems way up. I’ll probably give macOS 27 a go now (I avoided 26), but I’m a little wary of those Apple Intelligence tendrils.

I recorded a video demonstrating how to use the Pagecord CLI and Claude to generate a new theme for your blog. Full details on the Pagecord blog.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_ZhBPhl89IFirst time I've used Omarchy Linux to do a screencast and edit video. It was surprisingly good, but the Mac is still my daily driver.

I've just read that Standard Notes is shutting down Listed at the end of the year. Listed is their blogging platform that allows you to publish directly from Standard Notes itself.When it shuts down (Dec 31 2026), you keep your notes but your blog is gone, never to return.I figured I'd write a post about migrating from Listed to Pagecord on the off chance that someone wanted to keep their blog alive. If that's you, here’s what to do.1. Save your archiveEvery Listed blog has an RSS feed at…

One of my photos has been shortlisted for the British Photography Awards, in the Street category. I'm rather surprised because the quality of submissions is really high, but I do really like my photo. The winner is chosen by a judging panel, but there is a "People's Choice" award which takes into account public votes. So if you're feeling generous, please visit the page of my photo and vote for it 😊Vote for me!

Classic AI-sphyxiation from Adobe in Lightroom on iOS. An AI assistant taking priority over editing tools in a photography editing product?Perhaps I’m missing something, but what do people use this for? Is it for getting the AI to organise your photos, like “put all my Edinburgh photos in an album” or something? Surely most customers of Lightroom are there for the editing, much less so for assisted organising. I’d be surprised if the hard sell of these AI features results in more and stickier…

Tag management, now in beta. Coming soon to Pagecord.