I'm Neil, and I’m a software developer in the UK.

My iOS app just launched, it's called Running Track. Download it on the App Store, or read about it at runningtrack.app.

i also write fiction; you can read some short stories here.

If you like my work, please consider buying me a coffee to show your support. Thanks!

Latest posts

• Coding Agents and Software Development

  I had two teachers who left me with advice about software development that’s stuck with me to this day.

  The Planner

  The first was my high school Computing teacher, who taught me the importance of sitting down and writing notes, making a plan, before just jumping into writing code.

  I find it funny to think of this when I read articles giving advice about using coding agents like Claude Code and Codex, and the importance of getting it to make a plan first to get it to write code successfully.

  The Low Level Programmer

  The second teacher was the lecturer who taught the Low Level Programming class at university, who made clear that software is just data moving from one place to another, possibly being changed along the way.

  I find it funny to think of his class now. The assignment I remember most was to take the assembly output of some C code, and show what the higher level C language was doing in the lower level assembly.

  Can you imagine a university lecturer in a few years time, teaching students to study the lower level JavaScript code that was generated by the higher level English prompt?

  At Which Level of Abstraction Are Agents

  I started writing code in 2002, using REALBasic on Mac OS 9. I started writing code more seriously in 2006, using Java on Windows XP.

  I’ve always used what I was introduced to as “higher level abstractions”. Never punch cards, or assembly, or even C, really. But I can’t help but feel agents are another level up again.

  Instead of writing in a programming language, I can describe to an agent, in plain English, what I want to happen. That was unthinkable a few years ago. But it’s possible with coding agents. Design your software feature in natural language (with your agent’s help of course), and give that requirement to your agent, and something happens under the hood at a lower level of abstraction. Like the developers who wrote assembly code in the 1980s, that lower level of abstraction just happens to be where I’ve made my career so far.

  A Conundrum

  I hate the fact that all these LLMs are trained on stolen data.

  I hate how much energy is used to train these models.

  I hate that computer hardware like RAM is getting so much more expensive because it’s being bought in bulk for data centres to power LLMs.

  Morally, I think this is terrible technology, and I don’t want it to be a part of my career, or even the world in general, frankly.

  And there are other reasons to be skeptical about LLMs. The business model is a big question for all of these companies. They don’t make a profit, even when they charge people £200 a month. But I can’t see that being anything other than a short term problem as economies of scale, and the progress of time, bring costs down.

  Another problem often raised is: what happens to the next generation of software developers? If having an agent is like having a junior developer, and you’re the senior developer, where do the new senior developers come from? I suspect the answer to that is: where did the new assembly developers come from?

  Then there’s a question of how much time is saved using LLMs. One year ago, I tried asking Claude and ChatGPT (Claude Code and Codex didn't even exist yet) to write code for me and I got absolute garbage back. If I was relying on those older models, in chatbots, sure, I’d spend way more time fixing their mistakes than I'd save from having them generate code. But the version of Codex I used last week can write working code faster than I can. Claude Code isn't Claude. Codex isn't ChatGPT. If you base your assumptions on experiments with the chatbot, which can't see your codebase, can't run and debug and fix the code it writes, then you don't have a full understanding of what these tools can do. These are now very powerful tools. Not intelligences, and I've avoided using the term "artificial intelligence" on purpose. But tools for software development, yes. And I suspect they will quickly become very important tools.

  What Now?

  I am enormously conflicted about using LLMs. I have several issues that I can’t reconcile. I also just don’t want to be reliant on another American Big Tech company.

  But I’m no longer sure where my chosen career path is going.

  
  

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  6 February 2026

  • engineering
  • opinion

• My Top 10 Essential Albums

  Last month I saw Henry write up his top 10 essential albums and I immediately wanted to do the same. I love listening to albums over individual songs, and there are some that I go back to again and again.

  I've followed the rule that I can only have one album per band, to avoid it being a list of my favourite Green Day, Blink-182 and Gaslight Anthem albums.

  But be warned: there will still be a lot of early 2000s pop-punk.

  American Idiot - Green Day

  American Idiot by Green Day is probably their best album. Certainly the most popular with a mainstream audience. I also love Dookie, Nimrod and Warning, but this probably had the most musical influence on me, particularly as a teenager in a punk-rock band writing my own music.

  

  Conspiracy of One - The Offspring

  I used to spend most of my time in classrooms not taking notes, but drawing the flame skull logo from the cover of this album. The Offspring were another of my favourite bands growing up. This was the first album of theirs that I really loved, and led me into their back catalogue. Even in the early 2000s that was deep.

  

  Take Off Your Pants and Jacket - Blink-182

  What can I say about Blink-182’s best album? It’s great pop-punk. One of my favourite songs is a bonus acoustic track called What Went Wrong. A couple of years ago I wanted to listen to it, and I ended up digging out my old iTunes library to find it because it’s just not available on streaming services for some reason.

  

  Coming Home - New Found Glory

  I really like New Found Glory. They're best known for songs like Hit or Miss and My Friends Over You, typical early 2000s punk-pop. What I like about Coming Home is it's a bit more mature, in lyrics, style and production, while still sounding like New Found Glory. Like Green Day's Warning, or Blink-182's self-title album, it's a great example of a band evolving and showing off their range of musical talent, beyond what they're already known for.

  I wrote about this in 2023, and what I wrote then still summarises my feelings about it perfectly:

  It's a New Found Glory punk pop album, but it's so different, because it feels mature without being a change in sound. It's just refined, improved. NFG at their peak, even though it's not often held up as one of their most popular. And it is so positive too. It's really hopeful, really sweet at times, even. Especially songs like Coming Home and Too Good To Be.

  

  Puzzle - Biffy Clyro

  Getting a bit heavier now. Puzzle is when Biffy started to sound a bit more approachable, before the properly radio-friendly Only Revolutions, but keeping a lot of their heavier sound from The Vertigo of Bliss.

  I love Biffy Clyro. This is my favourite album of theirs. Who's Got A Match regularly pops into my head out of nowhere.

  

  Unplugged in New York - Nirvana

  A real classic. Another one I've written about already:

  This was the album where I realised that distorted grunge bands could have musical depth. They can play other styles, and sound good. It’s a great live album, and it’s Nirvana, of all bands, but acoustic.

  

  1989 - Taylor Swift

  This is such a great pop album, and any list of my top albums has to have some good cheesy pop. When I wrote about this album before, I said I hadn't really listened to it in a while - it now comes back into rotation quite often, when I'm looking for something lighter than my usual choices.

  

  The Joshua Tree - U2

  This is such an important album in the history of music. Before that though, it has some really great songs. But you can hear its influence in so much pop and rock music in the almost 40 years since it was released.

  

  Futures - Jimmy Eat World

  Bleed American is another fantastic album by Jimmy Eat World. Futures is my favourite though, and the one I come back to again and again. I wrote about Futures last year:

  I love Jimmy Eat World's mix of energy and slow burners. There's not a bad song on this whole album

  

  Handwritten - The Gaslight Anthem

  I love the Gaslight Anthem, and this is their best work. I wrote about Handwritten a couple of years ago, and my feelings haven't changed a bit.

  Handwritten is a great rock album. "45", "Here Comes My Man" and "Mae" are some of my favourite songs.

  

  
  

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  12 December 2025

  • music
  • opinion

• App Defaults - 2025 Edition

  I read this article about default app choices by Robb Knight a couple of years ago and thought it sounded fun. Seems like a good time to update it after a couple of years. For comparison, here’s the 2023 original. (I’ll also note when something has changed.)

  The general theme is to use tools and services that are cross-platform. I don’t like the idea of being locked in to any particular OS long-term, and my wife and I use different OSes right now, so cross platform sharing is especially important.

  • Mail Client: Mail.app
  • Mail Server: Fastmail with custom domain
  • Notes: Obsidian
  • To-Do: Todoist
  • iPhone Photo Shooting: iOS Camera
  • Photo Management: Google Photos. I used to use iCloud as well, but paying twice just for the benefit of using the native photos app on my phone seemed silly, and Google Photos has good family sharing across platforms.
  • Calendar: Google Calendar. I used to pay for Fantastical. But the Google Calendar app is fine. Another example of a service I use because the cross platform family setup works so well.
  • Cloud file storage: iCloud Drive. Although I’m increasingly moving towards getting myself a NAS thing and dropping cloud providers.
  • RSS: Reeder backed by self-hosted FreshRSS.
  • Contacts: Contacts.app
  • Browser: Safari
  • Chat: WhatsApp
  • Bookmarks: Safari
  • Read It Later: Safari Reading List, but I’m not a heavy user of this, and could easily switch to something else if push came to shove.
  • Word Processing: Obsidian and Google Docs
  • Spreadsheets: Google Sheets
  • Presentations: n/a
  • Shopping Lists: Todoist
  • Meal Planning: Google Docs
  • Budgeting & Personal Finance: Google Sheets
  • News: The Guardian, BBC News, Mastodon (via Ivory)
  • Music: Spotify, and some local files synced in Apple Music. Spotify makes me feel deeply uncomfortable now, but every time I try Apple Music I experience all sorts of papercuts.
  • Podcasts: Overcast
  • Password Management: 1Password

  
  

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  2 December 2025

  • app-defaults

• Running Track is on the App Store

  It's been over three years since Running Track, my app for tracking running goals and stats, was approved for Beta testing on TestFlight, and in fact since I first wrote about it here. It's been almost 8 years since the first commit, in January 2018!

  It's now live in the App Store. I'm very excited!

  There's a two week free trial for the paid Run Club features, so plenty of time to try out creating goals, editing personal bests, and sharing GPX files.

  And if you don't want to pay for the full subscription, but do like the app, you're welcome to buy me a coffee here to help support development.

  The (Brief) Backstory

  Running Track started as a way for me to export GPX files to share with my wife when her phone stopped tracking our runs properly. Later in 2018, I decided I wanted to set myself a running goal, and created a spreadsheet to track various stats. And then almost immediately fired up Xcode instead.

  I've rewritten it from a fairly vanilla UIKit app, to use Combine (during the Covid-19 pandemic), and SwiftUI (this year, when I swore I was done making changes and just needed to ship it for my own sanity). I even diverted into an Apple Watch app for actually tracking runs at one point, and I think I'm going to revisit it now that the Apple Workouts app has taken such a dire turn.

  I forced myself to settle on a limited feature set to start with, otherwise it would be another 8 years before I allowed myself to feel like it's ready for other people to use. So to begin with, you can set distance goals, view stats about your runs, and see your personal best distance for each run.

  The Future

  There's a big roadmap, longer than the one I felt comfortable sharing on the app's website. I have some ambitious plans for this app. There's so much scope for amazing fitness apps, thanks to the various HealthKit and workout APIs available, and I have some fun ideas beyond that too. I'm excited to see where it can go.

  Download it now, and let me know what you think!

  

  25 November 2025

  • runningtrack

• ✍️ Undercurrent

  Whispers about someone famous. Are they who they appear to be? A short story written for NaNoWriMo 2025.

  11 November 2025

  • fiction

• ADHD

  In January, I became a team lead in work, and learned one of my team members has both ADHD and autism (common enough to have its own name, AuDHD). And I had to do my best to learn about neurodiversity pretty quickly in order to support them properly. But I only really scratched the surface, dealing with very specific issues and one particular person.

  In March, I was explaining some worries I had about planning and organising a family event to my therapist. She asked me if I’d ever looked into ADHD, because I was describing issues with executive function. We did a screening assessment and I came out as strongly indicating ADHD.

  In the last couple of months, I’ve gone through a formal assessment. I do have ADHD. Combined-type, to be specific. But it’s been quite a journey.

  I’ve been aware of ADHD for decades. My first memory of it was in a storyline in Australian TV show Neighbours, where a troublemaker-type kid gets diagnosed, is put on meds, and becomes dulled and unhappy. That’s been a stereotype I’ve seen in a few places in media over the years. I’ve not known much more than that until this year.

  My understanding was it was a behavioural disorder, and was purely about hyperactivity. I couldn’t have been more wrong. ADHD means your brain works differently in a lot of different ways. Hyperactivity is just one aspect, and some people with ADHD don’t have hyperactivity.

  I do though. I never really noticed it because you learn over years to restrain it. I remember having my chair taken away from me in primary school to teach me a lesson about sitting down. I needed to be on the move, but I learned to be ashamed of that need. It’s not how you behave. That masking is a hard part of having ADHD, but one that’s often subconscious. Internalised over years of being taught the one, neurotypical, way that’s acceptable to behave.

  Inattentiveness is the other core part of ADHD. Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder. It’s badly named, because it’s not a deficit of attention. It’s a struggle to direct focus. When you get deep into something, you can really hyperfocus for hours on end. You can completely lose track of time, because you’re so focused. But in a lot of cases, getting started on something is hard because you have to bring your focus to that. This “task paralysis” is what I was talking about with my therapist, that led to my initial screening, and is one of the big things I struggle with. Not being hyperactive, but being able to actually get started on the clear list of tasks that I have to complete.

  Inattentiveness shows in more obvious ways too. Listening to a conversation in which I’m an active participant is hard, because my ADHD brain is spitting out a hundred different ideas related to the conversation, trying to remember a point I want to make while not interrupting (common ADHD behaviour), all while noticing everything else going on in the room. I find I can get sidetracked from a conversation I’m genuinely interested in. Which is awful. But it’s extremely common in conversations I’m not interested in, regardless of their importance. Which is obviously rude, but also a massive issue with things like keeping track in work.

  Time Blindness is another part of inattentiveness. It’s so easy to lose track of time. It’s easy to completely overestimate how much time you have to complete a task, which covers both things at work and even travelling time. I often leave things to the last minute, then rely on adrenaline to push me through. Except with travel, when I’m so paranoid about being late that I can often be extremely early for things. Having to adjust my approach to this with young children is a cause of great stress.

  Beyond hyperactivity and inattentiveness, there’s a third big element to ADHD for me. Low self-esteem. When you spend your life masking symptoms, or masking elements of your personality, you can struggle to know who you are, and when you’re genuinely you. But when you are you, truly you, people often have a problem with that. So you internalise that criticism, and apply it to yourself. You’re annoying, you’re too loud, you’re too energetic. Calm down. Be quiet. Or people won’t like you. You spend a lot of time worrying that people are upset with you, even if you don’t know why. (It’s called Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria, or RSD.)

  And you spend a hell of a lot of time feeling like you’re lazy. Why can’t I just finish this project? Why can’t I just get started today? Why can’t I just concentrate like everyone else does? I have a long list of tasks to do, get on with it. Oh why did I forget that obvious thing, I’m so stupid. Internal criticism can be brutal.

  There are all sorts of skills and techniques for dealing with ADHD that I’ve learned about over the last few months. It’s hard work, but is paying off. I might share some later this month. (I might not, because as I’m now realising, executive function issues in my ADHD brain make it easy to make commitments but hard to stick to them!) But just actually seeing the problems I had as problems born from ADHD, as opposed to just flaws in my character, has been such a relief. Such a massive help.

  Thanks for reading this, especially if you got through to the end. It’s not been easy to write.

  
  

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  6 November 2025

  • personal

• Inktober and NaNoWriMo

  This year I took part in Inktober. It’s a drawing challenge, where you are given one word every day in October as a prompt to draw a picture.

  I had a lot of fun doing the challenge. I started to get interested in drawing in a way that I’ve always wanted to, but never thought I had the talent or commitment for. Inktober has shown me that I have the commitment, and the creativity. And drawing something every day has helped me learn what I like to draw, and what I want to learn. That’s a great starting point for developing a skill.

  The other thing I’ve taken from this is that it doesn’t matter if it’s “good” or not. Nobody is judging this except me. There are drawings I’m proud of. There are drawings I was a little disappointed with. But they all count. And if I didn’t do the rubbish drawings, I wouldn’t have got as far as the good ones, and I wouldn’t have completed this challenge.

  

  Things I’ve learned

  • Humour and concept matter a lot more to me than realism or detail.
  • I can complete a challenge that lasts a whole month.
  • I don’t have to be a perfectionist.

  Next up: NaNoWriMo

  For a few years, I’ve been spending a lot of time recording ideas and starting first drafts of short stories and even a couple of novels. I’ve got into a bit of world-building for one, and I’m really excited by the idea. But writing a novel is daunting. So I’m trying to hone my writing skills a bit by writing shorter fiction, and I even used a couple of Inktober prompts as short story prompts. Check out my stories on this site.

  Funnily enough, NaNoWriMo follows Inktober. It’s a similar challenge, helping people to get writing by really focusing on it in November. The original challenge was to write 50,000 words - a full novel. That feels like a lot. Over 1,600 words a day. But it has evolved to encourage you to set your own goals, and that’s my plan.

  Inktober has shown me that I can commit to something for fun, and see it through. And writing fiction is something I’ve really wanted to do for a long time, and have enjoyed when I’ve got into it. But for various reasons I’ve found it hard to actually finish anything.

  So in November, I plan to write and share two short stories. I’m going to spend a few minutes writing every day, and build the habit, as I did with Inktober. I have no idea how much I’ll be able to write but this feels like a good starting point.

  
  

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  4 November 2025

  • writing
  • creativity

• 🎸 2025 Music #8

  "Better Days" by Yellowcard

  26 October 2025

  • music
  • 2025 albums

• ✍️ Inktober 2 - Weave

  A man races to his date. A short story based on an Inktober 2025 prompt.

  14 October 2025

  • fiction
  • promptober 2025

• ✍️ Inktober 1 - Moustache

  A short story based on an Inktober 2025 prompt.

  13 October 2025

  • fiction
  • promptober 2025

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