I Miss When Gadgets Looked Like They Escaped From a Toy Box
Weird gadgets were often worse, but they were also more memorable.
Engineering notes from the sharp end
Practical writing about software, systems, delivery, and things that behave strangely under pressure.
wade womersley – york based software engineer I write the way I work: direct, useful, and more interested in what holds up in production than what sounds clever on a slide.
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PHP, Programming
PHP 8.5’s array_first and array_last are small additions, but they remove helper functions most PHP codebases already reinvent.
PHP, Programming
PHP 8.5 deprecations are useful because they turn vague upgrade risk into a concrete cleanup list before PHP 9.
PHP, Programming
The PHP Foundation’s new ecosystem security team is exactly the kind of boring infrastructure mature platforms need.
Random Stuff
67 made absolutely no sense at ConFuzzled 2026, which is probably why it worked so well.
Software, Software Engineer
Android developer verification is not only a policy story. For teams shipping Android apps, it becomes another release-process dependency to manage.
AI, Programming
Android Studio’s Gemma 4 support is interesting because it moves agentic coding toward local, Android-specific workflows.
Programming, Software Engineer
C# 14 extension members give teams a cleaner way to express extension properties and static-style helpers, but they still need restraint.
Programming, Software
.NET 10 matters for C# teams because it is an LTS release, not just because it brings another round of language and tooling features.
AI, Software Engineer
The next gains from AI coding agents will come from model improvements and from clearer repo instructions, permissions, tests, and workflows.