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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Coding agents need bounded tasks, tests, and review because out-of-scope actions are exactly the kind of thing a lead developer has to catch.
Claude Code routines are interesting because they move coding agents toward scheduled, event-driven, reviewable work.
GitHub Copilot’s coding agent is useful, but I would want explicit workflow rules around permissions, networking, and review before giving it real access.
Codex on mobile is less about writing code on a phone and more about supervising background engineering work away from the desk.
Weird gadgets were often worse, but they were also more memorable.
PHP 8.5’s array_first and array_last are small additions, but they remove helper functions most PHP codebases already reinvent.
PHP 8.5 deprecations are useful because they turn vague upgrade risk into a concrete cleanup list before PHP 9.
The PHP Foundation’s new ecosystem security team is exactly the kind of boring infrastructure mature platforms need.
67 made absolutely no sense at ConFuzzled 2026, which is probably why it worked so well.