Matt Harwood

Naomi Alderman's Couch to 5k for reading

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 11:52:48 +0100

Naomi Alderman spent a fantastic hour on the You and Yours programme yesterday, talking about her new idea (and trial of) a “Couch to 5k esque” plan to help get back in to reading, in the age of distraction.

I highly recommend taking a look at Naomi’s great introductory post:

First of all, this program, as I’m conceiving it today, is essentially intended for people who have great memories of reading enjoyably but have found that their brains have been sucked into social media and the smartphones. It feels like a long time since they were in a regular enjoyable life-sustaining reading habit. It’s not our fault. When we bought our first smartphone, we didn’t know that they were going to have this addictive or compulsive effect on us.

Revolutionary Workout

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 14:33:24 +0100

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 17:57:50 +0100

Lead by thought

What's your earliest internet memory?

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 10:08:12 +0100

I came across an article from the Library of Congress where they asked attendees at a conference what their earliest memory of the internet is. I love this!

I can’t be entirely sure it’s the earliest, but very, very early on I remember a friend helping me create a Hotmail account, and being utterly terrified for a few months that a huge bill was coming for my Mum. I had no concept of a free service. The bill ended up being a shitty service, instead of monetary!

I’m really interested to hear - what’s your earliest memory?

One more notes app

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 19:27:20 +0100

Finding a process that works for you should come before finding tools.

Start with what you need.

Tools come with their way of working.

Understand the way it works, and what works for you, before thinking you’ve found the tool that will change your life.

At least, that’s what I try and remember 😁

Less Internet for Matt: Week One

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 15:23:53 +0100

Week one of focusing on not being sucked-in to the internet as much has gone well. I’ve thought about writers and video authors that I respect, and either do - or want to - read everything they write. A short list that it takes a lot to get an entry on to.

I have then added these, and only these, to Reeder which gives me a single, gorgeous space to keep up to date with the ideas and topics that matter to me.

To accompany this, next week - using a different RSS feed reader - I am going to add feeds that keep me up to date. These feeds will only consist of release announcements of important (to me) software, at least to start with. I’m aiming for no “general news” or commentary. It’s useful information.

That keeps two important things separate - things I want to read, and things I need to know. I can attend to them at different times.

The current list in Reeder:

JA Westenburg (almost every post feels relevant to me, and gets me thinking usefully)
Andrew Lock (deep dives in to new .NET features and capabilities)
The Marginalian (incredible notes on books and philosophy - utterly unique)
Derek Sivers (timeless wisdom)
Martin Fowler (others post on this blog these days alongside Martin, but it is always thought provoking if you’re a software engineer)
Zizek’s Substack (I always laugh and look confused in equal measure)
Jack Albritton - Youtube (inspiring whole foods and vegan videos that keep me measured)
Ann Russell - Youtube (my internet Mum, Ann’s videos soothe me and get me cleaning)

It is becoming disappointing how many people are falling in to Substack’s walled garden, but that’s a topic for another day!

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 10:20:50 +0100

6 Music produces the goods, again. Found this gem of a Mancunian album, with the track “Hitchhikers Guide to The Fallacy” being the one they played this morning 🎵

labrecords.bandcamp.com/album/poe…

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 21:47:52 +0100

Enjoying the look of Dave Winer’s new project rss.chat, a social network solely built around RSS and OPML. As simple as it needs to be. Dave talked about it for a few minutes on a podcast.

I keep having thoughts around just how many things can be reduced to a “fancy outliner”…

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 15:15:55 +0100

Currently reading: The Year of Less by Cait Flanders 📚

I'm just as hooked as the rest of them

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 15:55:48 +0100

I’ve taken a smug pride in not being algorithmically captured, my senses rendered useless scrolling TikTok, or Facebook. Scroll with no headphones on in a public place and I will be instantly enraged. But I think it’s time to finally admit the slight, or indeed large, projection going on here.

I might not flick through influencers, but I refresh Hacker News and email habitually (in the literal sense). Rarely does an hour go by without me “quickly checking BBC News”. My spare, or at least unplanned, time is filled with a version of a screen. Whole evenings disappear with the next episode of something, but that’s okay because it isn’t Netflix. If it was Netflix, I’d be like everybody else, wasting their time...

I’m realising how overstimulated I am because of this, but I’m starting to spot the traps that got me here.

When I was an early teenager, I escaped the world through the internet. I was mesmerised by the expansiveness of it all. The people I can talk to on IRC, the little tools people were building, the latest little widget for your personal site. It felt unlimited in a way that is not the norm these days. There was momentum and positivity. It was fun!

Now, a pseudo-expansiveness feels a million ways to get the next quick hit. Cmd+T gets me to the next thing I can convince myself I need to know. It isn’t driven by a passionate interest, more of an anxious need.

The commercialisation of that precious (at least, to me) space has a part to play in subduing the excitement. The projects that bubble up to the surface always have a money-making angle. Finding something shared for the fun of it is almost a forgotten memory. If it isn’t a side-hustle, does it exist? Open source has to have a Pro plan alongside it.

Last week, I hit a crisis point. I couldn’t refresh any faster, I was seeking dopamine like a scarce resource. The room was on the verge of spinning, if I’m honest. The heat wasn’t helping.

I decided a detox of a kind was needed. This can’t go on. The need to feel connected, updated and entertained needs attention - it’s making me unhappy, in truth.

It might turn out to be simple, but right at this moment it feels like something that needs to be strategised out of. The easy answer is to close the laptop, put the phone in a cupboard, and walk outside. Heatwave aside, I’d be missing out on something that honestly is my passion. That doesn’t feel ideal.

I don’t have all the answers, but I have a few ground rules to get me started on this and I aim to keep a good awareness of their impact.

I’ve uninstalled a lot things from my phone, and my home screen is simply messaging apps. I am horrendous at replying to messages, so a nice side-effect may be that I get back to people a little better. The general gist is my phone is for communication (shock, horror).
I am looking for communities and areas of technology that excite me for the right reasons. Things that energise me like they did in the late nineties and the few years after. I’m talking about lobste.rs, instead of Hacker News. The Fediverse. Tilde pubnix communities. Any forge that isn’t GitHub. I’m finding the people who are passionate and not looking to commercialise the world. Change your inputs... etc.
LLMs have made me, and a lot of us, feel that writing a blog or publishing our scripts/software is now tainted in some way. Either it will be gobbled up by their agents, or people will assume you’ve written it using them. The theory of LLMs killing the open-web is now reaching forgone-conclusion territory. I have decided to ignore all that and participate anyway. I trust that enough people around the world want the same kind of web as I do as to build places that are worth visiting and being a part of.
With ADHD, out of sight is often out of mind. So making my shell account on a pubnix my “home”, with it’s RSS reader and IRC client, means I don’t see the Youtube feed. I don’t have a browser tab to refresh the news within.

I won’t make promises I can’t keep, but I feel like I want to blog about this as I go. I don’t feel like I’m the only one that has convinced themselves they are different to the TikTok scrollers. I think a lot of us could do with help as we feel the web we thought we loved crumble. Help that isn’t panic-ridden, and depressing, but is more “come over here, let’s do the cool things together and leave them all to it”.

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 22:17:56 +0100

Picked up Cory Doctorow’s new book on AI today. Cory’s books are always insta-reads for me.

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 23:02:37 +0100

Does anyone know if the new Siri will work on iPhones that don’t have Apple Intelligence? (I.e my trusty iPhone 14)

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 14:15:50 +0100

CodeSOD: Driven Development:

Julien joined a team which bragged about their use of DDD. Everything they did followed DDD best practices, they said. The fact that they piled up all sorts of related buzzwords when talking about it should have been a red flag.

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 12:00:40 +0100

From the FT’s comments section:

Someone once pointed out to me that the Whoop, Aura Ring, Apple Watch etc are the modern day equivalent of the Tamagotchi except that nowadays, we’re the annoying stupid thing we’re trying to keep alive.

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 12:04:21 +0100

Hidden vegan gem: cooked breakfast in Wetherspoons, £3.09 👀

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 22:36:05 +0100

Watched: Monsieur Spade S1E2, Episode 2 🍿

This is turning in to a great show. Noir-esque atmosphere and pace, calming and intriguing. Recommended (Channel 4 app)

Sun, 31 May 2026 15:31:02 +0100

. @help Any idea why this might be happing in Inkwell (web) please? It happens with all the feeds mentioned here: www.macsparky.com/rss-2/

Mutation Testing with Stryker

Fri, 29 May 2026 11:06:33 +0100

For me, testing has two main purposes:

To prove what I’ve just added works
To make sure it still works when someone changes something in the future

Okay, there’s definitely more benefits to testing than this - but these, for me, are fundamental.

Mutation testing helps with the second one. If changes are made to the codebase, tests should fail. If they don’t, you likely have missing tests.

I use Stryker as my tool of choice here, because I’m in .NET land. Stryker takes your production code, and starts making thousands of little tweaks one at a time - inverting booleans or comparisons, emptying collections in initialisers - loads of things. The full list of “mutations” is here.

And then, it tells you which changes didn’t cause test failures, so you know where your testing gaps might be. Handy!

Say you have the following method in your production code:


public static string GetGrade(int score)
{
    if (score >= 90) return "A";
    if (score >= 80) return "B";
    if (score >= 70) return "C";
    if (score >= 60) return "D";
    return "F";
}

Okay, not the best approach to this in my opinion, but let’s go with it. Stryker would change those >= comparisons one at a time to, say, >. If you don’t have tests that cover the boundaries here (like a score of 90, asserting a return value of A) this will highlight your mistake.

As more and more code is produced by LLMs, I believe tests that prevent regressions become more important. We all know they sometimes churn out rubbish, or make assumptions. Maybe the diff that came back was huge, and you didn’t quite pay it the attention it deserved. Having detailed tests are going to pay off in these situations. They also give the LLM tighter guardrails while it’s implementing things - broken tests help nudge them in the right direction (as long as they don’t just rewrite the test...).

Thu, 28 May 2026 20:23:39 +0100

Finished reading: Meltdown by Duncan Mavin 📚

A pretty exciting read - the story of Credit Suisse’s demise. Quite an obvious basket case in hindsight!

Sun, 24 May 2026 21:18:02 +0100

Sweltering day, with two more on the way I hear. We mostly hid from the heat, baked a loaf (not my best) and willed on Spurs to lose (not to be).

Apple Video Podcasts Might Stop Me From Going to YouTube

Sat, 23 May 2026 12:49:38 +0100

It’s slightly old news, but Apple is making video podcasts more of a thing within the Apple Podcasts apps.

At least on mine, the homepage of the discovery tabs now shows video feeds in a very prominent position.

Now, I personally see this as being late to the party. Yes, video podcast RSS feeds have always been available to use within Apple Podcasts (I have a few, mostly from TWiT). But I’m old enough to remember Miro / Democracy Player and Odeo - where I first realised how much I could like a clean feed of video shows.

(I sometimes feel like I’m the only person weird enough to remember things like this - let me know if you are weird too!)

Apple’s push is welcome for me, as long as it doesn’t come as part of a strategy to put walls around the podcasting garden. Anything that stops me opening up YouTube for video is appreciated (I’ll just get lost for hours).

Fri, 22 May 2026 22:53:05 +0100

Watched: The Gold Season 1 🍿

Finally got around to it, after London Falling mentioned the Brinks-Mat job and piqued my interest! Superb show.

Thu, 14 May 2026 16:13:23 +0100

Picked up this gem for £1! Published in 1999. Sadly, so many of the links inside are dead. It’s fun finding the live ones. And classic descriptions such as this one 😂

Mon, 11 May 2026 21:47:05 +0100

I’ve just learnt of the “millennial pause”, a condition I apparently have inherited.

Sun, 10 May 2026 21:46:32 +0100

I read Keefe’s book on London’s underworld and the sad death of Zac Bettler last week on the plane to Crete. It was utterly gripping.