Dylan Beattie

If you haven’t already bought Everything Will Swallow You, what are you waiting for? It's nearly a year since I first read it and it's stayed with me all that time. It's the best kind of weird, as well as funny and hugely moving. One of those books you just don't want to end.

Pink Floyd in 1973: “no-one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun” Floyd in 1980: “Run! Run! Run! Run! Run! Run! Run! Run! Run!” Every Floyd-adjacent show for the last 40 years: “Run! Run! Run! Run! Run! Run! Run! Run! Run!” Floyd fans in 2026: “but no-one told us when to run?”

I'm really looking forward to this one, and not just 'cos I might have "accidentally" nerd-sniped David into making Astro support Razor just to see if it could be done... 🤣 Should be a really fun night. Hope to see a bunch of you folks there.

I'll be live on software-architektur.tv in 10 minutes talking about modern CSS (and probably architecture and DNS and open source and UX and a whole bunch of other stuff!) Tune in, it'll be fun :) www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYe8...

Today Microsoft Azure asked me for some feedback. Pretty sure we solved "circles" back in the 1990s. I remember radio buttons working just fine in Netscape Navigator. But maybe AI decided it's better this way. 🤷🏻‍♂️

You know how dumb it feels every single month logging into @dropbox.com to download the invoice for my Dropbox subscription so that I can save it... into my Dropbox? What if the invoices just appeared by magic in a Dropbox folder linked to the billing account? Wouldn't that be something, eh?

I'm playing a gig. An actual Serious Gig with Proper Musicians and no comedy songs about JavaScript. You should come. It'll be awesome. Hope & Anchor in Islington, Friday October 2nd, doors 19:30, music starts 20:30. Tickets £8 in advance / £10 on the door. www.eventbrite.com/e/angel-stor...

My workstation is a Ryzen 9050 with 128Gb of RAM, an RTX 5070 and three NVMe drives, and it is running Adobe Media Encoder like a very tired tortoise trying to suck treacle through a paper straw. Could we stop dicking about with AI models and get back to making computers faster and betterer please?

I think that @househouse.com - the studio behind Untitled Goose Game - should make a game based on the Sheep Detectives movie. There’s an actual murder mystery you have to solve but you can only control the sheep. 🐑

Two weeks from now Fronteers Dark Mode will happen in Dordrecht in The Netherlands. There are still a few tickets left. Be quick ⚠️ Join us for an afternoon and evening of great talks. With a spectacular line up: @anjana.dev, @tunetheweb.com, @cydstumpel.nl, @csswizardry.com and @heydonworks.com

True story.

All iPhones are foldable. Some iPhones are only foldable once. (with apologies to @terrypratchett.bsky.social)

I've said for a while that the road to sustainable open source is royalties levied by package managers and distributed directly to maintainers: freeasinweekend.org/open-source-... Now @seldo.com, co-founder of npm, has published an excellent article along similar lines: seldo.com/posts/nobody...

Got a feature request for the folks at @sessionize.com...

I have just reviewed 150+ "AI-assisted development" talks for a conference agenda. Precious minutes of my one and only life reading AI-generated abstracts for talks about how we don't need humans any more. Do you think the folks who submitted these talks would be happy with AI-generated rejections?

Last chance to get your tickets to Effective Claude Code! Next week, Tuesday & Wednesday afternoon, live on Zoom with me & @rendle.dev - skills, specs, agents, and everything you need to know about AI-assisted software engineering. Book now at claude.rendle.dev - use the code BSKY50 to get 50% off.

Today I will be mostly enjoying the fact that according to the Schema.org type system documentation, there are four categories of person: alive, dead, undead, or fictional...

Every time a client adds Google Tag Manager to a site I've built, I realise how God must have felt the first time somebody put an anvil on a butterfly.

No, we're not going to show you how to vibe-code a million dollar app in a weekend using only your phone. Sorry. But we will show you how to use Claude Code and tools like OpenSpec to plan and deliver working software in meaningful, manageable iterations. claude.rendle.dev - BSKY50 for 50% off!

Look at this. See the bikes? See the bikes stacked neatly? In the designated return area? Not discarded on the pavement like a child’s BMX? A BETTER WORLD IS POSSIBLE. And right here in the London Borough of Lewisham, too. ❤️

It has been a while since a post made me genuinely laugh out loud. Touché, sir. Touché.

I just received two simultaneous notifications on my phone. One from the government telling me WE'RE ALL GOING TO BURN and DEATH IS ON THE WAY, the other that there's a new Friday Night Comedy available on BBC Radio 4... and honestly nothing has ever captured life in the UK in 2026 better than this.

I wouldn't call myself a cartoonist, but I had the vision and just needed it to be on paper to the best of my ability.

So… the internet consensus seems to be that this was a total waste of time, that doing this at all makes me literally worse than Satan, and that I deserve to have my house burgled for even considering it. I just thought it was interesting ‘cos Linux printing has historically been quite complicated.

I set up a sandbox machine (Ubuntu 26.04) for running Claude Code in "yolo mode" (--dangerously-skip-permissions). This morning I told it "set up my printer" - that was the entire prompt - and it actually worked... scanned the network, identified the printer, configured CUPS, printed a test page. 🤯

Exactly! Also, 7.00am "in the morning". There is no 7am in the afternoon!