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And here we are three years after I wrote about the Google Pixel Fold being announced, followed now with the announcement of the iPhone Duo...(I have questions about the naming by the way). Four years ago I was talking about web primitives in the platform for the Surface Duo. My how time flies. There are CSS media features, a Viewport Segments API, a Device Posture API but Chromium based browsers are the only ones currently supporting these things. I haven't been able to find any signal yet on whether Safari will support these things in the web platform as the developer docs focus on application development. If you're interested in trying out the platform features, you can emulate the Surface Duo and Galaxy Z Fold in the developer tools. And if you're thinking, do I really have to have my website adapt to two screens? The answer is no. Adding a design to an application or dual screen makes sense if you have an experience that has two simulataneous contexts that are useful e.g. a list of email messages/inbox on one screen, an open message, email thread or email composer on the other. Here's one of my talks from 2022 if you're interested in learning more about what's available in the browser for dual screen/foldable devices. Happy building :)
The year flies by when you're postpartum, sleep-deprived and your little bubba is suddenly on the move and making developmental leaps. Time is this sort of weird compressed experience, not dissimilar to the way I felt about COVID and 2020 (wasn't that just yestersday? No indeed it was not, it was 6 years ago). And I'm a bit discombobulated as September is upon us. Budget planning at work? Didn't I just do budget planning for 2026? I went back to work in June, which has been an adjustment and prompted many an identity crisis, but at the same time I am happy to be back and doing lots of soul-searching. I'm in a better place than the start of the summer. Part of the soul-searching has been prompted by AI and the state of tech that I re-entered into. I still hate how it is being shoved down our throats and the prioritization of data centers, especially in places experieincing drought. Everyone should have access to water and humans should be prioritized over a data center. Full stop. For my current role, it has been extremely helpful in speeding up mundane tasks like compiling reports, and giving me more time to spend on things like design and social media content, which I historically had barely enough time for. But I continue to be baffled by AI and its bubble. The IPO valuations seem wildly ridiculous, and I've seen the salaries offered to people and I wonder how it is even remotely sustainable. I also hate the fearmongering and the polarizing content ("AI is going to replace [your industry of choice here]") to create engagement bait that has come with the commercialization of this technology. It is a horrible and interesting time in tech. I have seen many qualified people laid off because of "cost-cutting", and it's not right. Summer Bits # We survived multiple heatwaves in South East England, and while I'm told there were four, it really felt continous up until a week or two ago. I've kept the windows open and the house chilly in the morning because it is a relief. The first heatwave in May was stressful as hell, with Chloe about to be 5 months and trying to keep her cool while our upstairs rose to 28 C. The number of parents lamenting online about the lack of knowledge sharing in prenatal classes about how to keep a baby cool in hot weather was more than zero. We all knew the safe sleep guidelines said 17-21 C but wtf are you supposed to do when you can't get any part of your house that cool? It was stressful and horrible, but it's over for now. I think. My dog Vogue has had health issues since last October and we have finally got to a point where I have not had to take her to the vet in about a month or so. She's on heart meds and has mitral valve heart disease. Her heart is quite enlarged but we're managing. She rides in the bottom of Chloe's pram for walks so she still gets to go out and about. I love her to bits, I can't believe she's 14 and I cherish the time I have remaining with her. The Patio # While it became increasingly apparent that we will need more space when Chloe is older, I decided to make the most of what we have and asked our landscapers to put a patio in off the back of the house, and they finished it in early July. It has become a daily sanctuary, and I'm sad the nights are getting shorter. There was a good 3-4 weeks when we were outside eating dinner. Yorkshire Coast # We didn't leave the country this year for my birthday. I can't remember why it didn't quite work out, but we took our first overnight trip with Chloe up to the Yorkshire Coast and Whitby. It was beautiful and by the time we eventually found our groove with Chloe and naps and going out to do things, it was already time to leave. I love the sea, and it was lovely to be along the coast for a few nights. Will hopefully make a more permanent move along a coastline at some point. Family coming to visit # My mother came to visit for 3 weeks and help with Chloe which was so lovely for her to get that time bonding with her granddaughter. She also got to see Chloe make some big development leaps even in the short time she was here. Then my sister came and stayed with us for a week. We went to Wrest Park, London and Warwick Castle and Chloe loved it all. I only wish both my mom and sister could have stayed longer. What I've been... # Watching # A lot of reality TV. I've just been hella into Bravo shows more than usual. Ladies of London: The New Reign - It was the best Bravo show I've watched in a long time. Interesting characters who felt more authentic than Real Houswives. I am gutted it was not renewed. I want more of Mark and Martha! The Valley - More reality TV. Oddly comforting as the new season started when I was 3-4 months postpartum and two of the women on the series were also at that stage of postpartum so it made me feel a bit normal and seen. House of the Dragon - Season 3 was way better than 2. Rooster - Love a Steve Carrell show. It was different. I enjoyed it. Dutton Ranch - Ridiculous and outlandish like Yellowstone but entertaining. And it's Premier League season again babyyyy. Though I am extremely sad Arsenal sold Trossard. Boooo. But I'm thrilled there has been so much football on. Reading # Ha - it is taking me months to finish books at this particular moment in time. Glad I read so many last year. I did finish Crescent City #3 House of Flame and Shadow back in April. I started Brimstone (Fae & Alchemy #2) but could not stay engaged, so I DNF. I know book one was ripped apart because of the writing, but I was entertained. I couldn't look past the writing this time. I am currently making my way through the first book of Dungeon Crawler Carl. Other Bits # In this process of soul-searching and finding my identity as a mother, I am back to the state of mind prompting me to ask "why not?" when something comes up. So I bought a Pioneer DDJ-FLX4 to learn how to DJ and have been rediscovering the music I so love at festivals and feeling re-energized about something new. I'm loving mixing and am excited to see where this takes me. I've also decided to go back to school. Not your normal school though. I have become deeply interested in astrology and am going to pursue that for fun. Looking forward to being in a classroom setting again. Because why the hell not?
I started work back up again yesterday, June 1, as a remote tech worker for an open source consultancy. My husband started his paternity leave today. I'm only going back part-time for the moment so my rough plan is to work 3 days a week with the exception of this week, as I wanted to open my laptop, clear out my inbox, setup my Notion pages for 2026, change my away message and just try to get a vague sense of what's happened while I've been away. I'll work Monday-Thursday but Monday and Tuesday will be half days. My goal for the day was to get up with Chloe at 6:00 AM like normal. Put her down for her nap at 7:30. Have Jhey take over while I take the dog to the vet for heart scan and then log on for a little bit this afternoon. The universe said, a plan with an almost 5 month old? Nice try. Chloe woke up at 3:00 AM which is unusual for her. I rocked her back to sleep. Put her down. Tried to crawl back into bed. She woke up, rolled onto her tummy, and cried because she can't get onto her back because she's seemingly forgotten how to do so. She started rolling tummy to back weeks ago, but now that she can go back to tummy...that's all she does. Rinse and repeat until 6 AM. So I'm at that shattered level of tired. So much so that when I take my dog Vogue to the vet and they're telling me the results of her heart scan, it's not processing how poorly her heart actually is until I get home and talk to Jhey. She'll be on medication for the rest of her life. She's 14. We'll do another scan in a month to see if the meds help slow the progression of her heart enlargement and then I'll ask for a potential timeline...how much time they think she has left. Jhey goes to the gym and then someone shows up to pick up his special edition Mustang that he's sold. I get Chloe down for her nap and log on at 2:00 PM. I had briefly logged on for a half hour in the morning to just do a quick check and update. My inbox is a disaster as it seems my out of office reply, replied to spam messages that would normally not be in my inbox and I have 100s to delete. I try to be ruthless and delete as much as possible but leave the more company-wide discussions for follow up. I try and skim the chat. But there's too much. By the time it's 5:00 PM I have barely managed to get my Notion pages set back up. I'll try again tomorrow. I remind myself that today was particularly difficult with scheduling and is not indicative of my days going forward. Tomorrow I'll try for more routine. I go over to Jhey's parents' house and chat, we bring Chloe back for her nap, then bath and bedtime routine. I make a quick dinner of shrimp stir fry with a nice veggie stir fry pack from Waitrose. I almost make it to the end of the Euphoria finale but pass out briefly and then go up to bed. Exhausted but accomplished. Day one of this new life and routine and figuring it out is complete.
Today is my last day of maternity leave. Chloe is down for her morning nap and I'm trying to process the last 5 months and where it has all gone and all these complicated feelings. I want to go back to work and I don't. I am only going back part-time for a few months but it still feels like a massive shift is about to happen. Chloe is on a pretty good routine at the moment and just learned to roll over from her back to front. She is more aware, getting stronger and so damn cute. Her little gummy smile when I get her out of her cot in the morning and after naps fills my heart with such joy. I'm not sleeping particularly well at the moment and it's not necessarily because she wakes up at night. I have a lot of anxiety around sleep at the moment because of how hot it's been in the UK. Somehow despite the broken sleep, I get through the day and have a burst of energy after she goes to bed. I started anti-depressants for postpartum depression around the 3.5 month mark. This can also cause sleep issues and insomnia but I feel a lot better and have no problem saying without medication I'd be struggling to survive. I've even rediscovered my joy for a few hobbies and am excited to start gardening again and have decided our outdoor space needs an upgrade. I'm finding a rhythm again, ever so slowly. When it comes to the web and my career, I feel like I'm coming back at a weird time. AI is wrecking havoc and I continue to be skeptical of how hard it is being pushed. I believe it can be useful and is a tool, but the places where it could have the most impact and be incredibly transformational are not being funded adequately. I also don't believe it can adequately replace entire roles, and I don't believe we should be expecting 10x the output from workers because AI may be automating some tasks for them. We should not be pushing AI generated code to PRs without reviewing it or having some understanding of what has been generated. I fear there's going to be a lot of slop to clean up. I've been approached to create a proposal for a new side project. Details TBD but I'm considering moving ahead with it as it ties into Design for Developers. There's a lot on my mind, but I'm expecting Chloe to wake up any moment so I will eventually share those things on the blog but I will be back from maternity leave tomorrow (June 1) and dipping my toes back into adult life again. I've enjoyed the level of disconnection from online. My screen time is way down as I try to avoid being on my phone when Chloe is in front of me. Priorities have shifted. I've shifted. I feel like a completely different person, but I think it'd be strange if I didn't. How can you not grow after the experience of giving birth and motherhood?
And suddenly it happens one day in March. The sun beams down in a rare cloudless sky. It might be cold as the wind gently blows but The Sun. The Sun beams down and it promises Long nights on the horizon. It promises miserable humid days And lovely warm days. Harsh mid-day light. Dreamy golden evenings. It comes out to announce Winter's end before It once again disappears behind England's cloudy skies. And Suddenly Spring is here and my soul is warmed once again.
More in programming
This post was previously published through my newsletter on October 19, 2026. From time to time, I will republish newsletter issues on my blog here if I think people (and search engines) might benefit from it. If you want to read everything I’ve written once it is posted, I recommend signing up for the newsletter. For the last 5-6 years or so, I’ve been talking about, teaching and helping teams implement contract testing on a regular basis. To make that more concrete: at the moment, I’m having ongoing conversations with four different potential clients about helping them in some way with their contract testing implementation, and so far, I’ve run my contract testing workshop four times this year. It probably doesn’t come as a surprise to you when I say that I really like the concept of contract testing as a means of addressing integration testing challenges in distributed software systems. However, no matter if I’m speaking, teaching or implementing contract testing, certain challenges almost always come up at some point, and I want to highlight some of those today. Understanding the concept of contract testing First of all, it often takes people a while to understand the concept of contract testing, especially when they’re used to what I call the ‘traditional’ approach to integration testing: deploying the systems and services in scope to a shared testing environment and then testing them ‘as a whole’. Of course, the more distributed your system and your development process is, and the higher the deployment frequency, the more complex and the slower this integration testing approach is going to be. The premise behind contract testing is to break that integration testing puzzle down into small chunks of individual consumer-provider pairs, and then test the integration between those two in an asynchronous manner. By asynchronous, I mean that there is no need to deploy consumer and provider into a shared environment; both parties perform their part of the process in their own, local development environment. This means you can detect potential integration issues before you deploy, instead of stumbling onto them after you do so. This makes contract testing (or contract-based integration testing, to use its proper name) a significantly different approach to integration testing compared to the more ‘traditional’ approach. In my experience, it usually takes people time to wrap their head around how the process actually works, which steps you should take and in which order, and what you (do not yet) know after each step. It often takes going through several contract testing cycles before people start to ‘get it’. That’s not their fault, that is to be expected, since the contract-based approach to integration testing is, again, quite different from what they’ve been doing for so long. To better cater to this, I redesigned my contract testing workshop a year and a half or so ago. It is now a full-day workshop (half a day is simply too short), and I take much smaller steps and repeat them more often. From what I see, this has led to a better understanding of the concepts with my audience, and that’s the whole point. Contract testing === Pact I’ve talked to quite a few teams that had heard of contract testing somewhere, decided that that was the way out of their integration testing problems, and then immediately started writing contract tests with Pact. Understandable, because Pact is a very useful, very powerful and very popular tool, plus, it’s open source, which makes it easy for teams to get started. Often, they skipped a step in the process. Pact is very much a consumer-driven contract testing tool by nature, and while consumer-driven contract testing is the richest and most powerful of the different approaches to contract testing, it is not necessarily the best fit for every team and every context. It’s a classic example of using the wrong tool for the problem at hand, because they didn’t take enough time looking at the problem and the available solutions. That’s not the problem of Pact, even though it is often framed that way (‘Pact didn’t solve my problems, therefore Pact is not a good tool’). That’s a ‘we didn’t fully understand the problem and the context’ problem. Contract testing removes the need for communication Another challenge that I often see when I talk about or help teams with contract testing is the fact that teams don’t talk to each other. This then leads to integration issues, because team A expects something from team B that team B doesn’t supply. Contract testing is not the solution to these problems. It can’t be - tools alone do not solve problems, let alone communication problems. What contract testing does do is make potential integration issues visible early on in the development process, often earlier than (again) more ‘traditional’ approaches to integration testing. That’s where the value of contract testing can be found. It is not a means to replace communication between teams. In fact, and this is especially true for consumer-driven contract testing, contract testing cannot succeed without good communication between consumer and provider teams. Contract testing replaces all other types of integration testing This one comes up less often than it used to, but sometimes, I still hear people saying that when they will have contract-based integration tests in place, they don’t need other types of integration tests anymore - including E2E tests. That’s simply not true. While contract testing is a great way to find out earlier about the impact of a change in a specific consumer or provider further downstream, in many cases, I wouldn’t rely on these tests alone before moving to production. Because of its asynchronous nature, contract-based integration testing only verifies whether a consumer and a provider speak the same language - can a consumer understand the message returned by a provider in a specific situation? It does not verify that the request or the response message reaches the other party in the first place, for example. In other words, it doesn’t test connectivity between a consumer and a provider. And because integration testing is broken down into individual consumer-provider pairs, you don’t see the entire system working ‘as a whole’. This means you might want to keep a few end-to-end tests in place, even when you’ve got good contract testing coverage across the board. The above is not a complete list of challenges with contract testing, but the ones I mentioned here are those that come up most often.
Have you seen this? If you haven't, you should. I think everyone needs to. Wealth inequality on a scale this extreme is almost impossible to explain. You have to experience it to understand. Go ahead. Try it out. Where is the top of this graph? Good question. Keep
Slop is without a doubt everywhere. Be it in restaurant’s menus, music playlists, or online game storefronts, it is now impossible to escape it. Yet, I’ve never met anyone who was actually looking forward to consuming that. No matter how hard it’s shoved down our throats, the human longing to connect with other people through art still remains. Raymond Kotewicz They will not let you filter A simple solution would be to have slop filters. Automatically label AI-generated trash, and let users hide it if they don’t want to see it. So far, I don’t think any of the major internet platforms has implemented this. The common excuse for why they don’t let you easily filter out slop is that it would be technically too difficult. Let me be clear with everyone here: this is complete bullshit. We’re talking about companies that can hire some of the most talented engineers in the world. I don’t think anyone seriously believes they can’t come up with a way to guess if a file has been generated by AI or not. 90% of the slop out there stands out so much everyone can see how it was made after looking at it for 5 seconds. A more plausible reason for the lack of slop filter is that they are simply testing out the waters. They are checking if users will tolerate it. The question tech executives want answered is: will people buy this garbage? And if the answer to that question is yes, here’s what they will do: they will start generating it themselves. They don’t need the useless meat proxies who think typing ten words and pressing enter makes them creative. They definitely don’t want to verse anyone royalties when they could just be making a one time purchase of tokens. If you think this is not real, just ask Tim Sweeney. I bet he will be more than happy to confirm. Roman Navarro Curation by humans for humans So now that it’s clear that tech companies will not save us from drowning in slop, it’s time to turn back to actual humans instead. The good news is they are a lot of people who are here to help you. There are thousands of people on the internet who will search through mountains of content to find the perfect piece of art they want to share with the world. We don’t explicitly call them curators. They are streamers, bloggers, journalists, DJs, overly enthusiast fans, or simply your friends. Some of those people are seriously amazing. There are DJs out there who will spend thousands of hours digging through crates to craft you the perfect ninety minutes of music. Why do you still need those machine-generated playlists? The alternative to blindly trusting the output of a recommendation algorithm isn’t always to become an expert in every field of art. Sometimes you just have to put the trust you had in a machine back into another person. Back to the real world? The real long term solution would be to stop relying only on the internet for distribution. This is already a thing in the music industry. Every city has a record shop that will sell you a carefully selected set of vinyls. For many musicians, physical sales (and concerts) are a much better source of income than streaming. The same goes for the movie. While text-to-video AI is a thing, the real money isn’t made by generating 30 second TikTok dramas. The real money comes from people paying tickets to see a full-length movie in a theater. Sadly I’m not too optimistic about my own field: video games. Somehow it seems the direction we’ve taken is the opposite. We’re all in on online distributions platforms. We have fully accepted them as our new digital overlords. Next month GTA V is coming out without a disk in the box. Sony already announced that the next Playstation will not support physical media. Physical distribution is not even mentioned in the pitch of the average indie publisher. In Breda, the small Dutch city where I live, we used to have two dedicated video games shop. Higher interests rates, expensive rents, and various policy failures have done their jobs: they are both closed. I don’t think this is a good sign for the survivability of the gaming industry.
Understanding how assigning anthropomorphic traits to agents can improve their effectiveness and interaction.
