Ross's Micro Blog

It still amazes me what they teach 9 and 10 year olds.

Homework this week:

“Main Focus: How can I make the appropriate choice of pronoun or noun within and across sentences to aid cohesion and avoid repetition?”

I’m sorry, do what now?

A little reflection on last week's @loopconf.

I'm so glad this happened. I was honoured to be a contributor. And it reminded me of how important in-person events are, and how hard they are to organise.

https://rosswintle.uk/2025/10/loopconf-and-25-lessons/

No, NYT Connections puzzle. Go home. You’re drunk!

Blog posts I must remember to write:

– Review of LoopConf
– How I do blogging (ideas and notes to pressing publish – inspired by a colleague)
– Software can be finished – this idea is haunting me right now. It needs to be written about!!!

There may be other of my 25 Lessons that need expanding on too. We’ll see.

TV stuff. We have Apple TV+ as part of a bundle. Don’t watch it much.

But I recently watched season 1 of Invasion. Good character development. Very cinematic. But so… very… slow… and meandering with no real resolution. Good, but not my thing.

Now I’m watching Foundation and it’s great! Much better pacing for me. Superb world design. Hungry for more.

Was reading today about something taking over from MCP (Model Context Protocol) and it solidified a thought:

We are RUSHING into all this AI stuff so ridiculously fast.

I know why. Business!

But I honestly think we should be doing way less with this than we are. Moving more slowly and carefully. But how??

I’ve not flown on a plane for about 15 years.

I am flying next week.

I am SO confused about baggage and check in.

Oh yay! One of my favourite little Playdate games is on Steam too!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1425590/HYPER_METEOR/

(via the excellent Wired write up of the Playdate: https://www.wired.com/story/three-years-on-playdate-is-still-gamings-best-kept-secret/)

Can the title of this article have the “for seniors” removed? This sounds like a good direction for TVs for everyone.

https://www.theverge.com/news/785808/lg-easy-smart-tv-senior-citizens-redesigned-remote

I've not exported slides for my @loopconf talk yet. But honestly, they're not that interesting.

However I created a little resources for exploring notes and links about the “25 lessons" that I presented (or was it one lesson?), and you can select lessons and get those notes here:

https://25.forwp.dev/

LoopConf talk done! Phew! Does that stage ever get less intimidating?

Thank you everyone for all your lovely feedback.

And thank you @loopconf and @rzen for such an amazing day.

This is all 100% true. Jill is a gem of a person and it was amazing to workshop my talk with her.
https://mastodon.social/@jillbinder/115263142260946656

Pretty sure I broke my little toe yesterday. Which is annoying because I have a lot of walking to do this week!!

It is quite a beautiful colour though!!

I never meant to be working for a large US corporate, but honestly, this company has some great values and amazing people, and I’m actually really proud to be representing them at LoopConf this week.

https://wpengine.com/blog/loopconf-2025/

Dang, this is SUCH a good article on hiring software engineers:

https://leaddev.com/hiring/how-hire-force-multipliers-10x-engineers

And yes, keys, passwords all reset. And not sure where the compromise happened.. yet. Very odd.

Curious. Seems a Mailgun API key of mine got compromised. And despite a send limit of 1000 they’ve accepted over 3 million requests and send over 250,000 mails.

What?!!!!

I ain’t paying for those!!!

There is a policeman with a police car stood not far from our primary school gate this morning.

People are just driving up and parking on double-yellow lines right in front of him.

This is a tiny diorama view of the state of the world right now.

I think this is genuinely the best news story I read this week.

Ultralight backpackers going all in on Haribo-branded battery packs.

Amazing.

https://www.theverge.com/tech/781387/backpacking-ultralight-haribo-power-bank

I don't talk about work much, but today I was testing our plugin’s PHP version compatibility to 8.4 and back-compat back to 7.4.

I run my local sites using LocalWP – another WP Engine-owned product.

And I really thought I was going to break it. Switching PHP versions back and forth. Restarting services galore. Simultaneous downloads of new PHP versions.

It was flawless and made my job SO easy. Amazing.

So a plug for one of the awesome tools we make:

https://localwp.com/