August 2026

First full month in the new job, and despite some pretty terrible weather and an unexpected plumbing bill, August turned out to be a good month.

The Vibe

August in Adelaide is always a month of contradictions – sun and rain, cold and those first glimpses of spring. This one was no different. But the social connections balanced things out, and on the whole the vibe was good.

The new job is going well and is exactly what I was looking for – something that actually engages my problem-solving abilities rather than just going through the motions. I've met good people, I'm getting a sense of the opportunities available, and I'm genuinely excited about the Learning Futures space. There's a real chance here to let loose on some ideas I've been carrying around for a long time. We'll see how it goes, but even if things don't go in a particular direction, there's a lot to learn that I can take forward career-wise.

August has had its moments! We came home from seeing the new Spider-Man movie to find the backyard flooding – a 100mm of rain fell in the neighbouring suburb within 24 hours, our stormwater drain was blocked, and one thing led to another until we had a fairly significant plumbing bill and a weekend we'd rather forget.

On the better side, a friend came to stay for a couple of weeks – ostensibly to have and recover from surgery, but it turned into a good stretch of company, conversation, and after-dinner debate. That social element made a real difference to the month, probably more than I'd expected. We also had catch-ups with friends, and I met up with my old team, who gave me an orca diorama as a farewell gift. It takes pride of place on my shelf of knick-knacks:

![][images/knick-knacks.jpg]

I'm not one to show a lot of emotion, but it did give me pause to reflect on the team and what we'd built together. I took some risks in that team – hiring people with enthusiasm and different perspectives rather than experience, and watching them grow into their roles has been genuinely satisfying. My approach to management is akin to gardening: create the conditions, get rid of the weeds, and trust people to grow themselves[1]. Ultimately it's about having faith in people and creating the right milieu for them - not about you or your ego.

On the project front, I've been pulling together some ideas that have been circulating for a while – learning types, learning patterns, and the Bloom's 3D work – into something more consolidated and coherent. The goal is a robust website that brings these things together, and potentially the foundation for something more in the future. I've been pretty open with myself that running my own thing at some point is where I'd like to end up, and this feels like building toward that. So I've focused on developing a new 11ty Starter – trying to eliminate the technical debt I tend to accumulate in web projects, introduce some consistency into the CSS, and build something I can actually reuse across projects rather than one-offs.

I've been using Claude quite a bit for the dull parts of this work, which has been interesting to reflect on. I find real value in it as a tool – it lets me act more as conductor and decision-maker than writing the actual code. I feel enthusiastic about that; as a tool, it's allowing me to do more and faster. I'm enjoying seeing what people can do, like D'arcy's work as well. Rather than buying into the breathless hype that this is gonna change everything and be worth trillions of dollars, I'm seeing it more as a useful tool in certain circumstances. It's more akin to an app, no different from Illustrator or Photoshop, and probably not worth anywhere near what AI companies are being valued at. I see a text generator that can now be hooked up to a computer that responds to text commands. Not actual intelligence, just an app that responds to its own command by generating text that can be passed on to another application that can follow those commands. What actually worries me is if (and I think it is a big IF) the data centre build-outs happen without regulation around water and power and with no accountability. In the context of what's happening with climate, after seeing what just happened in Nepal (and in my own backyard) – how are we not having that conversation?

Photos

2026

Events

No special events this month, but I would be remiss to skip over Blaugust 2026. I've never written like that before - consecutively churning out the posts. It was a real challenge, but it was good for that fact alone.

Watched

Enjoyed the new Spider-Man and also watched Redux Redux – a low-budget sci-fi that reminded me of Cube and that wave of indie sci-fi from the early 2000s. Something a bit different, pretty low-key on the special effects, which I appreciated.

Listened

Two things worth mentioning. The latest season of the Buried podcast about hare coursing was really interesting – it reinforced the point that just because you can bet on something doesn't make it a good idea. What tends to follow gambling of any sort is some of the worst characteristics of human behaviour. Which made me think about what the hell is going on with "prediction markets" (i.e. gambling on everything) and sport which has completely tied itself to gambling money.

The ABC Background Briefing series on Tammy's story was more confronting. What it made clear is that Australian prisons have effectively become housing for people with serious mental illness – and that's a damning statement about how we treat mental health as a society. We're locking people up for stealing $20 worth of groceries, which is a poverty problem, not a criminality problem. Meanwhile, the people who probably should be in prison – domestic violence perpetrators in particular – aren't going to jail and then murdering women. That's pretty disheartening. The missing piece, as I keep coming back to, is care – from politics, from institutions, from the public.

  1. There is ample space here to make a joke about feeding them bullshit and heat, but hey I'm more mature than that ↩︎

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