I'd rather spend a week understanding what to build than a month building the wrong thing.
Selected essays
Archive →The Last Published Date
Two client websites built alongside each other, with opposite architectures, decided by one piece of evidence that was free, public, and sitting under a date stamp before either proposal was written.
Building LapDelta: A Real-Time F1 Replay for a Pound a Month
A 60fps replay of real Formula 1 telemetry that runs for about a pound a month with no request-serving backend, built on a zero-copy data contract shared across three languages and a fair amount of geometry.
The Second Reader
University taught me every practice that defines good engineering, then removed the one condition under which any of them make sense. What's left over is a lesson about knowledge itself.
Make the Easy Thing the Right Thing
When you start copying infrastructure code for the third time, you've already waited too long. A note on extracting shared patterns into a library, and being kind to future-you.
Building a Mathematics Interpreter in F#: From Parser to Symbolic Calculus
How we built a full interpreter with symbolic differentiation, six number types, and interactive graph plotting, and what the architectural decisions reveal about building extensible systems.
About the editor
I'm David Shortland, a software developer at Smedley Group Advanced Technology, where the domain is global electric karting.
I write here about engineering practice, architecture, and the reasoning behind decisions. If that sounds useful, the archive is the front door, and the work history shows the practice behind it.