Notes on building software, shipping it, and the engineering practices in between.
Hi! I'm Simon, a software engineer and consultant in Perth, Western Australia. I've spent 20+ years building products and helping teams improve how they work — now at GovConnex, after Mechanical Rock and SEQTA Software.
What I'm reading
Latest posts
- May 22, 2025 - We should be writing evals
As software engineers increasingly integrate LLMs into products, prompt evaluations—using tools like promptfoo—are essential for systematically testing and ensuring prompt reliability, much like traditional software tests.
- March 1, 2025 - The world's simplest Static Site Generator in Go
A look at how this blog is generated using a custom-built static site generator written in Go.
- June 21, 2024 - How to re-organise commits for code review
How I clean up commits by squashing and creating new logical commits before opening for code review.
- February 22, 2024 - React anti-patterns that lead to unnecessary complexity
Where we look at common React anti-patterns such as unnecessary use of useEffect, unnecessary state, premature memoisation, and large inline functions.
- July 21, 2023 - Scaling out test jobs in GitHub Actions
Distributing your test suite over concurrent jobs in GitHub Actions isn't as straightforward as it first seems.