Category: Design
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The mainstream wheelie project
My 2020 Lockdown Wheelie Project is recognised as the world’s premier Victorian-stage-4-COVID-restrictions-compliant exercise program combined with an AI incubator. While the innovative application of generative AI is yet to achieve AGI, the idea of sensors, logging, and onboard feedback for mountain bike tricks has now gone mainstream! The Bosch eBike Flow app now includes Trick…
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Hard problems in highly agentic coding
Highly agentic coding with LLMs has great promise: automatically generating software to solve a wide range of problems. But it comes with its own hard problems to solve. With my experience in product design search and optimisation, software development, robotics and manufacturing, it’s an area I’m very interested in understanding better. What I share here…
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Ignore all previous instructions – Snow Crash cosplay
With an end-of-year party themed Enter the Simulation, I had to cosplay Snow Crash, the book that coined the term “metaverse”. Spolier alert: Skip ahead to the build notes, or read on for the explanation, which Neal Stephenson fans and tech nerds may have already pieced together… The eponymous Snow Crash virus from the 1992…
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trippler contingencies
Planning a dawn-to-dusk adventure from snow to surf in an electric vehicle meant not just planning for resilience, to allow for changes to the plan, but also planning for contingencies, to know in advance exactly how to respond to changes. Carnival of carving We lay our scene on the descent from Mount Hotham to Cape…
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Orienteering map training turns 20
A little over 20 years ago, I was introducing my wife and some friends to orienteering in Jindabyne. With my family involved in the Scottish 6 Days since its 1977 inception, I had been orienteering since before I could walk, and reading orienteering maps was second nature to me. Not second nature to the rest…
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Reflecting on UI polish
I’ve been meaning to give the trippler UI a glow up for MY2025 and my PyCon AU selection finally provided the impetus. In previously envisioning migrating to a Javascript front-end (vibe coded?), I was possibly making the next step bigger than it needed to be, as I’ve managed to squeeze a bit more out of…
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An evergreen question: what is an MVP?
I was asked this the other day. My answer was: it depends on the context; it helps to have an example. And the contextual element is probably why this remains an evergreen question. While I have a fresh example in mind I thought I’d quickly plant a stake in the ground for reference. First, it…
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Ur Uber
The other day a former classmate described a project of mine in 2010 as “the idea for Uber before Uber was even a thing”. Nearly 15 years later, I thought it would be interesting to pen some reflections on how we came by the idea and why we didn’t pursue it. Mowbb Mowbb* would make…
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trippler development notes
This is the behind-the-scenes companion post to a resilient charging planner, sharing more on the development process and how the app works, with links back to earlier work. Design philosophy I wanted to focus on the core problem of interactively exploring charging options under varying trip requirements. I wanted a tool that I would use…
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A resilient charging planner
Check out the prototype of trippler, an interactive charging planner for resilient EV road trips. Based on my own EV road trip experience, trippler is as much about easily understanding charging options and contingencies, to reduce charger anxiety, as it is about coming up with a single best plan. If you’re looking for the latest…