Simon Mayes software engineer · founder, Untether · climber
Everything I've published here, by year. Software quality, developer experience, behaviours, and notes from building Untether.
Don't ditch the smartphone — reconfigure your relationship with it. Use a constrained smartwatch, shift essential interaction to it, and keep your phone out of sight.
AI spews static artefacts that rot the moment you edit. Stop duplicating — vibe-code disposable apps that render live views from your System of Record.
Build genuinely useful, AI-powered personal apps with no backend at all — a static site, OAuth PKCE to the providers you already use, and OpenRouter for the smarts.
Engineers don't talk about software quality — they get stuck arguing about test types. A case for the discipline, in plain language.
A tool for GitLab Pipelines to fetch temporary credentials, secrets, and parameters from AWS using ABAC.