Oli Allen's blog
I recently built a tiny train departure board which pulls data from the National Rail API – and needs a WiFi connection to do that. Originally I had the details in a config file that I’d edit and upload to the Pico, but I wanted an easier way – one of my personal goals was…
I promise this isn’t one of those “what deep sea diving taught me about B2B sales” type LinkedIn posts. I help run a team of marshals at the Isle of Man TT races. I also lead a remote engineering team. These sound like very different jobs, but they have a similar concern: how do you…
I built a tiny live train departure board for my desk. It shows real departures from any station, updates every minute, and looks like a miniature version of the dot matrix boards you see on platforms across the UK. Just about space for a couple of departures, delay information, platform number and the time. I…
When you “vibe-code” a signup form, what does the AI produce? It learned from the internet. And the internet is full of manipulative UX and “dark patterns”. This isn’t hypothetical. AI coding tools suggest button copy, form layouts, modal dialogs. They’ve been trained on millions of websites, many of which use dark patterns. The model…
When you need to integrate with a third party API, conventional wisdom is clear: don’t reinvent the wheel. Use the library. Benefit from community maintenance, battle-tested code, someone else’s bug fixes. But sometimes the wheel you’re importing is a lot bigger than the wheel you need. Perhaps the library you find has a decent amount…
I’ve put together a working semaphore signal for my garden railway. The arm raises when a train passes and resets once it’s gone. It’s not prototypical to any real signal, but it works, it looks the part, and it was a satisfying little project. The Basic Idea The system is simple: When the train clears…
Asking a developer to live-code in an interview is like asking a mechanic to change the oil using tools they’ve never seen before, while you watch over their shoulder and take notes. It tells you nothing about the day-to-day work they’ll actually do. It tells them nothing about the tools they’ll be working with if…
A few decades ago, I lost marks on a college assignment. The brief called for an evaluation section: what went wrong, what I learned, what I’d do differently. My submission said, essentially, “it all went fine.” I’d been doing this stuff in my spare time, and even semi-professionally, for years at this point. There wasn’t…
A tourist attraction I visited recently had information boards at various points around the site. Each one had a QR code promising more detail about what you were looking at. Every single one I tried lead to a broken link. This keeps happening. I was in a hotel room and wanted to order room service.…
The South West Peninsula Spring Rally is a one day scatter rally taking place in the South West of England. Participants are challenged to visit between 10 and 19 locations during the day riding anything between 150 to 400+ miles. 2024 was it’s 15th year. A few weeks before the rally, you’re sent a map…