Cool Things - January 28, 2026

More cleanup. 932 open tabs on the phone browser.

From Podcasts

• Startups For The Rest Of Us Episode 752 - The State of SEO in 2025 talks about how if everyone is using the same frameworks and models to make their content marketing material, there is literally no differenciation between them. By definition it is average.

From Laptop

• claude-plugin-fizzy – I’m trying to use Fizzy for task management. And will be experimenting with Claude next month, so this seems like something I’ll need.
• Processing 11 million rows in minutes instead of hours – Some fun optimizations in there.
• Before The Exit – This book is somewhere in my TBR pile. But likely somewhere in the middle.
• I’m in the CSP rabbit hole this week so I’m harvesting credit card numbers and passwords from your site. Here’s how. and Part 2: How to stop me harvesting credit card numbers and passwords from your site are topical.
• How AWS S3 is built sounds nerdy enough that I need to listen to it when not multi-tasking
• You Need More AWS Accounts Than You Think – I mean, duh. I think we had 9 for our ‘simple’ setup. This is one of my AWS maturity heuristics I measure companies with.
• The Security Questionnaire Survival Guide – ‘A practical guide to the worst part of enterprise sales’. Heh. As the person who had to fill these out for the most part of the last decade, that is so true.
• What Parisians hate (almost) more than anything – file under ‘Things I did not know about Paris.’

From Phone

• I Work For An Evil Company, But Outside Work, I’m Actually A Really Good Person – Remember, if you try to change something from inside the belly of the beast, you are also being slowly digested by the beast to eventually be shat out.
• Jaydee - Plastic Dreams (Long Version) – classic house for your Wednesday
• Architects in Iceland are showing us how to build with molten lava – there is a whole back story to this link being open. It’ll make a dozen-ish people laugh. And then shake their heads.
• In defence of middle management: why bureaucracy keeps companies running – ‘A company produces products but its management produces decisions.’

• [I Accidentally Became Important At Work

  Black and Forest Green

  Art Print](https://wisdomandwonderdesigns.co.uk/products/i-accidentally-became-important-at-work-black-and-forest-green-art-print) – a mass market print, but still kinda great

• ‘One World Under Doom’ reading order – Reading order for a bit crossover Marvel did all summer, that I am ashamed to say I bought every issue as if it was the mid-90s all over again.
• Guard Your Publishing: A Straightforward Guide to Understanding and Surviving the Music Business – new book from Liz Kamlet that is going to be really good. Even though though I have no interest in making music, the business side is fascinating. (See also why I listen to a tonne of fiction writing podcasts even though I dont have a fiction book in me.)
• The AI-Powered Product Engineer: A New Engineering Archetype
• 70k Books Found In Hidden Library In This Germany Home! – Left to my own devices…
• Shit Men Say In Strip Clubs – a coffee table book
• #NoBacklog – “A backlog, at best, is a wishlist; at worst, it’s a denial list that deceives us and those around us. You may think a backlog is a look into the future, but it’s just a piece of archaeology.”
• Life’s lessons understanding Through Feather, Brick and Truck analogy – Apparently this is a thing I am just now learning of. (Where ‘now’ is whenever I opened the tab originally.)
• How do you get someone to care about Shakespeare? Two words: Goblin Macbeth – I regret not going up to Stratford for this
• Dolly Parton themed cast-iron pans crack me up. ‘Please don’t take my Pan’ indeed.
• I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again – Have I linked to this before? Undoubtedly.
• Full timeline of the Star Wars books – Remember, the books are better than the movies.
• The 300 Greatest Albums of All Time – Love lists like this. Even if this one has an annoying infinite scroll.
• 60 Maxims for Digital System Design in the 21st Century – Ooo. Another list. This is much better than the albums one.
• Humanise – “one of the world’s pre-eminent designers explores how buildings and cities around the world lost their soul - and what we can do about it.”