In the summer of 2009 I got a bunch of mp3s from a friend. In this particular batch was an album called "Shallow Grave" from some artist named "The Tallest Man On Earth", a name which I figured (correctly, as it turns out) was tongue in cheek.

The album was intense, raw, organic, overcompressed—all things I loved, and none of which I had previously associated with folk/country/Americana. But that is what was happening. I was immediately drawn in, and have been following Kristian Matsson's music ever since. I always find myself coming back to this first record, and often this song in particular. I don’t know if this story it tells is perhaps intended to be a metaphor, or what. It certainly has a chilling element to it that belies the beautiful folky melody. Regardless, there’s a sense of wistfulness, of resignation to oneself and one’s choices that I find compelling.

I celebrated the official launch of Appium 2 with a set of webinars hosted by HeadSpin. This talk was presented in order to give a bit of the backstory behind Appium 2's development as well as showcase the set of new features and changes to be aware of when adoping Appium 2.

This is a song / music video recorded with my brother at Earthtones Audio. While the song has intensely personal and specific meaning for me, I like to think it also says something universal about significant transitions in life (and death): the courage, fear, loss, and hope involved. We recorded this song in basically one day while I was visiting on a short trip. I decided to throw up my phone to capture some video as we were working, and it turned into this really fun way of showing our recording process and visualizing the different parts as they come in and out of the song.

This is one of my favourite songs by one of my favourite songwriters. I still remember checking out Bon Iver's first release back in 2008 and being blown away by so many of the songs. This one in particular captured me. The impenetrability of the lyrics, the loose and jangly guitar tuning, the sheer emotion pulsing throughout. It captured me. So here's my hopefully not-too-skinny homage to this musical love of mine.

With the recent and sharp rise in the adoption of AI assistants, particular in fields formerly related to creative work, I felt the need to put forward my thoughts on the consequences of AI usage for human creativity. I argue that while AI assistants embody a huge amount of promise in terms of making creative production easier, there are tradeoffs and dangers involved in their use, particularly for our human faculties that we prize most highly.

Here's the AppiumConf 2021 keynote, which happened during the Covid-19 pandemic, making it impossible for us to hold the conference in person. My secret demo for this talk was to produce an Appium 2 plugin for automating Unity-based games! Appium 2 was not yet released and so the rest of the talk was as discussion about the development process for it.

In this paper, I explore the resonances between the Israelite origin myths of Genesis and the various other myths in the Ancient Near East, primarily Mesopotamia, and attempt to argue for an ideological distinctiveness within a largely similar contextual frame.

I was a guest on this episode of the Here Be Dragons podcast, discussing theology and technology.

At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic there was a lot of discussion around the place of church in public life during quarantine. Online-only services started to pop up, prompting the question for many of when church would make the jump to a completely virtual reality. I wrote this article to explore some of the philosophical and theological foundations of VR and what "VR church" might even mean as a concept. Spoiler alert: I'm not bullish on VR church!