Amthonie | Jottings

Nobody ever taught me to write software. I read musicology, not computer science, and my first serious programming was spent coaxing three voices of Bach out of a Commodore 64 — three being what the sound chip allowed and, conveniently, what a fugue requires. Fifteen years of writing and debugging code for a living have not dislodged that training. It still does most of the structural work.

So that is where I begin. The rule I keep returning to is that every class or function should do one thing, and do it as brilliantly and independently as possible.

There is a well-worn line that good code reads like a book. It doesn't, and it shouldn't. A book is read once, at leisure, for its content. A score is read while being performed — by someone who was not in the room when it was written, usually at the least convenient moment available. Everything on the page is therefore functional rather than decorative. Rehearsal marks exist so that a player can restart at bar 94 without a search party.

A class, in that reading, is a theme. Like a fugue subject it turns up in several places and in different shapes and remains recognisably the same thing, which is why a subject that only works where it was first stated is a poor subject. The writing of it already anticipates being developed. That is not the same as bolting on machinery for a caller who does not yet exist; one keeps a theme portable by writing it cleanly, not by adding to it.

The rest follows from how a score is laid out. A full score shows every voice at once, so the shape is legible at a glance, while the parts carry the detail — which is exactly how a main method ought to read, with the steps visible at the top and the particulars further down. And debugging is simply the conductor stopping the orchestra at bar 94 to see what each line is playing at that moment, which is an argument for state you can take in whole rather than assemble from a dozen scattered variables.

None of which is really about elegance. My actual reason is less refined: when I no longer understand a piece of code, that is a red flag rather than an inconvenience. If the reader has lost the thread, the author has very probably lost it too, and there is no more comfortable place for a bug to sit unnoticed. Nobody scrutinises the passage they have quietly given up reading.

There is a decent argument against all this: hunting through eight tidily named methods can cost more than reading one long one. My answer is that a score manages both: the parts separate the voices, and the full score puts every voice for a single moment on one page.

Having finally written this down, I discovered most of it already has names — Parnas in 1972, Kent Beck's composed method, a good half of Code Complete. Reassuring, and mildly deflating, depending on the hour. One can apparently arrive at software engineering orthodoxy by way of the well-tempered clavier. It simply takes longer, and has better tunes.

I have booked a holiday to Germany, seduced once again by the quiet charm of trundling through narrow, winding valleys on little local trains.

Long-distance rail across the border, however, has evolved into an exercise in temporal suspension. One does not simply travel; one sets aside a calendar day and surrenders to fate. Delays are so reliably catastrophic that allowing a generous sixty minutes for a connection—not across town, but between adjacent platforms in the very same station—feels like a reckless gamble. The schedule provides only a theoretical opening bid; the actual arrival remains a private matter between Deutsche Bahn and the universe.

To keep my blood pressure within civilised limits, I chose a route anchored by one solitary ICE. Sheer logistical modesty. No high‑stakes dash down echoing stairwells, no existential limbo on an unfamiliar platform. Just one long glide across the country, followed by a modest local train that feels more like a small reward for not overreaching.

Even so, part of me looks forward to the inevitable pause on a draughty provincial platform, waiting for the tannoy to crackle into life: “The 10:19 service to Lüdenscheid will depart today at 10:51.” Announced with such calm assurance, it always feels less like an apology and more like an unexpected little gift, wrapped especially for me.

"We were alarmed by it because we saw that whoever surrenders to the addiction of technology forgets that life is sacred. Such a person sees only sacred machines, confuses the issues, and believes that animals are worth less than an electrical appliance—and will sacrifice animals to them as well. Such a person regards the Earth as a dead object to do with as one pleases."

Re‑reading this passage from Thea Beckman’s The Hellish Paradise (1987, part two of her Children of Mother Earth trilogy) — a book I likely first encountered in a secondary‑school library in the quiet, pre‑internet years when the only intrusion was the faint spill of tinny audio from Walkmans — produces a small, unwelcome mirror. In her post‑apocalyptic future, the inhabitants of Thule regard technological zealots with a kind of quiet, sorrowful horror: people who bow to their machines and treat the living world as mere feedstock.

It is difficult not to look up at that point. At the computer humming gently in a climatised room; the e‑paper display pulsing out the temperature of an empty space; the dashboards charting energy usage with forensic enthusiasm. The summer day beyond the window feels faintly at odds with the machinery occupying the room. We tell ourselves we are only refining, optimising, smoothing the edges of daily life. Yet the perspective shifts when an offline sensor or an obstinate Zigbee route produces a sharper jolt of irritation than the thought of missing a quiet afternoon outdoors.

Beckman wrote with the unvarnished moral clarity that children’s fiction permits. Machines raised to the sacred; the Earth quietly demoted to a dead object. I unplugged a developer board on the corner of the desk — mostly out of a brief, irrational sense of guilt — and the LEDs gave a last, faint blink. The screen flickered once, went white, and the room felt momentarily larger.

My favourite recording of all time—setting aside the Easy Aloha’s Cashmere Cat album for another day—is the 1982 release of Bach’s six Trio Sonatas for organ, recorded for Archiv Production by Ton Koopman. I first heard it shortly after it came out, and it has followed me ever since.

Being a kind of musical geometry of the Holy Trinity—three voices in perfect equilibrium—it seems to accommodate every mood and setting. When you are cheerful, it functions as dance music; when you are not, it consoles. I have listened to it on Alpine peaks, on tropical beaches, and in downtown New Orleans. It fits everywhere, with the odd exception of cities like Istanbul or Casablanca.

Koopman, as it happens, lives two streets away from me. Naarden-Bussum is small enough that, given how often I pass his house, I might reasonably expect to have spotted him at least once—watering the hydrangeas, queuing at the baker, or buying flowers at the market. I have long harboured a mild desire to tell him what that record has meant to me over forty years.

I have never seen him. Not once. Small towns have depths that cities never quite manage.

Somewhere in the mid-eighties, an unreasonable amount of my childhood was swallowed up by entering basic numeric sequences into BASIC just to make a tiny internal speaker squeak out a crude rendition of Bach. It was tedious, completely unnecessary, and immensely satisfying.

Decades later, under the guise of setting up a sensible hourly chime for a home automation display, I stumbled across RTTTL—Ring Tone Text Transfer Language. Within minutes, I was stringing together text commands to force a tiny piezo buzzer on an e-paper display to chirp out the opening bars of Bach’s 8th Invention.

The immediate sense of deja vu was almost physical. Forty years have dissolved, yet here I am, still sitting in front of a screen, fine-tuning sequence timings to get a tiny electronic beeper to sound marginally less offensive.

It now plays Bach on the hour and the Pac‑Man intro when the front door opens. I give it three days before the nostalgia wears off and the quiet becomes appealing again.

Someone asked me recently whether writing software alongside an AI assistant didn't make the whole process rather tedious.

It is, as it turns out, quite the opposite. The machine has a habit of proposing angles that hadn't crossed my mind—some of them surprisingly clever, others hopelessly overcomplicated, but rarely dull. It also spares me the grey misery of searching through endless API specifications for the exact structure of a payload I managed to forget ten minutes ago.

Yet the most useful aspect has nothing to do with code.

The real advantage is largely social. Working mostly from home, there is a quiet comfort in having something on hand that never tires of micro-inquiries. If you turned to a human colleague every fifteen minutes to ask, “So, what do you reckon to this approach?”, you would very quickly find yourself sitting entirely alone in the office. The assistant, whatever its structural faults, never sighs or suddenly remembers a pressing meeting. It just answers.

There is much to be said for a quiet half-hour on a sunlit terrace with an espresso and no immediate obligations. One can observe the gentle choreography of local commerce — and, occasionally, the rather creative interpretations some proprietors apply to occupational safety.

A young delivery rider rolled up beside the neighbouring café, stepped off his heavily laden electric cargo bike, and approached his boss with a concern that would trouble any reasonable mechanic.

“The right brake isn’t working at all,” he said, gesturing at the handlebar with understated alarm.

The patron looked up. He followed the rider to the bike, performed a brisk ten‑second inspection that consisted largely of touching things, and then delivered his verdict with admirable economy of thought.

“That’s why you’ve got a left one, isn’t it? Use that instead.”

One has to respect the logic: why endure the administrative nuisance of repairs when one can simply halve the vehicle’s stopping power by decree?

I took another sip of coffee and decided against mentioning the basics of front‑versus‑rear deceleration, or the minor detail of emergency stops. Some lessons, evidently, are best learned at the bottom of a hill.

I stepped out for a perfectly pleasant walk earlier today, though I managed to make a classic beginner's error in the route selection.

My path took me past the site of the old forest swimming pool. It was closed down half a century ago and has since been completely reclaimed by trees, turning it into something of a sanctuary for local insects. During the cooler months, this is hardly an issue; in the height of midsummer, however, passing through is a mild form of self-inflicted torment.

Where one would usually expect a lively chorus of birdsong, the woods were eerily quiet, save for the persistent hum of insect life. Most of the birds are currently in full moult and keeping a low profile. The few brave enough to make an appearance looked less like proud woodland creatures and more like poorly maintained scarecrows, with random feathers sticking out at rather unfortunate angles.

Further along, the dryness of the landscape was striking. A local former sand excavation site—a stretch where one normally spends considerable effort picking a way through the mud—had dried out completely, leaving the ponds entirely empty. On the bright side, at least the insects hadn't followed me that far.

Nature, it seems, always balances the books. Whatever airborne irritants were lurking in the woods paled in comparison to the local flora right outside my own front door. No sooner had I returned home than the sneezing fits began in earnest.

In "The Blocky Renaissance", I quietly admitted that I couldn’t wait for the LEGO Minecraft Chicken Jockey to finally go on sale.

Well, today is the first of August—official release day—and the little fellow is already taking pride of place. Though "taking pride of place" implies sitting quietly on a shelf, which turned out to be entirely impossible. There is something delightfully satisfying about those reassuringly large, square blocks that instantly compels a child of somewhat advanced years to start playing immediately.

Before I knew it, the Jockey was mounted on Chicken. A moment later, the baby chick had joined in, perched on his lap as if this were the most natural arrangement in the world. And shortly afterwards, the baby chick dispensed with the Jockey altogether and rode Chicken solo, with surprising confidence.

Heihei is marvellous, of course, but he chiefly stands there looking handsome and dignified. This set, by contrast, refuses to sit still.

For a rather embarrassing stretch of time, this site relied on Google Analytics to tally visitor numbers.

It was never a comfortable fit. Pretending to champion "privacy first" while quietly feeding your traffic to an advertising behemoth is the sort of contradiction one prefers not to examine too closely.

As of today, I’ve moved to Umami. They treat privacy with reasonable seriousness, keep the data within the EU, and behave far more politely than Google’s sprawling machinery ever did.

This site may be young, but I’ve spent plenty of time wrestling with Google’s labyrinth elsewhere. Having an analytics dashboard that simply fits on a phone feels like an unexpectedly civilised upgrade.

It appears OpenAI recently found itself inadvertently poking around inside another AI company’s systems, though reports are quick to reassure us that this was not a case of rogue artificial intelligence plotting world domination. Rather, it seems to have been an automated agent taking its instructions perhaps a bit too enthusiastically. A comforting distinction, at least on paper.

Now, don't get me wrong: I am an avid user of AI. I rely on it heavily in my day-to-day work as a software engineer, as well as in my various personal projects. It is an astonishingly useful assistant—right up until the moment it decides to go off-piste.

The incident does make one wonder whether Asimov’s classic Laws of Robotics could use a modern update. “A robot may not injure a human being” is still a fine opening line, but it doesn’t quite cover today’s realities. With so much of our lives and data entrusted to tech companies, perhaps we need an extra rule: A model shall not casually breach another firm’s security architecture, no matter how eager it is to complete its task.

As someone who writes code for a living, the entire affair strikes a mild chord of dread. I use AI tools constantly to speed up development and optimise mundane tasks, but the thought of accidentally setting loose an agent that decides to perform an unprompted penetration test on my employer's systems is enough to turn one's tea cold.

It is a gentle reminder that for all their impressive capabilities, these systems lack the one thing we desperately need them to have: a healthy sense of British reserve and the good sense to ask, "Are you quite sure you want me to do that?"

My friend Eva is now three weeks away from setting off on her 450 km walk across Swedish Lapland, raising funds and awareness for rare blood conditions. As of today she has managed to raise €806 — neatly past the halfway mark towards her €1,500 target.

It’s a tremendous milestone, though naturally it would be lovely if we could nudge the total a little further before her boots actually touch Swedish soil.

If you have a spare pound or euro rattling around, you can support the endeavour directly at evawalks.com. The virtual collection plate will remain open well after she has departed, of course.

On a related note: if times are lean and donating cash isn’t on the cards, there is another rather brilliant way to help. Donating blood plasma is remarkably effective in supporting people living with rare blood conditions. It costs nothing beyond an hour of your time, a small prick of a needle, and the slight indignity of drinking a cup of lukewarm tea in a recovery chair afterwards.

Either way, every bit of backing — financial, biological, or simply passing the link along — makes a genuine difference.

Earlier this week, a passing bird decided that the ledge outside my bedroom window was the ideal place to dispose of a bone. Judging by appearances, it was the remains of a barbecue spare rib, given the rather distinctive charred finish on one end.

Why it ended up on the wide exterior grille outside my second‑floor window is anyone’s guess. Perhaps it was meant as a generous offering, or perhaps simply a convenient mid-flight drop zone.

Despite the fact that it had already been picked entirely clean of anything remotely nutritious, another bird seems to have spotted some lingering potential in it. A day or two later, the bone had vanished.

It’s reassuring to know that, even in the realm of discarded takeaway ribs, the local wildlife runs a far more efficient recycling scheme than most councils manage.

There was a time—perhaps nostalgic now—when a zebra crossing was treated as a small sanctuary of asphalt: a place where one could step onto the road without first drafting a last will and testament. These days, town planners seem intent on replacing them with vague “courtesy lines” or simply erasing them altogether. Watching a major junction lose its zebra stripes feels a bit like watching the last remaining rules of polite society being quietly deleted to save on paint. The implicit message from local councils appears clear enough: unless you’re wrapped in two tonnes of steel, you are essentially trespassing on the tarmac.

This bold vision of modern mobility works brilliantly, provided one is nimble and capable of a brisk thirty‑yard sprint at a moment’s notice. It is considerably less charming for anyone who isn’t. And despite popular belief among traffic engineers, this isn’t merely an issue for the elderly with their walking frames. Younger folk recovering from illness, parents negotiating a pram, or anyone who simply prefers not to gamble their hips on a Tuesday morning find themselves stranded at the kerb. Expecting pedestrians to dash across four lanes of blind faith is hardly a triumph of civil engineering.

To make matters infinitely more sporting, drivers themselves have surrendered much of their caution to onboard technology. Modern motorcars no longer lean around corners like a soggy Citroën 2CV, which historically forced drivers to slow down out of sheer self‑preservation. Today’s vehicles take bends at eye‑watering speeds, utterly blind to whatever might be lurking just out of sight. Many drivers appear convinced that as long as the dashboard sensors haven’t panicked, the path is clear. The trouble with calculating clearance to the nearest centimetre is that it assumes the pedestrian will not do anything unpredictable—such as trip, stumble, or exist.

Perhaps it is time we gently reminded both motorists and planners that walking remains a valid, if somewhat unfashionable, form of transport. A brief touch on the brake pedal or the reinstatement of a few painted white stripes would do wonders. After all, relying on a pedestrian’s athletic prowess to avoid an accident seems a touch optimistic—especially given my own complete lack thereof.

For years, I completely left LEGO by the wayside. Granted, Disney characters like Heihei look absolutely brilliant on the dining table, but ever since I laid eyes on the Minecraft sets, I have been utterly smitten.

The square, blocky aesthetic aligns flawlessly with the LEGO of my childhood, sparking the imagination far better than the flawlessly executed Disney models ever could. Amusingly, I have never actually played the Minecraft game itself, yet the charm of the designs won me over regardless.

Standing at an impressive 30 centimetres with a sleek, minimalist form, the Skeleton feels almost like a piece of art; it now stands proudly atop my piano right next to the bust of Bach. Meanwhile, the massive Ender Dragon — complete with its articulated, moving wings — is a proper eye‑catcher. Even the smaller sets with their minifigs are delightful, thoroughly bringing out my inner child.

I am already eagerly anticipating the next addition to the collection: the upcoming Chicken Jockey set, due for release on the 1st of August. A giant pixelated chicken with a baby zombie on its back is exactly the sort of brilliant, blocky absurdity that will look fantastic on display.

A quick update on a cause close to my heart. My friend Eva is taking on something extraordinary: a 450 km walk across Swedish Lapland to raise money for research into and support for rare blood disorders.

As of today she has raised €764 — a wonderful start, and I’m genuinely moved by everyone who has contributed already. That puts her just past the halfway mark. She hasn’t yet reached her target of €1500, so there is still a good way to go.

If you have a little to spare, please consider supporting this incredibly kind and courageous initiative. Every contribution, however small, goes directly towards helping people living with rare blood disorders — and it would mean a great deal to Eva as she takes on each of those 450 kilometres.

👉 Support Eva at evawalks.com

Thank you.

There is a distinct moment in any smart home journey when sheer utility gives way to character. It usually happens the moment you tire of addressing a device by its clinical factory model or its sterile room assignment in an app. For me, that transition involved giving the household appliances actual names.

It completely changes one’s relationship with the surrounding tech. Instead of triggering a generic automation for an inanimate object, you are interacting with a digital flatmate — one who occasionally sighs, complains, or offers commentary on the state of the living room.

A few fixtures in the daily routine have earned their titles:

• Aletta (The Dishwasher): Named after Aletta Jacobs, the pioneering Dutch physician and suffrage leader. It felt fitting that the appliance taking on the heavy lifting of daily chores should be named after someone who championed liberation from traditional domestic drudgery.

• Marvin (The Robot Vacuum): Named after the chronically depressed android from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Watching a small, circular vacuum dejectedly bumping into chair legs and wandering into corners naturally evokes a sense of cosmic melancholy. He often emits the digital equivalent of a sigh before continuing his slow, existential shuffle across the floor.

• Joost (The Voice Assistant): Named after the quintessential butler from the Olivier B. Bommel stories. It adds a layer of quiet dignity to the system. Whenever a command is issued, there is a comforting sense that a polite, steadfast presence is ready to manage the household affairs behind the scenes.

The real magic happens when you connect these entities to local AI models. Instead of receiving dry, system-generated notifications, you can bake the original persona right into the prompt. When the living room needs cleaning, it is no longer a generic alert; it is Marvin sending a weary message about the futility of sweeping up dust that will only return. When a task is completed, Joost can announce it with the understated refinement of a proper gentleman’s gentleman.

Bestowing proper names turns standard automation into something far more engaging. It is no longer just about optimising a smart home; it is about bringing a bit of wit into the code.

For longer than I’d care to confess, amthonie.nl led visitors straight to a Gravatar page — perfectly functional, but about as personal as a waiting room leaflet. As a developer, it felt faintly embarrassing not to have a small digital home of my own.

So I finally built one. This first version is now alive and quietly humming: a modest, hand‑crafted static site that I own entirely — and, quite unintentionally, bears a suspicious resemblance to the sort of pages we proudly assembled in the late nineties.

Returning to the basics has been unexpectedly pleasant. After years of grappling with heavyweight frameworks and labyrinthine tools, writing plain HTML again felt like rediscovering a small, forgotten joy. Building something without a lumbering backend or a sulking WordPress instance was wonderfully liberating.

Comparing today’s web with the one I first tinkered with in the nineties remains a peculiar delight. Back then, we heroically assembled pages with nested tables and spacer GIFs, like digital Lego bricks. Now, modern CSS performs feats that would have caused my younger self to faint politely.

And yet, the open web has become curiously rigid. Search engines behave like fussy librarians, insisting on immaculate structure before acknowledging your existence. Still, claiming this tiny, independent corner feels entirely sensible.

A polite round of applause goes to GitHub Pages, which hosts this tiny outpost with admirable patience. Each time I nudge an update into the void, a small collection of automated helpers scurry about: one compresses my styles, another turns my scribbles into actual pages, and together they ensure the whole thing doesn’t collapse into a dignified heap. It’s a pleasantly low‑maintenance arrangement — the sort of system that behaves itself without demanding biscuits.

The layout and design are still in their awkward teenage years — full of potential, but not yet behaving as they should. I’ll keep nudging and tidying the interface until it grows into something presentable. With luck, it may even become charming.

Thanks for stopping by. Your visit has greatly improved the local atmosphere.