All views are my own...
-
Was VS Code peak IDE?
Visual Studio Code changed the game for me, and this documentary feels like a fitting tribute to it: My programming journey started in a BBC Micro at school. Then, out of necessity to play early PC games, I became proficient at editing CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT. If that sentence means nothing to you, look up 640K…
-
The BMW i3 Was Braver Than It Needed to Be
Why I’m Writing More About Cars One of my goals this year was simple: write more. Not because I want to become a motoring journalist, but because I enjoy the process of reflecting on the cars I’m lucky enough to drive and own. Writing forces me to think more deeply about why certain cars resonate,…
Posted in Cars -
Never Meet Your Heroes? Driving the Porsche 997.2 GT3 RS 3.8
Every so often you get a proper “pinch me” day. Thanks to a generous friend, after years of obsessing over the 997.2 GT3 RS 3.8, I finally got to drive one. One of my goals this year is to write more. Another is to drive more. I’m hoping those two things complement each other. If you’ve…
Posted in Cars -
The Bottleneck Moved: An H1 2026 Update
The bottleneck moved The week after Agile on the Beach was an odd one. One day I was supporting our CPO with the board pack, pulling together the engineering story: six months of delivery, tidied into charts. Another I took off to spend at my friends’ company, helping them work out how to adopt AI, with the…
-
AI Needs Human Guardrails Too
After my talk at Agile on the Beach 2026, a Software Engineer Leader from John Lewis & Partners came over with a question I wasn’t expecting. He didn’t ask which model we use, whether we prefer Cursor or Claude Code, or which MCP servers I’d recommend. He asked about the AI framework I’d mentioned almost in passing. Could I…
-
Acceleration (Boooost), Confidence and Defence
A few months ago I shared our Q1 AI update and, more recently, some thoughts on our new PDP release at Collecting Cars. Looking back, both stories were really about the same thing. A relatively small engineering team shipping more than I would have thought possible even a year ago. At the time, the conversation…
-
PDPv2 “The Money Page” Released
This week we released PDPv2. Our NextJS Product Display Page. The show me the money page! You can see it for yourself on Collecting Cars and Watch Collecting. The most critical page on the platform. The page where excitement peaks, auctions end, bids fly in, and reliability matters most. If this page fails, we lose revenue,…
-
AI First Q1 2026 Summary
Foundations To Outcomes A page refresh that took ten weeks in the last iteration took under a week this quarter. Same team. Same headcount. Different way of working. I lead a team of 7 engineers, a data engineer, and a DevOps specialist at The Collecting Group. In Q1 we shifted AI impact across our codebase…
-
AOTB Fireside Follow-up
A fireside follow-up, and the bits I wanted to underline I recently did a fireside chat follow-up to my AOTB 2025 AMA talk. It was meant to be simple. A few questions, a few stories, a bit of reality from the last 6 to 12 months. What I didn’t expect was how clearly a few…
-
Back at Collecting Cars
In October 2025 I left Collecting Cars to try something new. Four months later, I’m back. The other role didn’t land how I’d hoped, and in that time I realised how much I missed what we have here: the team, the platform, and yes, the cars. I’ve rejoined as Head of Engineering. Thank you to…
Olly Brand 