From being slightly disappointed to be handed the keys to earning second place on my list of all-time favourite cars. The BMW E46 M3 CSL completely recalibrated my expectations. Twenty years old and still capable of embarrassing far more exotic machinery, it’s a reminder that outright power and performance figures only tell part of the … Continue reading BMW M3 CSL: What’s all the fuss about?
Is the E92 M3 an oxymoron? It is heavy, but agile. Stable, but playful. Frenetic, but confidence-inspiring. Mechanical, with a dual-clutch gearbox. A Clubsport spec E92, a road trip to the Nürburgring and a few laps of the Nordschleife gave me the chance to find out. Would I still choose a manual one? https://collectingcars.com/articles/bmw-e92-the-oxymoron-m3
Visual Studio Code changed the game for me, and this documentary feels like a fitting tribute to it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHL3XzjpT5w 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 … Continue reading Was VS Code peak IDE?
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, … Continue reading The BMW i3 Was Braver Than It Needed to Be
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 … Continue reading Never Meet Your Heroes? Driving the Porsche 997.2 GT3 RS 3.8
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 … Continue reading The Bottleneck Moved: An H1 2026 Update
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 … Continue reading AI Needs Human Guardrails Too
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 … Continue reading Acceleration (Boooost), Confidence and Defence
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, … Continue reading PDPv2 “The Money Page” Released
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 … Continue reading AI First Q1 2026 Summary
