The Beer Driven Devs

Matt takes Liam on a tour through the history of CPUs and GPUs — from the Amiga and Doom to shaders, CUDA, and $6,000 graphics cards. Along the way: why constraints drive innovation, how gaming hardware accidentally built the AI era, and why today's silicon kings might not hold their thrones forever.

Matt recaps SlashNEW Conference 2026, from his first scripted talk to standout sessions on automation, communication, change management, and the uncomfortable truth that AI isn't new problems, it's old ones on a new substrate.

Picking up the thread from last week, Matt and Liam try to pin down what 'enterprise' actually means — and unpack why so much of the perceived cost of bespoke software is really the cost of enterprise overhead that most small businesses don't need.

Matt and Liam pick apart the persistent myth that custom software is only for big enterprises. From SMB access to risk, lock-in, and the manufacturing roots of enterprise software, they argue that bespoke isn't the dangerous option — homogenising your business to fit someone else's product is.

Matt and Liam unpack the EuroOffice scramble, the US CLOUD Act, and what data sovereignty actually means in 2026. It's a tour through Sun, Oracle, LibreOffice, the Microsoft Ireland case, and the uncomfortable questions every consultant should be asking about where their clients' data really lives.

Matt and Liam dig into Anthropic's unreleased Mythos model and the security implications everyone's talking about — then pull back the lens on AI hype cycles, data de-anonymisation, and whether we're sleepwalking through the biggest privacy breach in history.

Matt finally snaps. After a faulty GPU, a laptop that keeps rebooting itself, and a pre-installed audio driver that hides in System32 and reinstalls itself after every Windows Update, the only sensible move is nuclear — wipe the drive and switch to Linux. A deeply personal saga of hardware woes, vendor frustration, and one very stubborn rootkit.

Matt finally gets to debrief on .NET MAUI Day London — meeting the team in person, the talks that blew the room away, and why .NET 10 has him genuinely excited about mobile again. Plus: Liam's fully agentic AI game studio, and Matt's vibe-coded YouTube filter that may or may not be called the Fluff Slicer.

An AI agent submits a pull request, gets rejected, and publishes a hit piece. We unpack what happened, what it means for open source, and whether software engineers still have a job in 2026.

In this episode, Matt and Liam talk about hype cycles in modern tooling, using AI and Aspire as examples of what happens when tools are used outside their intended context. They explore why frustration often comes from misaligned expectations rather than broken technology.

A deeper follow-up to our earlier JavaScript discussions, this episode digs into why the ecosystem keeps tripping over the same problems. We unpack supply-chain risk, package culture, governance gaps, and the uncomfortable truth that some issues aren’t technical at all: they’re cultural. JavaScript isn’t going away, but that doesn’t mean it should remain the default foundation for everything we bu...

Matt and Liam debate whether AI is making software better or just faster, exploring how AI impacts developer workflows, platform quality, and the real value it brings to people versus companies. A candid discussion on tech debt, productivity, and what we actually want from our tools.

A reflective end-of-year conversation about decency, responsibility, and the small choices that quietly shape our workplaces and communities.

The Beer Driven Devs attended ADAConf again, this time with Matt presenting. In this episode Liam and Matt reflect on what they learned about change at this year's conference.

Matt and Liam unpack the stubborn stereotype of the socially inept specialist, how it still shapes expectations today, and why great leadership has nothing to do with whether you can code — and everything to do with how much you care.

This week Matt introduces Cabinet — a lightweight, encrypted offline data store for .NET apps — and shares the story, design decisions, and trade-offs behind it.

Matt and Liam share how they actually use AI day-to-day—from code assistants to creative projects—and explore whether AI is really coming for our jobs, or just changing what those jobs look like.

Matt and Liam pull apart the reflex to start with tables and let an ORM shape your code. We talk aggregates, normalisation vs denormalisation, many-to-many pain, and when a document or relational store actually fits the job.

We keep using these words—agile, governance, risk, contracts—but do they mean what we think they mean? This episode digs into the trouble with shared language and mismatched definitions.

The recent nx exploit grabbed a lot of attention for using a novel AI prompt injection attack. This episode unpacks what happened, the dangers of blind trust, and some ways to minimise risk.

Matt and Liam are joined by Jimmy Bogard for a deep dive into the ethics and commercials of maintaining sustainable open-source software in the .NET ecosystem.

In this episode, we explore the impact of interruptions on deep work and productivity, discussing the hidden costs of meetings and the importance of maintaining focus.

Why do we keep getting estimates wrong? We explore the psychology behind estimation, planning fallacies, and the real reasons tasks feel harder than they should.

In Part 2 of our chat with Ulysses Maclaren, we dive deeper into AI, agency, and the big existential questions — with plenty of laughs along the way.