The Books
€35 EUR for PDF and EPUB.
Software projects keep failing, not because we don’t have the right team or tools but because our software development system is broken. Out of the Software Crisis is a guide to fixing your software projects with systems-thinking making them more resilient to change and less likely to fail.
€10 EUR for the ebook-only version, PDF and EPUB.
Yellow is a short ebook (around 90 pages).
In it, I outline some of the core principles that drive my work using casual and approachable language, even when I’m covering potentially complex topics such as Gall’s Law or loose coupling.
€10+ EUR for PDF and EPUB.
Twenty-five years of writing on digital transformation, digital publishing, innovation, and software development
€35 EUR for PDF and EPUB.
What are the major risks to avoid with generative AI? How do you avoid having it blow up in your face? Is that even possible?
The Intelligence Illusion (Second Edition) is an exhaustively researched guide to the risks of language and diffusion models.
Hi, I'm Baldur Bjarnason, and I'm available for consulting and web dev work
I’ve been making websites for over twenty-five years, working as a web developer (front-end, back-end, or full-stack) for both companies and charities, small and large, in a variety of programming languages.
I’ve written two books, a course, and a video series on topics related to software development and have been writing about web development online for years.
My preference and primary expertise these days is concentrated on web languages: CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. My JS experience covers Node, Deno, and the Browser, both with frameworks or without.
Projects and code I’ve worked on are being used in production on a number of ecommerce and business sites across the world.
I strongly prefer non-framework solutions – not because I can’t but because standard JS is usually the most cost-effective and efficient approach for most web software projects.
You can find me online at Bluesky, Mastodon, this blog, or my newsletter.
Email me to see how I can help you.
This site has three main sections:
I try to publish the essays on, roughly, a weekly schedule, and they are what I send out to the newsletter. (So, if you’re subscribed to one of this site’s feed, you don’t need to subscribe to the newsletter.) The notes are published more sporadically and I usually only include them as links in the newsletter.
If you want to follow everything on this site, I recommend the main feed, but I also offer feeds for each individual section. You can find all the feeds listed on the feeds page.
Latest 5 Essays
- Feedback loops, 'AI', learning, and management
- Hitchcock's Notorious, Defence in Depth, and the weakness of Nazis
- My Mother's Advice on How to be a Great YouTuber
- AI and Esoteric Fascism
- Poisoning for propaganda: rising authoritarianism makes LLMs more dangerous
Latest 3 Coding Notes
Latest 5 Notes
- Cat and Raven Photos (31 March 2025)
- Anti-terrorist spy movies, the end of James Bond, and remembering my grandfather
- Spy media as commentary on society: Callan, The Equalizer, Danger Man, The Prisoner
- Switching my pricing to Euro, but also making it tax-inclusive
- Now I'm disappointed.
23 more notes can be found in the notes archive.