Disconnect on Holiday

Wed 10 September 2025

A timely topic, as I'm writing this on the plane back from my latest trip: When you go on holiday, don’t check your work email, disable all notifications, just disconnect completely. Not just for your own mental health - many people have covered that extensively - but also to test the resilience of your work projects.

It’s easy to argue about bus factors, but nothing clarifies the situation better than going off grid for two weeks. Can your colleagues add new features, fix bugs with ease? Or do they start wishing for you to come back, try to contact ...

Joining Anthropic

Mon 28 October 2024

I'm excited to announce that I'm joining Anthropic, starting this week! I'm honoured to be joining such a capable and kind group of people, who I've long admired - Claude was the first LLM that I found myself consistently using. Recently I've been really blown away by Artifacts and Computer Use, and the consistent improvements in Claude's skills.

I've also been incredibly lucky to be part of an amazing journey at Google DeepMind for the past 10 years, where I got to work on more exciting projects than I would have ever dreamed of: the saga from AlphaGo to ...

Being Productive

Fri 13 September 2024

Recently I was asked which habits and practices were the secret to my productivity. I figured my answers might be of wider interest. Let me know what works for you!

Why should you listen to my advice? Aside from my papers, in each year of the past decade I've authored ~1k pull requests with ~200k LoC of deltas, with a similar number reviewed:

You can tell when I'm on holiday :)

Learning

My first recommendation is to learn as much as possible, about the entire stack you work with - in AI, ...

Work Rules!

Mon 03 October 2016

Work Rules! is the title of a great book by Laszlo Bock, SVP of People Operations at Google.

It's a pretty accurate portrait of life at Google (at least from what I've seen over the last three years), and at the same time it is a great guidebook for companies that haven't yet come as far along the path of employee empowerment.

If you are in any way involved with work - be it employer or employee - this is a must read, with lots of practical advice on how to improve your organization (and your life!). It ...