No character means as much to me as Jean-Luc Picard. I realised quite young that religion didn’t work for me, and Picard became my moral compass. Thank you, Sir Patrick, for bringing him to life for me and so many others, and for always respecting what he meant to us.
Rob Gough
Fractional CTO in Manchester. I help founders and companies make sound technical decisions — what to build, who to hire, and what to actually do about AI.
I also design, build and run my own products, and I write about all of it.
Open to new clients. → How I can help
Consulting
Fractional CTO work for founders and teams who need senior technical judgment, not a full-time hire.
What I do →Projects
Products I design, build and run solo — StayUpfront, Dictator, Weighted Down, Shot and Tell, Belfry. The day job that keeps the consulting advice grounded.
See what I've built →Writing
Code, products, weight, and whatever else is on my mind — the blog goes back to 2022.
Read the blog →Recent writing
Recent notes
Worth it for the glowing apple icon. So glad that's back! Shame there's no FaceID, 5G, or an all-around folding display ("tablet mode"). That said, the current design is pretty great, looks like it's been trimmed a bit but otherwise largely the same. That's a good thing. #MacBookPro #Apple
Easy to point and laugh at PHP last week.
But the real lesson isn't about PHP. The same week:
- A bug in the Brotli compression library meant urgent patches for Node.js, Python, Bun and Envoy
- Ruby shipped fixes for regex bugs that GitLab found could be turned into remote code execution
- A poisoned LiteLLM release turned up on PyPI
- Browsers blocked eight eMudhra certificate authorities after their private keys were compromised
Whatever your stack, at some point a serious vulnerability will turn up in something you depend on. It's all but inevitable. Amazon spotted attackers trying the PHP bug four days before the fix was public.
Security moves fast now. Taking precautions still matters, but it's just as critical that you can roll out a fix the moment one drops. That means keeping an eye on dependency updates, staying on the latest versions of your libraries, CI that actually works, tests you trust, and deploys that stay boring even when your site is under load.
I'd argue you should always have had these in place. Now they're a must-have.
Got a technical decision you'd like a second opinion on? hello@robgough.net