AI, WordPress hacks and island life – notes from 17th June 2026
Posted by Paul Silver
On the 17th June, twelve freelancers got together in the beer garden of the Battle of Trafalgar to talk all things tech, self employment and a fair amount of random nonsense. This was the evening of the first England game in the (men’s) World Cup 2026, so I was surprised so many people came along.
This is some of what we talked about:
- Timing AI training with renewable electricity production
- Dealing with a bad and ongoing WordPress hack
- Don’t have a bare metal server if you don’t have a decent sysadmin
- Make sure your forgotten password system actually works
- Using full English words for class and method names helps keep an LLM on track
- Interviewing to go full time
- Getting through 50k Claude tokens in 10 minutes
- Calming down clients worried about Mythos
- Is there football on?
- Handling other people’s moving around your own work
- Experiences living on a small island
- Getting through *big* waves
- Sport in hot conditions
- F1 – Hamilton win! (first driver to do in their 20s, 30s and 40s)
- The design of North German toilets
- Filtering Trump from social media