Life log

Mostly harmless

By Chris Williams

The vulture gets a new set of feathers

Yesterday, The Register, the enterprise IT publication I spent years editing while managing a crew of writers, unveiled a substantial redesign.

While the near-thirty-year-old publication has iterated on its design in the past (a quick search reminded me of a 2018 layout trial), this is easily the biggest departure in recent memory. They've moved away from the usual rigid, aligned rows of content that defined El Reg for ages in favor of a much more free-flowing layout.

It has clear hero content at the top to read first that's engaging, then sections of special interest amid a flood of news. There's a navigation bar along the top again that makes it plain to visitors what this publication is all about. Data centers, security, software developers, open source, and more.

The sister sites The Next Platform, Blocks and Files, and DevClass have undergone similar redesigns at the same time.

The plumbing and the pivot

I’ll leave it to the Reg team to tell the full story behind why the change happened now. Suffice it to say, when you’re dealing with a publication this size, the visual shift is often just the tip of the iceberg; the real work is usually happening in the plumbing below.

I was involved in the early planning for this redesign, before I left in 2025, though the current team pretty much did all the work. I like that they've made bold changes and broken out of the mold of previous years. It signals the publication is willing to take risks and evolve.

Let's take a quick wander down memory lane and remember how the site used to look:

  • Back in 2000, which is about when I started to read the site, it had the same kind of free-flowing columns it now has albeit with a simpler aesthetic.
  • It still wasn't lined up in 2002.
  • In 2005, it moved to the fixed rows that it held onto for years.
  • By 2009, it had honed the three-column, fixed-row layout it would become known for. I joined in 2011 when it looked like this.
  • By the mid-2010s, it gained a dominating hero box at the top to direct readers' attention, while keeping the fixed layout.
  • By 2021, the site had moved to a dot-com and switched to four columns of fixed rows.
  • And as I was handing in my badge and notepad, the site looked like this. It had a four-column layout that broke for ads and special sections that highlighted in-depth pieces and hands-on guides.

And that takes us to today's four-column layout that's a combination of the 2000-era free-flowing approach with the 2020 era's big hero boxes and special sections. Remember that a lot of traffic to El Reg came through the front door out of loyalty, and that's a luxury that most online publications don't have. It meant the name of the game was to direct these homepage seekers to where we thought they ought to start but still give them a menu of options of other cool articles to read. Whenever we heard the phrase, "the homepage is dead," we'd laugh into our martinis.

Thick skin and a sliver of advice

To the team: keep at it. Redesigning a site with a non-trivial readership as informed, engaged, and... let's say opinionated... as El Reg’s requires a very thick skin. Looking at the early forum feedback, it seems the traditional "everything was better in 1998" crowd is out in full force, complaining about the lack of a grid structure on the homepage even though in 1998 the site had unaligned rows. Maybe everyone got used to the grid.

My advice? Hold your ground. It’s important to try something new, even if it ruffles a few feathers. The soul of the site — the info-dense, fast-loading, acerbic core — is still there. I can imagine there will be some tweaks over the coming weeks, as any redesign goes through. Revisiting some of the heading sizes and styling, and perhaps going easy on some of the rectangles and borders, may be all it takes to polish the new look.

If anyone's really upset with the layout, just browse the archive page which has the earlier fixed-row layout.

Some recent reads

Since we're talking about El Reg and its stablemates, here are just a few articles that I’ve particularly enjoyed in the past few days:

By Chris Williams

Of OS dev, hedgehogs, and RISC OS

I spend my day job witnessing planet-scale infrastructure and thining about its users, so naturally, in my off-hours, my brain decides it's the perfect time to think about local MMU page table setups and retro computing.

AI-assisted OS development

If you've been even casually browsing the latest crop of AI-generated hobby operating systems popping up on Reddit's /r/osdev, you might think whipping up an OS is now just a matter of thinking back to your first time using DOS or Linux, and then prompting a language model nicely.

I get it: I've always wanted to peer inside seemingly forbidden or daunting systems, like operating system kernels or games console firmware and hardware. When you find out how it all works, you feel compelled to replicate it for yourself one way or another.

As copy.fail (CVE-2026-31431) helpfully reminds us, though, writing an OS remains objectively tricky, assuming you want to do it right.

Getting CPU segmentation and page table set up correctly is a mysterious art, and the authors of these shiny new AI-ghost-written kernels, let alone the developers of today's mature kernels, need to worry all the time about security and edge cases. I mean, the mighty, battle-hardened Linux kernel can still fall victim to local privilege-escalation bugs, so your weekend project just might have a hole big enough to drive a virtual truck through.

I don't mean that as a harsh criticism or dissuasion. Far from it: I wish more people understood how microprocessors and operating systems work and the security mechanisms they depend upon. I think these AI-assisted projects are a potentially fantastic way to learn.

That said, security is still something to take seriously, even when we're just building things for ourselves, our friends, or our communities.

Retro computing

Speaking of doing things the hard way, I have to hand it to Reassembler for getting Sonic the Hedgehog running on Amiga hardware. Seeing as the Amiga is bitplane-based, which I've never fully gotten my head around, getting sprite-based Sonic running on it is no small feat.

Also hat tip to Displaced Gamers for their breakdown of Final Fantasy's combat system for the Famicom and the NES. The original game was completely playable, arguably groundbreaking, but bug-ridden.

Not surprising since it was basically one programmer cranking out 6502 assembly on a deadline. That developer is Nasir Gebelli, who recently resurfaced. I recommend checking out the 1998 and 2017 interviews with John "id Software" Romero and Nasir. The interviews are fascinating.

RISC OS

And then there's Gerph, who is out there modernizing RISC OS development and bringing the original Arm-based OS to 64-bit. It's inspiring stuff, and a good reminder that there are still interesting things happening in the world of OS dev.

For more information, see his Pyromaniac project. I should do a more in-depth look at this OS soon.

By Chris Williams

The path to Big Tech

Right off the bat, I want to say I don't speak for Google in any way, shape, or form. I'm just a guy with a keyboard, an internet connection, and some opinions.

It’s been so peculiar working on the inside after years of looking in as a journalist, especially now with the spectacle of Google Cloud Next 2026 in full swing as I type this.

I mean that in the best way possible. Call me biased, and you should, but Google is a fantastic place to be; there are so many smart people tackling planet-scale problems. I’ve been here just shy of a year, and the learning curve is still vertical.

Where it all began

I took a rather circuitous route to get here. I graduated from the University of Warwick in the UK with a master's degree in electronics engineering, could write code as well as design circuits, and did some work in the embedded space. But being young and impatient, I caught the journalism bug, and left hardware design behind. The website I built for my university's student newspaper, The Boar, won a national award. I also edited the Drobe website that covered Arm systems before they were cool. I later worked in newspapers as a reporter and then as a production journalist, editing copy and laying out pages including special editions covering the 2011 England riots.

Life as an IT journalist

Then I found the perfect intersection of news and technology: I joined The Register, a UK-based IT news publication that has long been known for its acerbic take on all things enterprise IT and software development. We always advocated for our tens of millions of readers, the customers of the Big Tech vendors, rather than cheerleading the industry, and strived to be technical, practical, and entertaining. I kept in touch with tech by writing open-source software, speaking to engineers about their work, and using the tools our readers used.

Joining the Big Tech tent

I left The Reg as its editor-in-chief in 2025 to join Google as a technical editor, where again the focus is on making sure users as well as their AI agents have access to the best information they can get to build the products and services they need. I've been living full-time in San Francisco since 2014.

While in media, I kept a lid on my personal opinions, and any professional views I had, I'd express through the pages I was editing and overseeing. Now I'm out of the publishing game, I'll be using this space to air my thoughts on the industry, the technology, and the people building it. And, from time to time, my thoughts on life outside of Big Tech.

This post was quite long but in future, I'll keep it mostly short and snappy.