About

About the Author

I’m Pete Griffiths. I’ve been writing and designing software for around 25 years, mostly around high-traffic systems, performance and codebases people have to live with for a long time.

I spent 19 years at bet365, working across the website, In-Play software, mobile apps, API platform, and internal frameworks. A lot of that was being responsible for the renowned performance of the site, user experience and our ability to deliver quickly. These days I’m at Superbet.

Why unpopular opinions?

This is not really an attempt to be contrarian for clicks. The name is more a nod to the way experience changes your relationship with trends. After enough years, you start to notice when accepted wisdom is useful, when it is theatre, and when it is just making everyone’s life harder.

Sometimes that comes from hyper-normalisation of a particular mindset. Sometimes it is just a lack of historical context. Either way, I think it is worth writing down the things that feel true after living with the consequences for a while.

I’m not claiming to be right about all of it. My engineering agenda leans heavily toward performance, simplicity, and reducing the amount of investigation people have to do to understand a system. That does not always line up neatly with popular opinion, which is probably why it belongs here.