I had hoped to write about wire transfers for a while, since they’re fascinating and poorly understood. The sanctioning of Russia in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine has made some of the mechanics extremely topical. We'll return to the infrastructural bits again, but many people find themselves urgently wanting to understand what SWIFT does and does not do, and hopefully this will help.

On the other hand, by many quantitative metrics, software is still doing fine, and the whole UML exercise was only a minority pursuit at its peak.