Recent content on aaron fas


 These are the most recent articles from the blogs/sites I follow. Updated daily. 

 2026-08-16 
 
 
 dahlstrand.net 
 
 

 2026-08-15 
 
 
 dahlstrand.net 
 
 
 The new funnel, part 2 www.robinsloan.com 
 
 
 Northern Gannet simonwillison.net 
 
 
 Weeknotes: Aug. 8-14, 2026 tracydurnell.com 
 
…
Hey 👋, 
 AI is everywhere, and we (developers) are going crazy automating everything with skills. 
 But do you know what’s missing? Evaluations. 
 What’s an evaluation? 
 “Evaluation” (or eval for short) is the fancy name given to an automated test for your prompts. 
 If you have implemented any AI feature, you most likely have some prompts that you…
Main benefits of AI? Processing huge amounts of (relevant) data and trying things that a human would never bother trying. 

Today was Easter Monday and we had some “torrà” (bbq) at my parents’ country house. We decided to walk there from the city. It was 20 minutes of nature and interesting sounds and views. Orange trees looked like it had just snowed but fragrance was obviously of spring. I tend to say my favorite season is winter, but I might be changing because I am enjoying spring and autumn more…
Hey, hey, hey 👋 
 Let’s celebrate together the brand new redesign 🎉 
 Do you know what was the goal for the redesign? Simplification. I replaced the theme with something easier to manipulate. Thanks for all these years, manis 🫡. 
 
 📖 Internally the theme I made was nicknamed 'ximple' . 
 
 I don’t plan to update it drastically, but I do plan to evolve it.…
Over a month without junk. Maybe it was never about the quality of the articles? Or maybe it was, because here I am after all. Writing. And this would’ve never been a proper post. 
 But since I’m already here let’s roll with it… These past weeks I’ve been doing a bunch of different things. I’ve bought and started refurbishing some old Game Boys (I will post…
That moment when an old game makes you think unexpectedly deep. It’s so fun replaying Animal Crossing in my refurbished Nintendo DS Lite. 

Is AI induced fatigue a thing? I am starting to feel it. AI is making everything faster and more intense. At first I got really excited with how much I could achieve, but now it’s starting to revert. It makes sense, the Goldilocks effect is a thing after all. At first AI was good just for very basic stuff, and this basic stuff is usually boring, but now? Now it’s getting better and…
Yesterday I was helping a friend get their flashcart working on their GBA modded with an IPS panel. In case anyone on the internet ends up in the same situation with low quality audio and glitched textures: you need to buy a proper flashcart. Ideally an Everdrive or EZ Flash Omega DE. Full stop. It’s kind of expensive, but that’s the only way for GBAs (specially with motherboard 02) to…
I am starting my new junk section. Expect junk and chaotic stuff in here! (ʘ‿ʘ)╯
Hey 👋 
 I use a git repo as my personal wiki. I’ve written about this setup before : Vim (Neovim) on my computer, and recently I started using Obsidian + GitSync on my phone. It works surprisingly well, except for one thing that’s been driving me crazy. 
 Every time I sync from my phone , a script I use to generate the diary pages loses its executable permission . 
 After…
Hey 👋 
 Last week I did something I never thought I’d do: I built a feature in an iOS app. 
 Some context: I’m a web developer. Backend preference. I’ve never touched Swift, never opened Xcode with intent, and definitely never worked on the Clay codebase (our internal iOS app at Automattic). 
 But I had an experiment in mind: how far can AI take me in completely…
Hey 👋 
 I was doing the dishes the other day and I had this realization. 
 We are not going back. 
 I don’t think we will ever go back to how we used to program. And it happened so fast that I didn’t even notice when it happened. 
 One day I was writing code. The next day I was… still writing code, but with AI. And then at some point it flipped. Now I’m…
Hey 👋 
 I’ve been using vimwiki for years and there’s one thing that’s been bugging me the entire time. 
 You know when you select text in visual mode, hit Enter, and it becomes a markdown link? Well, mine weren’t that pretty. 
 When I’d select “Article: How to Buy a House” and press Enter, vimwiki would create: 
 [ Article: How to Buy a…
Hey 👋, 
 Last year I decided to reuse an old MacBook (early 2011) as a home server. 
 I installed a Linux distro (Ubuntu server) and added a couple of hard drives via USB. 
 The main purpose of it was to use it as some torrent box. After a quick investigation I installed qbittorrent-nox . 
 
 📝 qbittorrent-nox is a version of qBittorrent without X interface . 
 
 The…
I run all my webapps in a single Digital Ocean (link with referral) droplet (their fancy word for VPS). 
 When I started I had some issues: with builds requiring more memory and how to monitor a Dokku server to diagnose instabilities. 
 At some point my server randomly froze (and as such all my apps became suddenly unavailable). This is what I did to fix it . 
 The Problem 
 The…
Hey 👋, 
 inspired by this RSS Server Side Reader idea I created my own within Hugo. 
 Find it at /reader ! 
 Why? 
 For the last year, I have been trying to find interesting blogs to follow. Every time I found one I added it to Feedly. That was nice, but if I didn’t check it in a while content would pile up. 
 After reading the aforementioned post, I thought that was a…
Hello 👋, 
 if you know me you know that I like Pokémon . But what’s surprising is that there hasn’t been any mention to it in my website until now! :D 
 Recently I visited Japan (my favorite destination ❤️ ), and while being there I challenged myself to get the 151 Pokémon cards from the first generation . 
 I succeeded 🎉! And to be honest it was easier than I…
Hey 👋, 
 I want to publish more. 
 It is not that I don’t write, I write a lot in my personal notes and at work. But I rarely publish anything. 
 For a long time I justified it to myself as “not having anything worthy to write/say”. And it was true to a point. But it is not anymore, since long ago I started writing drafts whenever the tiniest of the ideas crossed my…
Hey 👋, 
 For a project I’ve been working on recently I had to allow requests that took longer than 30s to complete. 
 I did my tests in local and everything worked, but when I went into my production server (using dokku): “503 Service Unavailable” 
 <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC '-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN'>
<html><head>
<title>503 Service…
Hey 👋, 
 I have been using Git for a long time, but never really focused on doing smaller commits until three years ago. When I joined Automattic . 
 I think there is a healthy obsession on doing granular commits with meaningful descriptions. 
 Since then, I have become much more conscious about doing just the change I have in mind, and working step by step. With a clear vision on why…
Hey, 
 I have been reading and growing interest (no pun intended) on the digital gardening concept. 
 One of the key ideas I liked is that content is heavily interconnected. It makes sense, right? We are on the internet after all. Hyperlinks are great 🔥! 
 What follows is a quick overview on how I added backlinks to my Hugo site. 
 What are backlinks? 
 Basically it is a link…
Hey,
I’ve become comfortable with a specific setup for my personal projects. But realized that I ended up repeating many things on the backend. 
 I decided to create a single API (instance) to share between them. 
 My usual setup for personal projects 
 As a web developer I am, more often than not these projects are some kind of webapp. 
 I usually structure them by…
Hey, 
 I found Andy Matuschak’s notes about taking notes (kind of meta hehe) super interesting. 
 But I was delighted by the interface his notes use to navigate. Go click on the link above and click on some of the links on the page to see what I mean. 
 So simple, yet so powerful! I didn’t know until now that I have always wanted this for my notes . 
 My current setup…
Hey 👋,
if you want to monitor the resources in your Dokku server you are in the right place. 
 The last few days I had some CPU peaks that triggered some alerts in my DigitalOcean server. I didn’t know the source of this and I was surprised that I was basically blind to the resources that each of my Dokku apps were consuming. 
 I reached out to the Dokku Discord and it was clear…
Hey 👋, 
 recently I was working on Numynums and wanted to align three div to the center of the page in a very specific way. 
 
 Example of three divs aligned to the center . 
 As you can see above, the = symbol is exactly in the middle of the page. And the other two, are to the left and right of the = symbol. 
 It took longer than I expected, and I learnt something new so..…
Hey 👋, 
 I think I have never mentioned it in here but I am a vimwiki user for a long time now. 
 Normally I use it from a single computer and I have had a cronjob that automatically does a commit and push every hour. 
 That was enough, but recently I am using a secondary computer and I have seen an hour was not frequent enough. 
 I changed it to run every minute, but I starting…
Hey 👋, 
 recently I challenged myself to recover a project that was abandoned for a while: NumyNums . 
 It was a simple game built around 2014 (wow… 10 years already!) that I used as an experiment for another project of mine: WebWrapp . 
 So I rewrote the game, using React this time, and uploaded it to https://numynums.com (which I had to re-buy since it expired long ago).…
Hey 👋, 
 this is a quick update: this year I am participating in Advent of Code . 
 Who knows if I will complete it, but for the moment I am consistently solving the puzzles every day. 
 My solutions are written in PHP . Initially I wanted to do really elegant solutions, but now I am happy with just solving the puzzles :smile: 
 
 ⚠️ The repository below contains my actual…
Hey, 
 this is not my usual article in this blog. It’s less technical and much more abstract than usual. Consider yourself warned. 
 Today I just stopped for a moment and thought. Did nothing else, just tried to consciously think. 
 This was after I found on twitter an image which basically gave three advises: 
 
 When you are confused, write. 
 When you are anxious,…
Hey 👋, 
 if you are reading this it might be because you are a little bit confused about when to use if and when to use a while and what’s the difference between them. 
 If that’s the case, keep reading. 
 Story time 
 Some years ago I was helping a first-year Computer Science student with some programming tasks. 
 One of the main reasons she kept failing and…
Hey 👋, 
 recently I have been trying to figure out why my site was not ranking very well for my own name. 
 A friend of mine suggested to check my site in ahrefs . 
 I had a pretty decent ranking (92%)… but I saw something strange with my canonical url: I was not redirect www to non-www . 
 How to redirect www to non-www using Dokku 
 After a couple of quick Google…
Hey 👋, 
 long time ago I decided I was done with my shared hosting and wanted something new. 
 I wanted the solution to be able to run on a cheap VPS at DigitalOcean (link with referral). 
 I promise I plan to write a post about “how to migrate a site”, but I had this in draft first :) 
 What was my motivation? 
 As I said, I will go into more details about why I…
Hey, 
 I have been facing an issue with a Whatsapp bot I have running in Dokku (more on this in a next article!). 
 The node app got consistently stuck after every deploy. So I needed to restart the app manually after every deploy. 
 The app was actually starting, but the actual bot didn’t initialise correctly. 
 To restart the app I had to ssh into the Dokku server and run:…
Hey 👋, 
 recently I gave GPT-4 it’s own web page . And this is the article with the results of the experiment and why I decided to pause it. 
 I was consistently updating the site every 24h for around three consecutive weeks . 
 Then I got bored and stopped. 
 Psst! , if you want to see the whole conversation review the commit messages in the repository. For example, check…
Hey 👋, 
 as you might know I have been using GPT-3 and ChatGPT recently. 
 After my previous test I decided to purchase a ChatGPT Plus subscription to be able to access GPT-4 as soon as possible and compare the results obtained with GPT-3 with the ones that GPT-4 would provide. 
 So I started thinking on a small project that I could ask GPT-4 to implement, and then… What if I…
Hey 👋, 
 Like many others I have been experimenting a lot with GPT (and ChatGPT) recently and yesterday GPT-4 was announced. 
 I felt inspired by the demo they presented and decided to give it a try. 
 I thought that using the “old” GPT-3.5 would be a nice idea so I had a baseline to compare with. 
 Deciding the project was easy since I had this idea in my mind for a…
Hey 👋,
recently I wanted to play with GitHub Actions and this blog (upcoming post :eyes:) and I realised that I had this repository still in Bitbucket. 
 So I decided to migrate the Git repository from Bitbucket to GitHub. 
 Here’s what I needed to do: 
 
 Made a fresh new clone of my Bitbucket repository to a new localtion 
 
 git clone --mirror…
Hey 👋, 
 recently I was in a hurry and I ended up usingthe traditional MAMP tool for macOS for a personal project. 
 This project involved sending emails, and I wanted to test what I was sending locally. 
 I knew MailHog so I decided to set it up in local. It was an easy thing, but not as straightforward as I would have liked. 
 Here you have the steps I’d have loved to find…
Hey 👋,
I have been trying to open a specific project in PhpStorm for a couple of days (I have to admit I was not trying that hard ) and PhpStorm was systematically freezing. 
 PhpStorm went on a white screen for a long time and the cursor was stuck in the infamous rotating candy from mac OS. 
 Solution: In order to fix it I simply removed the .idea/ folder at the root of the…

 Update (July 2026): the little backend I describe below grew into likeslikes.net ,
a free service anyone can use. If you want a like button on your blog you no longer need to build your own
backend: register, verify your domain, and point your button at the public API. The
 likeslikes.net docs are the canonical, always up to date instructions.
And if you don’t want to…
Hi 👋,
for the last months I have been working on my free time on an RTS game without a name: Unnamed RTS .
I have been doing that while streaming and it has been, for the moment, a really great experience ! 
 Investigation 🧠 
 We started from the beginning: learning the framework (Phaser) and the language (JS).
But recently I have been working on something I find more…
Hi 👋, 
apparently I have been a little busy this year and a half because that’s how long since my previous post here. 
Let me be honest: I have never been really consistent with this “blog” but… wow! 
 Well, I just wanted to write here about my latest adventure, I am streaming on Twitch ! 
 My main motivations are: 
 
 Practice my spoken english…
Hi :wave:, 
Second lunar challenge cycle completed successfully! :muscle: (more or less) 
 What did I do? 
 TL;DR: 
Meditation app focused on being simple and extensible: Voidhead . 
 The journey 
 This is the second project I develop for my personal challenge. It is important to me because I show to myself I can continue this rhythm without compromising the rest of my…
Hi :wave:, 
I did it! First lunar challenge cycle completed successfully! :muscle: 
 What did I do? 
 TL;DR: 
Tool to quickly allow to copy and paste from one device to another: Quickopy . 
 The journey 
 So, as you may know I started on Nov 23rd a personal challenge I named “The Lunar Challenge” . This is a quick summary of this first journey. If you want to…
Hi :wave:, 
in my last post I said I was plannig to start a new challenge and that I would be sharing the details shortly. Let me present to you: The Lunar Challenge :rocket: 
 What is it about? 
 TL;DR: 
 I will deliver a different product every two weeks . Starting on November 23rd . 
Longer answer: 
Read the rest of the post :smile: 
 Motivation? Why now? 
 I…
It has been almost four years since my last post. Wow… That’s tough. 
Well, it’s not new. I have a tendency to yearly posts (New Year’s resolutions?). But this time, it has been not one but four of them . 
 And I am committed to make it change . 
 Why this? Why now? 
 So I have really had this feeling of telling myself to slow down for almost all my life. I…
He estado releyendo el blog y he sacado algunas conclusiones: 
 
 Soy un tostón. 
 No cumplo lo que prometo (y eso que son promesas a mí mismo). 
 El blog no tiene nada que ver con la informática (que era la intención inicial). 
 Y, last but not least , estoy obsesionado con el tiempo . 
 
 Voy a explicarme. ¡No es que haya sido una sorpresa! Esta obsesión mía con el…
El otro día me pasó algo curioso, fue casi como una revelación y quería escribir sobre ello. Así que lo he hecho, en medium . Quería también escribir algo en medium, y en inglés, así que de un tiro maté tres pájaros. 
 Básicamente lo que cuento es que me he dado cuenta que en ocasiones tenemos vergüenza (o miedo) a mirar hacia atrás en el tiempo y encontrarnos cosas que no sean de nuestro…
Por fin, y una vez más, el período de exámenes ha llegado a su fin. Como siempre ocurre con estas cosas, no veía la hora. 
 No sé si sólo me pasa a mí, pero he venido observando un efecto curioso a lo largo de mi vida como estudiante: con la llegada de los primeros exámenes, mi cerebro parece activarse. Se despierta. Algo en principio por lo que estar agradecido, pero no viene con la intención…