Recent content on Unfinished Side Projects
At serious risk of sounding like a heretic here, but I’m kinda bored of talking about AI. I get it, AI is incredible. I use it every day, it’s completely changed my workflow. I recently started a new role in a tricky domain working at web scale (hey, remember web scale?) and it’s allowed me to go from 0-1 in terms of productivity in a matter of weeks. With that being said, it’s all starting to…
Late last year, I made the conscious decision to start posting more of the stuff I make on the internet. When I’m working on something interesting, I write a blog post about it. If I make an app for myself, I put it on the internet for free. It’s only been a few short months, but I wanted to share some of my reasons for doing so and some of the highs and lows that have come from it.…
I went on a skiing holiday over the Christmas break. We were flying into Salzburg airport and the scenery was incredible, the cloud was super low and you could see the Alps stretching out under a winter sunset across the Horizon. The cabin crew came over the tannoy and said Can you all please turn all electronic devices completely off before landing. This includes mobile phones. All items must be…
I run Coolify on Hetzner to self(ish)-host all my side projects, toys and any other bits I want to put online. About a week ago I got hacked and posted about it on Hacker News . The post went viral and I got around 30k blog views over a week (normally I’d get maybe 10). Overall, the reaction was incredibly positive and I had several people go into my git commits to find my email and tell me…
Edit: This got way more attention than I was ever expecting. I originally asked claude to draft it from a transcript of my panicked messages and the feedback was clear, nobody likes AI slop. As a result I’ve redrafted it this morning to fix some inaccuracies and make it sound human. - Jake Or: How I learned that “I don’t use Next.js” doesn’t mean your dependencies…
Another little fix that’s taken me weeks to figure out. I have a site I’ve built in SvelteKit. I have a route at /sitemap.xml which just generates some XML for the sitemap. When I submitted the sitemap to Google search console it kept giving me ‘Sitemap could not be read’ or ‘Couldn’t fetch’. Loading the sitemap myself was fine, checking the sitemap in 10…
Possible symptoms: My shower is too hot on the coldest setting. This post describes how to fix a shower thermostat where the coldest setting is too hot. This post is for you if: You have a bar shower like the one below (Doesn’t have to be the same exact model). You can turn the temperature dial to the coldest setting, but the water is still too hot. You want to fix it yourself without…
Table of Contents Introduction The Challenge The Problem Scale / Shape of The Data Things that didn’t work Iteration 1: DynamoDB Iteration 2: Elasticsearch Iteration 3: Postgres The Data Pipeline Evolving The Database Schema Iteration 2: Materialised Columns Iteration 3: Studies Data Iteration 4: Entity, Attribute, Value Querying the New Structure (CTEs to the Rescue) Iteration 5: Hashing…
This has bugged me a couple of times when setting up uploads directly from a client to DigitalOcean Spaces. The error path is: You have a backend that generates a pre-signed URL for a client to upload to. The client tries to upload to the pre-signed URL and gets a CORS error, which looks something like: Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at…
Another day, another interesting little bit of knowledge. This time, it’s how to deploy a SvelteKit app to Heroku. SSR Vs Static SvelteKit is, by default, a server-side rendered framework. This means that when you request a URL, the server will render a page and send it back to the user as HTML. If you’re used to Django, Flask, Rails or any other MVC style framework this will make…
This has been plaguing me all day, so I’m saving some instructions here for future reference. For my project i’m creating a Svelte front end and a Go backend. I’m using JWT for authentication and I want to store the JWT in a cookie. The flow should go like this: User logs in by sending a POST request to my sign in endpoint. The backend checks the credentials and if they’re…
Alright, I’ll confess to you that I’m pretty deep into this project now so writing this blog post as if this is a fresh idea I just thought of seems a little disingenuous. What i’ll do instead is talk through the basic design of Garduino and maybe a few things I learned by building stuff that didn’t work. What the fuck is Garduino Jake? Garduino is the name I’ve given…
I’m starting a new project! I’ve been working my way around trying to come up with a new project to start recently. It’s coming up to winter and I need something to do now the nights are drawing in and I can’t go out on my bike as much. Honestly, picking a project to do has been a really tough challenge for the following reasons: It needs to be doable inside, and I have no…
In my last post I talked about my background as both a manufacturing engineer and a software engineer. In this next post I want to talk about what I think manufacturing engineers can learn from software engineers and software engineering in general. I’m honestly not sure how many manufacturing engineers end up becoming software engineers and vice versa. What I can say from experience is that…
I find it’s difficult to know where somebody is coming from unless you know their background. Like everyone else, my opinion is formed over time based on my experience. So here’s a self-indulgent post where I share my work experience as both a manufacturing engineer and a software engineer. I left school at 16 and got an apprenticeship working for Rolls-Royce, making turbine blades for…
Hey there! My name is Jake Saunders and I’m from the north of England. I left school at 16 and started an apprenticeship with Rolls-Royce in Derby making aeroplane engines. From there, I spent 10 years in manufacturing as an engineer before moving into software engineering. I’ve been a software engineer for around 5 years now, working in Python, Typescript, Golang and Elixir. I’m…