Recent content on James Olds
I am a factory worker now. 
 Wake up, deploy the robot vacuum so it’s done before the kids get home.
Fire up a Claude code session and have it get to work on a feature for a side project.
Run a load of laundry. 
 Go back, get the vacuum unstuck from the couch and then get a notification.
It’s time to switch the wet laundry over to the dryer. 
 Check my phone,…
A voice assistant I can call from my watch that talks to GPT-5 Realtime, Todoist, Gmail, and GitHub. Built in a day.
Experimenting with mobile development setups using VMs, Zellij sessions, and SSH clients to code from anywhere.
Application development with microservices is typically a bit different and at times more complicated than more traditional monolithic architectures. When writing a feature against a single service, you may find that you depend on another running service to test API calls. Debugging and observability can be more difficult as well, due to needing to aggregate logs and traces across multiple…
This sprint I have a ticket from the security team to investigate unencrypted snapshots in our AWS account and either encrypt them or delete them if no longer needed.
In my initial attempt I just used the AWS web console, filtered by “Encryption: Not Encrypted” in the snapshots section, and attempted to delete that list. 
 But it would make for a boring story if things were…
With Windows 10 Pro, you have the option of using a Windows native hypervisor called Hyper-V. It’s included with the OS so you
don’t have to pay the high price of something like VMWare Workstation while still getting great performance. I set it up with the default option of using Dynamic Memory so that it won’t use much ram until you
start adding a lot of routers and…
I’ve been wanting to learn systems programming for a long time now. After reading about Rust every-other-day on Hacker News I’ve been dying to dive into it but have found that most tutorials online get kind of tough to follow for those of us without a C/C++ background. So, I found a copy of The C Programming Language on Amazon for 15 bucks and will be learning both C and Rust at the…
In the latest test build of Windows 10 (build 14316), Microsoft introduced
Ubuntu userland as a windows exe. This means you can apt-get anything in
ubuntu’s repositories and PPAs right from windows! This is actually pretty cool. 
 More background can be found at
 https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2016/04/06/announcing-windows-10-insider-preview-build-14316/ 
 Join…