Recent content on Caffeinated Code
Every senior engineer is a decade or so in the making, and AI just took that away. So far our fix is to hire people already senior, and skip any sort of growing. In an earlier post I argued that judgment takes a long time to build, and doesn’t churn with whatever flavor of the month framework is in fashion. Since then a harder question has been sitting in the back of my mind: where does the…
I asked Claude Code to remind me about something the next day. One line, a throwaway request. The model reached for its memory system and started to write a new memory file plus an index entry, and a hook I keep on memory writes blocked it. The reminder ended up on my Kanban board instead, where it belongs. That beat is the whole architecture in miniature: the model wanted to append, the guard…
I wrote earlier about why I’m not buying Jira : a solo user can stand up a custom kanban board with an afternoon of AI help and skip the heavyweight tool. So I did. The speed was the least of it. What stuck with me afterward was how little of the work was mine, and which part of it was. 
 The reflex is to call it a ten-times multiplier and move on. But that credits the tool with…
I built a Kanban board from scratch recently. I used a ZazenCodes devtool repo as the skeleton, let Claude Code do most of the typing, and the whole thing came together in a morning before work: a web UI for dragging cards around, an API behind it, a CLI for when I don’t want to open a browser. It fits my head exactly, because I shaped every column to fit my head. And sitting there looking…
Free plan limits that matter for a static blog: 
 
 500 builds/month (you’ll use maybe 20-30 if you post regularly) 
 1 concurrent build, 20-minute timeout (irrelevant for Hugo, which builds in under 2 seconds) 
 20,000 files per site (you have 10 posts; you’d need to write prolifically for a decade to approach this) 
 25MB max single file size 
 100 custom…
Let’s Encrypt is a game changer for websites. 
 I thought it was a good idea when Let’s Encrypt introduced the notion of a free CA Authority making SSL more accessible to the public in early 2015. But, I didn’t delve deeper because I was already using sslmate to somewhat automate my certificate management. Then, as I was setting up a new domain, I noticed that Dreamhost was…
GPG2 is a brilliant encryption tool, but so rarely used. 
 It’s not used mostly because it’s difficult to get buy-in from all the people with whom you want to securely communicate. 
 But if you use it and are lucky enough to find peers who use it as well, it’s a great boon for secure private communication and data storage. 
 Keep Your Master Key Safe 
 This is a…
Update 3/10/2016: Cipher list matches recommendations from https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Server_Side_TLS . 
 Update 5/29/2015: Modified cipher list for high security. 
 Update 12/9/2014: RC4 has been identified by SSL Labs as a weak point in SSL implementations so the example nginx configuration below now includes disabling of RC4 ciphers. This updated configuration means that the…
Originally published on Medium: What Your Boss Wants
If you live in a terminal, you are likely using GNU Screen . 
 This is a pretty cool way to set a status bar at the bottom of your unix screen session. Add this to your screenrc file (one line): 
 [dennis@caffeinatedcode ~]% vim .screenrc

caption always '%{=b dw}:%{-b dw}:%{=b dk}[ %{-b dw}%{-b dg}$USER%{-b dw}@%{-b dg}%H %{=b dk}] [ %= %?%{-b dg}%-Lw%?%{+b dk}(%{+b dw}%n:%t%{+b…

 It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law. 
 
 —Douglas Hofstadter
I like paranoia in design. Well, I take that back. I don’t like it when it inhibits programming experimentation and creativity, but I do like it when it comes to services, and most especially when it comes to backup. 
 I wanted to write about my experiences with consumer offsite backup services (e.g. Mozy, Carbonite, Jungle Disk) as well as the plain practice of having a redundant…
Before the Internet, there was an effort to distribute news to the 2000 or so home computer owners in the Bay Area. It only took over 2 hours to download an entire newspaper over the phone at a $5.00 per hour usage charge, now that’s tech! 
 
 

“Mind your web presence,” said my former boss and mentor Gilles Vandelle. We were discussing the kinds of hits we get when we do web searches on people. Gilles, who specializes in search technologies, showed me some of the things he found about me. Results focused mostly on my photographs, some friends’ website links, and miscellaneous contributions to journalism and charitable…
About the Site 
 A place where DM puts things he found helpful or noteworthy. Running since 2000. 
 For a current about page, visit dm.omg.lol . 
 
 About Caffeinated Code 
 Caffeinatedcode.com started in early 2000 as a router/webserver personal project hosted at home using a CyberMax tower PC on a static DSL connection. It was pre-wiki, but intended to be a repository of…