Feedback loop engineering
Why the most important skill with AI coding agents isn't prompting or curating context – it's designing how they verify their own work
i am dain
...and these are my thoughts mostly on technology
Latest posts
Coding agents in secured VS Code dev containers
How to sandbox coding agents while maintaining development flexibility - the ideal balance between security and convenience
My current development tooling setup
How do I mix local LLMs with cloud ones and code gen with continuous learning
The leftist case for generative AI
Outright rejection of gen AI won't get us the best outcomes
Using Distroless in production instead of Alpine
I hereby renounce years of suffering with native extension compilations breaking
Lisbon Story 1994–2024
How Lisbon has changed in the last 30 years
Expanding TrueNAS Scale with a new drive
How to set up another drive for a home setup
What are Large Language Models and how to run open ones on your device
Part two of the series Building applications using embeddings vector search and Large Language Models
Understanding embeddings and how to use them for semantic search
Part one of the series Building applications using embeddings vector search and Large Language Models
Installing and configuring TrueNAS Scale for home use
Getting up and running, gotchas I came across and my favourite apps
Delightful rabbit hole #1
Starting from LLMs and capitalism and ending up with experimental fixed focus macro photos on my phone
Build a cheap but fast home NAS system
How to set up an open source NAS with a second hand tiny PC that outperforms commercial NAS hardware
Safely access your home NAS with an OpenVPN server on GCP
How to run a low cost OpenVPN server on GCP (or use Tailscale) to access your NAS anywhere even if your home internet is on a shared IP
Give app servers a REST – CDNs and APIs are the new LAMP
Be like water
Creative Lives interview
I was interviewed by Creative Lives in Progress magazine while working at ustwo to show people how it is to work in the creative industry
Why and how Github should have binary diffs
To make Git (and Github) more useful for collaboration on non-textual content
Finding an affordable electric family cargo bike in London
Out with the cars, in with the cargo trikes
Indiewebify yourself
Take control back from silos to make the Web personal and open again
Containerise everything
Stop installing development environments locally
Why YOU — not Henry Ford — should design your working life
Your life was designed 150 years ago
Build your Minimum Viable Product
The first iteration of a product should be about learning
An introduction to jQuery Deferred / Promise and the design pattern in general
What I learnt trying to untangle the async spaghetti
Getting Cross-origin resource sharing with complex jQuery AJAX requests
CORS can be tricky, especially if you need to do something beyond the basics like authorisation or custom headers
On the fragile relationship between nature conservation and economic growth
Including the shocking loss of biodiversity around the World through audio recordings of wildlife
Setting up rmate with Sublime Text for remote file editing over SSH
Instead of terminal editors with steep learning curve, this guide helps you to tunnel Sublime Text in to your server for remote editing – with sudo