thoughts, talks, projects and unpopular opinions
This is a time capsule post, since I'm interested in keeping track of the quickly evolving experience of AI development. I recently started a project that makes your phone into a context aware desktop controller . Sort of like the stream deck. The project itself is not important for this post - only the development methodology. With every new project, I try to use a new tool. This time that was…
I have a friend who was a programmer a generation before me who I always looked up to. He now teaches at a community college. He recently reached out to me about what to teach his students. I'm putting it here as historical record of this moment in time. Jono, Been a while. 🙂 I hope you and your folks & family are doing well. I am still teaching College computer science and (as I'm sure you know)…
I have always been somewhat fixated on developer experience, and will often go way overboard trying to optimize my daily workflow. While working at Udemy, I starting the Local Dev Guild, where we all got to nerd out on this stuff. I was maybe a little too into it. The "IDE" for developing with AI is having a fascinating renaissance right now, so I have been exploring some of these new tools for my…
I have been doing a lot of system/network admin lately using Claude Code on my NixOS config files. It has been amazing since I do not like the Nix language, but I love the Nix experience. Now I can really cruse on trying new things and implementing production fixes. I really need to write that update to Nix - Death by a thousand cuts . So much has changed in the past year. One of the nice things…
I am an addict. No joke. After a full workday of writing code, I come home and hack on side projects. It's not healthy and I’m the first to acknowledge it. This is a real addiction, but is not taken seriously since its seen as “one of the good ones”. What’s changed recently isn’t how much I build, but how I build. For builders, there is that dopamine hit when many hours of effort turns into…
TLDR: The Companion Pass is a low effort way to get a bunch of free flights on Southwest. For the past 10+ years, around this time I either present my talk on financial independence at work or give this spiel for friends and family. So I figured I would codify it once and for all here. You can find more current and detailed guides , but here is my concise bullet point version. Credit card churning…
When I start a new job I often spend the first day bookmarking all the important sites we use (email, ticketing, reporting, documentation, hosting, etc). At my new place of employment, they rely on go links . Not my favorite tech, but it is an interesting alternate soultion to my bookmarking workflow. Go links have been around for decades and there are a ton of implementations, including my…
Back when I was in high school, my grandma got a call from a scammer claiming to be me. The story was I got caught in a bad situation and needed a bunch of money wired right away. To which she responded, "Well, you got yourself into this mess. You can get yourself out." (click) Yeah, she did not mess with nonsense—scammers or not. But many do fall for these calls. As methods get more…
This is my perspective on using Nix (the OS, the package manager, and the language) as a main driver for the past 2 years. I have gone to conferences , engaged the community , donated , submitted bug reports , converted my home servers, and probably spent hundreds of hours in Nix configs. I consider myself well versed, but certainly no expert. TLDR: In its current state (2025), I don't generally…
At the end of the year I square up my donations in order to meet the fuzzy target I set for that year. There is really no reason why I need to do this by the end of the year. It is mostly a habit from back when there was a tax advantage to donating smaller amounts while using the standard deduction. Here is my general methodology: Throughout the year when anyone I know (friends, family, coworkers,…