Personal blog of Ross Duggan.
Been just about a year since Ash and I were in Japan, and last night, the first cooler evening we've had this summer, I was thinking about a hot, steaming bowl of ramen. Somehow, the first random ramen shop we walked into on the first day we arrived in Sapporo was both of our favourites of the whole three month odyssey.
Another small update to Usagi! This time a request from one of the two other people using it I know of – a small refresh button to explicitly update the usage (convenient if you're operating close to the usage limits and configure a longer cycle between refreshes).
Small update to Usagi , I've included the weekly usage bar for Fable just below the weekly usage bar.
Joel Spolsky once called it "the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make", and not for nothing: "When you throw away code and start from scratch, you are throwing away all that knowledge. All those collected bug fixes. Years of programming work." Even twenty years into my career, despite understanding, both logically and from experience that a rewrite is a high-risk move…
Once again found myself needing to create a bootable Windows USB stick on macOS, once again surprised at how fiddly it was. This time, though, I made an app.
Claude is changing how I write software dramatically. My biggest worry, as someone who's been writing software for a long time, is that I will be so blinded by my hard earned intuition on complexity that I will subconsciously be less ambitious than the moment calls for – that some treacherous part of my mind stubbornly knows it's too hard. When I was 25 I thought it was a given that I would just…
Putting together a little desktop notifier for new Stripe subscribers using Rust! 🦀
Yesterday I was looking at the zclaw project , and I thought it would be cool if the ESP32 could run an actual language model. Then I remembered that Andrej Karpathy had dropped microgpt a couple of weeks ago, and thought it might be fun to try and get a GPT running on the ESP32. I've got a couple of them lying around from a few other tinkering projects, as well as a functioning ESP32 Rust project…
Parachuting into an unfamiliar codebase, where the original author is long gone, is an experience that will be familiar to a lot of developers. People writing with AI assistants have been encountering this in another form. Simon Willison wrote a brief post about it recently, concluding, "I no longer have a firm mental model of what they can do and how they work, which means each additional feature…
The way that I've used AI for coding has changed drastically over the last year. In fact, the rate at which it is changing is probably the most drastic element of it – I can't recall any time since my first year of college, twenty years ago, that I've experienced such a rapid evolution in my own ability to do stuff . This week I have written a fully self-contained system monitoring daemon and…
GitHub, Github Actions, and the GitHub Container Registry have been how I've been handling builds, but it's been slow, and it's started to seem absurd to have all these builds occurring in some random datacenter presumably on the other side of the Atlantic ocean, that I am then pulling back to a server in Europe. I started fishing around for a locally hosted replacement, coming across Forgejo ,…
I was never big on New Year's resolutions. However, as I get older I appreciate that there are natural moments of reset in your life. New decades, new jobs, new homes. New years are one of the predictable ones. Conveniently, they come with a built in universal counter and even a glass of champagne and fireworks at the end. Might as well take advantage of the infrastructure. So, I've thought about…
I'm a big fan of Cloudflare, but the extended outage on November 18th was long enough that I started wondering whether I really needed it to be in the critical request path for my blog.
A price negotiation call to Virgin Media ended up with me upgrading to 5Gb fibre broadband. This took me on a bit of a journey investigating things that have changed in home networking since 1Gb networking cards hit the scene. Turns out, somehow both more than I expected and less than I imagined!
I started building a new blog in December 2024, and wrote my first substantial post in January 2025, but I have only published a handful of posts since then. What does that tell me?
I recently refurbished an old iPod Classic, and purchased some albums in the iTunes Store (yes, it still exists!). Once I found out that most iPod Classics are capable of playing Apple's lossless format, ALAC, I really wanted to sync them over to experience this heretofore unimaginable audio clarity. However, even though I could download them, the albums refused to show up in the sync list.…
I needed an invoice generator to quickly produce some random test invoices while building Manano, as part of a feature letting tradesmen track receipts by sending photos to our WhatsApp number. I tried a few invoice generators that showed up in Google results, but all of them were oddly slow, wouldn't remember details without signing up, and sometimes produced odd looking outputs. Eventually I…
A few months ago my parents gave me a box of my stuff they’ve had variously in attics and storage since I moved out in my early twenties. One of the things in it was my Sega Mega Drive — boxed, and with games and accessories. Unfortunately, I didn't have a TV that I could connect it to! The only connector packaged with it was designed to plug into the aerial socket of a CRT television. In the last…
First few weeks of our Japan trip were fantastic. Despite some minor confusion over our visa length on entry, we had a great start in Sapporo, with nice weather and friendly people.
We've been going over the pros and cons of the current route, and have decided that the V-shaped travel route is not our best option. Instead, we're going to jump from Hokkaido to Okinawa, and head back up from there!