Thoughts, articles, and updates from hecworks. Phish, Code, Fatherhood, Outdoors, Travel. Some Fluffhead.
VC Backed IDEs So I was as excited about Zed as other developers. I initially downloaded it, found it didn't do what I wanted, and left. And then a year or so later I came back after 1.0 and liked what I saw! It had good theming, some plugins I wanted, and was way faster than my VSCode at the time. They had baked in some AI features that I didn't really use but thought "whatever", the…
It Started with Slop A few years ago as the AI revolution (or not) took hold, people started espousing the idea that anyone would be able to write their own software just how they want it. Every little thing would be customized just how they want and it would unlock a new era of software design. What starting actually looked like was NextJS apps spammed to all corners of the internet with the same…
A Not-So Biblical Flood of PRs How many tickets are you completing a day now? Crushing 20 PRs across 13 repos with no end in sight? An (exaggerated) developer's job has changed. Now a single team member with a modest budget produce a flurry of PRs and keeping up increasingly feels like a fools errand. And with the $/task frontier falling every day (ahem OpenAI and DeepSeek), this is a problem…
I feel awkward about my body, I don't feel like the picture of an outdoorsy person, and I work indoors for a living. Why do I buy Patagonia clothes? A mix of quality, warranty, and the company's commitment to its products. I like a little ethics in my clothes. Ideals I love that Patagonia is a company that practices its values. Employees get on-site child care, the company has…
I've been toying with the idea of what my next car could look like. Maybe more of a project where it takes a little love. Maybe an old 4Runner if we want to get something thats capable. But if I want something more fun, either a CRX or Civic Si/EF Hatchback. It'll be atleast a few years before we go down that road though.
I'm moving my AI stack off of claude after hitting nothing but rate limits. AI setup will be continuously updated here . Hermes/Opencode for harnesses, StepFun 3.5 Flash/Minimax M2.7 for models, Openrouter to wire it all up.
The Cheap AI Assistant Era is Here Something has happened in the last few months, and I'm not sure how many in the space have noticed. Open source LLMs have gotten very good at tool calling specifically, and very cheap . We're talking less than 30 cents for a million tokens of output! And, these cheap models can reliably call tools like executing some apple script or calling reminders.…
Twin Dad Why? Being a new dad is so hard. Things change drastically from day to day, you're getting such broken sleep, and you have a whole new person to love. Being a twin dad is like x2. So I wanted to offer what little advice and reassurance I can, and hope that this helps even one new person. If you're a new dad who is struggling (I nearly had a breakdown on day 2!), please feel free…
I've started to mess around with OpenClaw and it's amazing . It really is just like being able to talk to an AI over a chat and have it do things for you. Create calendar appointments, iterate and deploy my website, and remind me to talk with the people I love in my life. I'm looking forward to what else I can do with it.
I'm a little bit into my paternity leave and happy to share some good news. We have welcomed two wonderful new children into our family. I've still got more time, but having the space to get to know my new family members and make sure they're doing well. I'm looking forward to this next chapter of my life.
Site Expansion I've had this site around for a while, but have been inspired by what I've seen around the internet and a little bored with what I've had around in the past. So I'm changing it up a bit. I've added a new theme all around the site (except for Tapehendge, it's a little big right now.) to have something more striking with splashes of color still around…
What is GlowDoc? GlowDoc is a homegrown documentation static-site generator that is meant to be both lightning fast and drop dead gorgeous. It has themes to style the website however you want, or extend the themes should you so desire. Its generator is written in Rust, so its blazingly fast to reduce friction in getting your documentation out. Why does GlowDoc need to exist? I felt the…
I got a promotion! I'm now a Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Ibotta, after a little under 2 years at the company. I'm elated to be recognized for my hard work and steps toward improving reliability at Ibotta.
Why? Just after things started to reopen from the pandemic in the summer of 2021, I was meeting up with a friend in a parking lot and going to see the band he would swear I would like. I had described them as "Dad Rock" after listening to the album Farmhouse, and was mostly going as a way to spend some time with him after being cooped up in my tiny 1-bedroom apartment for over a year. And to add…
First Came the Light! It didn't take long for me to understand why all of these strange people show up to a stadium in Commerce City like a yearly ritual everyone was eager to see start. Phish creates a space for people to feel like they're a part of a community, everyone here for a singular purpose of blasting off to space on a donut, and everyone is dedicated to having fun. It…