Recent content on instantiator.dev
In previous tutorials you’ve set up an AI assisted development environment, and created your first project. Now it’s time to think about how to ensure you produce good code that’s reliable. The good news is that the software development industry has done a lot of thinking about this…
Most people learn by doing. In earlier posts we set up a dev environment and and a small Streamlit prototype. Now let’s use opencode to add a new feature.
There’s a bug in the Sky Hub that stops you from changing a whole bunch of settings. It’s a genuine mistake that Sky won’t fix. Here are some workarounds to help you control your home network…
In earlier posts we set up a dev environment and a Git repository. Now we’ll create a small prototype from scratch using Streamlit .
TLDR: I’m enjoying Dungeon Crawler Carl. It’s amusing and poignant. It has several themes, they’re layered, and it takes a while for them all to warm up, but it’s worth it.
Use git to keep a full history of your coding project and track changes. It’s a commonly used tool to help manage your work.
A short tutorial to help you set up a lightweight AI assisted-coding environment, with free tools. It’s a modest solution but, if you have a computer, you can get started for nothing.
Google’s Gemma 4 wrote an unintentionally hilarious one-act play, given a very simple prompt. It would have been wrong not to publish it here…
When it’s not being a television with a very awkward user interface, the Samsung Frame 55" is touted as being optimised for art. Imagine spending money on it, just to learn that if you want to access the art itself you need to buy a subscription.
number-jam detects, tracks, and obscures vehicle number plates in video clips - and was an experiment in AI-assisted development.
Browsers rule with an iron fist when it comes to the things your web app is allowed to do, and video playback is a complex topic. This post breaks down some advanced solutions for developers implementing embedded video.
I am a tech lead and senior software developer. My career reflects my passion for public service and volunteerism.
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 Do…
Conversational deliberation is hard to get right, and even harder to scale. Here’s how we’ve been lowering the barriers to both…
When the time comes to delete an old S3 bucket, it’s important to know that they can’t be deleted while they contain content. Here’s what you can do about it from the CLI…
ListSky is a new tool for collaboratively managing lists of social accounts.
An alternative calendar for the geek in your heart… 
 In this house we celebrate… 
 Here’s a fun alternative celebration calendar. It’s a collaboration between friends, and we’ll keep improving it. It’s for you, for the geek in your life, or the nerd in your heart. You can add it to Google Calendar for the full experience, or visit it on its own page .
What is The Epistolorean , and what has it got to do with Count Dracula?
How to use Open Social Distributor to post threads and messages across multiple social networks at once.
What if your UI was a slide show? 
 Reveal in React 
 TLDR: Here’s a template repository for a NextJS app with a Reveal slide show UI: instantiator/reveal-on-next
OAuth Token Explorer is a tool to explore authentication and authorisation on behalf of a user.
json-to-smart-csv is a tool to help build CSV records from arbitrary JSON…
A quick guide to running your own tile server, with a geo database populated from OpenStreetMap data.
In this part, we’ll build a simple user interface for a Flipper Zero app.
FlipperZero is a digital signals multi-tool. Here’s a short guide to the basics of building an app for it…
Exploring your personal Netflix viewing history… 
 TLDR 
 If you’d like to generate your own Netflix data visualisation, feel free to make use of this Jupyter notebook:
This is a quick guide to some of the features of the Semantic Kernel, a Software Development Kit that simplifies integration of language models into your own applications.
A tool to design 3D printed crossword puzzles. 
 Generating 3D crossword models 
 I’ve been working on a tool to generate crossword designs using OpenSCAD. The output is an STL file that you can use with your favourite slicer and send to a 3D printer. It’s open source, and you’re free to plunder it for tips, techniques, or to generate your own…
Presenting a simple template to develop, publish, and test a simple C# service backend on AWS, with serverless Lambda functions, supported by DynamoDb, behind an API Gateway, and protected by Cognito auth.
It took me 3 weeks to complete the day 11 puzzle for Advent of Code on a BBC Micro this year, and you’d be hard pressed to describe my solution as “proportionate” or “necessary”…
Consensus Chess is going through some beta testing on Mastodon, and you can play today!
I’ve been working on a pet project recently: Consensus games are a fun new way to play together through social media…
A few days ago we had a call from one of the most sophisticated phishing attacks I’ve experienced…
It’s possible to share a secret amongst a group of people so that only some of them are needed to reconstruct it…
More commonly known as a Dead Man’s Switch, a Dead Person Switch (DPS) is a system that can hold a secret on behalf of a person, and govern its release should they become unavailable.
_Art is fun and hard and messy and complicated and like every other trade it’s full of people who are earnestly showing you what they created (sprinkled with a few jokers )._
Just recently I have been exploring a very strange issue: My application couldn’t find a tool that was right where it should be…
I am hoping to interview some investigative journalists for my masters thesis at the University of Oxford.

 The things I’ll do to avoid learning LaTeX… 
 
 Do you prefer Markdown to LaTeX?
The Data Standards Authority are holding an open challenge to discover and set a new data standard for vulnerable people services.
In part 5, we amended our Lambda to write to an S3 bucket; and in this part, we’ll explore triggers to run it regularly.
In previous parts, we’ve built a Lambda that can query the OpenWeather API, using a secret key; and in this part we’ll extend it to write that data to S3.
In part 3, we extended our Lambda to communicate with an API, using a secret key; and in this part, we’ll explore the logs created when the Lambda runs.
In part 2, we build a Lambda function, deployed and invoked it; and in this part, we’ll extend it to communicate with an API using a secret key.
In part 1, we set up the basic infrastructure to support a new Lambda function on AWS; and n this part, we’ll build a Lambda function, deploy it to AWS, and invoke it with some input.
At first glance, Amazon Web Services (AWS) can seem impenetrably complex, but it’s not so bad once you’ve found your way around it…
There are a many ways to peek inside a data file and reason about its contents.
This post is about a triplet of simple, easily available tools that
I’ve found handy for searching and querying common data file formats.
You might too…
Anyone can code. 
 This is a short exploration of the choices for coding beginners out there.