github • linkedin I started this blog for two reasons. Number one was to have a formal place to publish my notes and review my lessons learned. The second...
I've recently been using some version of this whenever I'm prompting. Please make sure that your responses adhere to ASD-STE100 format. ASD-STE100 Simple Technical English (STE) is a standard for technical documentation that was created to make manuals that were clear, concise, and easy to understand. When given to an LLM, it drastically reduces the amount of slop it produces in its answer. LLM's…
I don't know what's been going on with me this past year, but I feel so lethargic when it comes to grasping ideas. I think part of it was going full software factory at my last place. Pumping out as many features as possible was our priority. Because of this, I never took great consideration as to the long term effects of what my code was doing. If tomorrow wasn't promised, who cares what you did…
I keep getting YouTube ads for Base44. Their tagline is, "Turn your ideas into apps." That's a pretty compelling pitch. There's only one problem: your ideas suck. Good ideas are rare . More often than not, the ideas we come up with are either neutral or, worse, actively detrimental to the organization. Even in the age of AI, where we're all supposedly equals in terms of output, only a handful of…
On Saturday mornings, I'll usually pick up some bagels and coffee from our local shop. While I'm waiting on our order, there's a few copies of the paper laying out on the bar near the window. At first I would just skim the headlines. Then I started reading the articles in depth. Eventually, I found myself looking forward to reading the paper more than actually picking up bagels! Seeing all the…
I'm unemployed... again. About a year ago, I decided to chase the startup dream and join as one of the founding engineers for zinnia. Unfortunately, we lost funding and had to shut down last December. Losing not only your job but also your company in one day wasn't my favorite feeling in the world, but I'm incredibly grateful for the experience it gave me. Perhaps a story for another time! But…
Code completion in Cursor has long fascinated me since it's just so stupid quick. How exactly is it able to figure out what I need so quickly? Well, the short answer is it just runs a small model locally. If that's the case, building our own should be straightforward. Let's create a Neovim plugin that does exactly that! We'll utilize a small model for understanding our code and then completing it.…
I've been on the job hunt again (a story for another time), and a company that I'm interviewing with has its technical screening centered around using phoenix + liveview. The goal is to build a simple web app with a form and a database. Conveniently, mix has some commands we can use to build those out pretty easily mix phx.gen.live Articles Post posts title:string body:text And sure enough, it…
The AI bros might have been on to something I'm not necessarily proud to post this but it's just a reality of where I've been the past couple of months: nearly all of the code that I push is generated by AI. When I think, I prompt. When I run into friction, I prompt. The act of typing out code by hand was a pleasure that I thought would never leave me. Yet here I stand. A man who knows the latest…
When you think about becoming a better programmer, your mind immediately goes to learning theory, reading a substantial book, or working on a sick project. And while that is the best way to improve 99% of the time, I want to mention a few easy things to implement that have helped me improve by 1%. Tried and true Drinking coffee I used to avoid coffee at all costs. I hated how jittery it would make…
Using typespecs helps you reason about your code better, think about all possible paths Keep everything seperated can be easy to write a module with another module in mind and end up returning values or creating logic that fits in the context of that module. i find that to be unhelpful in the long run. while they can interact with each other, keep those return values sepearate a crude example…