Josh McKinney's personal website
Axum is the most popular web framework in Rust at the time of writing. In this post, I'll show an easy and ergonomic pattern for connecting to a database using SQLx and Axum. This is a small response to a question on a reddit thread about how to structure SQLx queries in Axum . The pattern I'll show here is not the only way to do it, but it's one that I've found to be simple…
Recently, while searching for a Thunderbolt 4 Dock, I found myself in a sea of data, but with no detailed comparison table to help. Hence, I decided to create one myself.
I remember the early 2000s, a time marked by heated discussions in Slashdot comments and perhaps even earlier on Usenet. The topic of interest? Articles presenting possible solutions to fight spam. Accompanying these articles, a popular checklist was often shared. Now, in the 2020s, we're seeing a similar phenomenon with articles questioning the usefulness of LLMs in software writing. So, I…
Lately, we've seen a significant rise in articles casting doubt on the utility of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT for specific tasks. These articles tend to anchor their conclusions on isolated experiments, generally an inadequate and potentially misleading approach due to the intrinsic randomness characterizing the outputs of LLMs. Instead, it's crucial this evaluation…
I was curious about how ChatGPT would go with creating this era's main cultural output, memes after reading a comment by @jeisc on Hacker news : Does anyone here really think that AI will produce a new "Jungle Book" by Kipling or a new "Mona Lisa" by Da Vinci or a new "Requiem" by Mozart" which could even have a remote possibility of becoming cultural icon and reference? And is that a goal or…
I recently read a few posts on the Simple DIY Electronic Music Project blog about using the Raspberry Pi Pico to interface with synthesizers over MIDI. The Pico is an interesting beast and I was curious how far it can be pushed - how many devices can a Pico control at once? It turns out that it is possible to create a MIDI thru device of up to 25 outputs with PIO doing most of the heavy lifting…
Yesterday, I released junit-json-params , a small java library built on JUnit 5 that enables parameterizing unit tests with inline JSON and JSON resource files.
Note: this post contains outdated instructions for a problem that occurred installing .NET core on OSX in 2016. https://github.com/dotnet/sdk/issues/4600 suggests that you can now install dotnet core on macOS by running brew install dotnet . The instructions at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/install/macos are also…
Like many a software engineer does again and again, I'm restarting my blog. This time I'm going to kick this iteration off with an idea inspired by Michael Kordahi (@delicateGenius) many years ago for Tech.Ed 2011, the Geek Origin Story .
In the past I and several of my colleagues have run into problems when attempting to install software downloaded from the MSDN Subscriber Downloads or elsewhere. One possible cause for this is file corruption either due to an incomplete download, or caused later when copying the file to another device (e.g. over a local network or via flaky USB drives). This problem is easy to detect and prevent.
In well designed enterprise apps, it is often the case that your application will run in multiple environments, and against different databases (Development, Test, and Production). This can lead to issues when it comes to storing connections strings.
On the way back from the Hunter I discovered the best second hand bookstore I've ever seen (in Newtown). Bigger than anything (new or secondhand) in Canberra by far, and well stocked with anything from Sci-Fi to communist propaganda. It even has a couple of cats that live there. http://gouldsbooks.com.au/ Picked Up: William Gibson - Idoru Corman, Leiserson, Rivest -…
"No hotkey, no extra steps, drag and drop the programs on your Windows taskbar by simply... well, dragging and dropping them! Neat concept, huh? No need to get all nervous when a program crashes or if you wanna reboot; you can re-order your programs exactly as they were." http://www.freewebs.com/nerdcave/taskbarshuffle.htm
So yeah a blog, novel eh...