A tiny scrapbook for ideas on software development, the world, life and everything else inbetween.
Every time I talk to someone about working with LLMs, the conversation ends up in the same place. Not models, not benchmarks, not even tooling. Feedback loops. Let me tell you how I got there. Step 1: A prompt and an LLM Prompt feeds into an LLM At the beginning, there is just you, a prompt, and a model. You type something, the model answers, you tweak, you try again. It feels magical the first…
I have been diving into the personal assistants world with Openclaw. Yes, I know I know, same as everyone in the internet lately. Anyway this stuff is mine so I want to share a little bit the setup I've come up to. Lots of people in my homelab The "aha" moment for me was when I started using different agents. I started using just one of them and I couldn't find why all the fuss about it. It was a…
For years I ran this blog on Ghost. It is a fine blogging platform — polished, fast, and it mostly stays out of your way. But it is also a service you depend on, a Node.js process you have to keep alive, a database to back up, and a monthly bill to justify. A personal blog is, at its core, a handful of Markdown files and some HTML templates. Throw a bit of pandoc in the mix and you have a full…
For a while I used coding agents for small, self-contained things. Refactor this method. Rename this variable. Extract this into a function. Safe, short instructions where the agent couldn't go too far off track. But I kept seeing people push further — giving agents a longer leash, taming them into handling real features end to end. And it was working. The gap between what I was doing and what…
There is a game from my youth on which I spent countless hours as a small child with my Amstrad CPC 6128. I have very fond memories of spending the full afternoon trying to move around in its map. If you are thinking it is a super advanced 3D game with fast paced action you are absolutely wrong. The game is Don Quijote. A text based adventure. Yes. Just some super naive graphics. A small REPL-like…
Another year, another shorts. Looks like we will be another exploration year. We are having stuff like ralph wiggum loops in our lifes that still feel a lot like we are throwing spaguetti to the wall to see what sticks. What a time to be alive. This post on how to workflow image generation with nano banana is amazing. It is giving me a lot of inspiration for some tooling I want to create for my…
I tend to be much faster using git from a TUI instead from using the commands in the terminal. Not exactly when doing add or commit but I, very much enjoy reviewing the code and checking the diff. I know I know... the good old git diff or diff-so-fancy are cool but I am a person of habits. My biggest use case is that I normally want to break the work I've done into more than one commit and I'd…
I'm still getting the habit of writing this small form content. It is very interesting because, to be honest, it looks to me like a small effort format that gives space between longer form content that requires more thinking and time in front of the machine. The latest mastodon update brought quotes ). I'm super happy to see mastodon community advancing in a healthy state. Google releases MCP for…
When you are coding one of the most interesting things you can do is to define abstractions that work as a black box. That helps you thinking at a higher level reducing the cognitive load on the problems you have today. Today we have a portable way to do that between llm clients: the skills . Skills are able to do something similar to this in llm clients. We only have to win having an open…
One of the reasons for me to have the excuse not to write is that I have nothing to write about. There are a lot of topics you can almost tweet about but not write a full blog post. I saw that Thorsten Ball is writing normally a weekly post gathering all those small topics and reads. I will, unapologetically, copy that practice. He publishes that as a newsletter too. I will just write the blog.…
This will be a quick post. I am just enumerating all the tools I am using on my mac to avoid missing Arch too much. For work related reasons I moved to a M2 mac four months ago so I had to adapt a ton of stuff. The Non-Negotiables First, the good news: many of my essential tools (Neovim, VSCode, etc.) are cross-platform, so they came along for the ride. But some aspects of my workflow needed…
To be honest I was about to title this post "How to fuck up with your data" but at the end of the day... I like data. I love data. Data is cool and necessary. And toxic if used wrongly. "Metrics are fine so everything is fine". I am tired of seeing organizations and people to rely on metrics to do the job for them. Metrics are becoming the opium of management. We forgot why we do stuff and instead…
For reference you can see a bit of the organization of my sites in this same blog . At 4am evilmeow.com and all my sites (including this log started alerting) You can already see the 5h of downtime. Funny, isn’t it? Ping failing so let's see. A restart "fixed" the problem for a couple of minutes and then it got down again. The logs for some reason were not being sent to Loki. So we redirected…
I have a lot of things in my life I've always wanted to understand but for some reason the maths were too hard for me. One of my good old nemesis was the Fourier Transform Scary as fuck I am not that good at mathematical abstractions so in order to understand something I prefer to take the opposite path and then see the reason of it. Why is it useful? Why all the fuss? A Fourier transform is a way…
Hi! I’ve done the 100nt revamp of my homelab so I want to do a small post to describe and document how everything is doing and where I wanna go since I think this is relatively interesting. First and foremost, do not forget what I want my homelab for. My homelab is excessive, overkill, baroque... Do I need a Kubernetes cluster? No, obviously not. Do I learn a lot by having and maintaining it?…
Last time I changed the backend for the blog was in 2016 when I moved to an static site. It had all I needed. With RSS you have all you may ever need. Anyway times advance and things move on. Lately I am hosting evilmeow.com , a Mastodon instance and the whole idea of the Fediverse is extremely appealing to me. Being trapped in x.com should not be a thing and as of today it is. You cannot have a…
Sprint - BookWyrm Sprint is a book where I have mixed feelings. To be honest it is not for me. I am happy anyway that it is being useful for a lot of people. Its reviews are amazing so I am fine saying it is a good book. Anyway, unfortunately I find extremely surprising people are finding it so useful. For some reason we need a book for someone to come and tell us: "For Christ sake, you need to…
An inventory of projects over time. I started keeping track of this on early 2023. Evilmeow.com 10/2022 - Active My small mastodon instance. I don’t like the approach twitter is taking althoug I still have to use it to keep in touch with some people. Anyway I let my geekiness roam free here. I may eventually open it to the public but it is something that won’t happen anytime soon. I am reading a…
Disclaimer: This is an article on Object Oriented programming. I won’t intentionally talk about other models like functional. I won’t commit suicide today. Sorry XD When doing Domain Driven Design we give a lot of importance to the modelling of the problem space we are working in. We should always do it in OOP but for some reason DDD has managed to strike a nerve we weren’t able to hit before. But…
I’ve been lately studying a bit the contents of GPT & Chill . Since machine learning is not something I am extremely proficient with I am building my own library of resources to be able to query while going through the contents. I am a big believer in reading the same concepts from different sources to reinforce learning (no pun intended). I am taking this time a more structured approach in…
This is probably the 1000 post on the subject but from time to time it is fine to repeat the message. During all my career I’ve been avoiding to be identified with any technology. Instead, I’d love to be identified by the fact that I use technology to solve problems. This has a couple of implications that I’d love to enumerate Programming languages will change with time I prefer not to be called a…
Welcome to the new site! What’s this? A test post to verify the build works.
I’ve been there. We have more books that what we like to admit and we have more games in Steam than what we’d like to admit. I was hoarding content for three more lives as if I was to get them. This small rant is my own way of admitting that time is limited. Acknowledging that time is limited, anyway, has some implications. Choosing your next read is a very rewarding task. You get the dopamine…
I will be shutting down hackers.surf Lemmy instance. I will be moving my account to lemmy.world. Don’t get me wrong, anyway. Lemmy is a great project that deserves to be kept and iterated. Anyway it is still fundamentally different from Mastodon in the sense that hosting an instance as a mere user makes less sense. Unless you are hosting a community you lose a lot of the benefits of searching and…
I built a tiny site to detect if in a given picture there is a photo of a stratocaster or a telecaster . Since we are in another AI surge I decided to write some pets in relation to machine learning. I was experimenting a bit with image categorization so I wrote one small web app. It is a super basic neural net to categorize if a photo contains either a Telecaster or a Stratocaster. Something that…
There is a lot going on with the AI scene lately. The proliferation of LLMs is causing a lot of hype in the industry. I am super bad at predicting trends. We had this hype with a lot of innovations in the past and some stuck and some didn’t. The super obvious comparison is cryptos and the blockchain. We all have this in our recent memory so the comparison is evident. Anyway there are many…
I had this discussion many times. Some people argument often that software are ones and zero and software doesn’t rot because of that. If you don’t change a software it doesn’t change. It’s only bits. Ok. I’m fine with that. Maybe my problem is with the definition of what means for a software to rot. If I had to give a definition to what I mean for software to rot I’d say: The value a given piece…
Why a simple notion database when you can make it 100 times more complicated but more fun? Ok, let’s be honest. This is overkill. This is too much. A simple notion page is enough for this but… this is 10 times more fun. Architecturally speaking this is an exercise in gratuitous complexity. The finished product is in library.joy.pm . What is library.joy.pm? I take notes when reading books. But I do…
There is little software in the development community that raises so much anger as Jira. It is not a bad piece of software, don’t get me wrong, but we’ve seen so much misuse there that it is not hard to find people that recall past battle scars when they confront it again. I will focus in Jira for the sake of the storytelling but this is applicable to every single project management software.…
I’ve had this conversation so many times I have to turn this into a blog post. This is a controversial topic. I understand that some people need estimations and I may not be an authority to rant about this but… this is my personal space :-). A lot of times when dealing with software projects we say we are optimizing for predictability. We want to build projects in such a way that we know…
If you are here is because probably you’ve heard the trend. Every big company that appreciates herself is creating an internal developer platform (IDP, from now on). Thank god some companies are starting to notice that not every single person in the company should be pushing features forward but some people should definitely be thinking on how we improve our daily work. Often, for some reason,…
Introduction I've just finished "A Philosophy of Software Design" by John Ousterhout just two days ago. It is a book on software design. I've been reading a lot about the topic of complexity lately and this came as a recommendation from Lee Hambley . Good stuff to come. Some things I loved We need to talk about design : We need to talk about the interfaces we show in our code. We need to open the…
One of the tools I've always wanted in my tool belt was a graphing tool for text files. Since I handle a lot of text that goes into repositories it is always a bit of a pain to somehow to version control diagrams. Today we will dive a bit into the world of Graphviz. A tool that turns scripts written into the dot language into images. Those scripts describe directed graphs. We can anyway emulate…
Let’s play a bit with Twitter data. There is a Spanish saying that says “La felicidad va por barrios” which is used like “every dog has its day” but close-to-literally translates into “happiness goes to some neighbours”. Me and some friends wanted to check if happiness in Twitter depends on your neighbourhood too. Yes, I know it is a weak justification for writing software but… ¯_(ツ)_/¯ This is my…
One of the new funny things I found in emacs is org-edit-special. I keep my config files on GitHub in an org mode file. Since I am in an org mode the snippets and indentation and all the stuff are from org mode major mode which is a pain in the ass. For that purpose: org-edit-special to the rescue! If we have an org mode file like the following: * Homebrew I'll add homebrewe'd emacs packages to…
I am not such a big fan of paper. I don’t know. Maybe it is just me but I found it extremely inconvenient for taking notes on how code should work. It is too far away for my development environment. They are difficult to share, specially in a remote environment, easy to lose and difficult to transform. Also on paper everything looks easy and good ;) I have used several alternatives for different…
Amazon has just announced Polly and I wanted to give it a try. Of course the first thing that came to my mind was: elfeed ! Polly is not free but 4$ per 24 hours seems reasonable in order to read a post from time to time. Anyway let’s start there, get the ball rolling, and if it works well maybe we can think in adding more backends. So, let’s go to work! I was trying the command line and it looked…
I left Medium as a main host for my site. Don’t get me wrong. It is a great platform. I cannot recommend it enough and for a non hosted solution I think it is the best you can get. This is one of those “it is not you, it is me” situations. I want to be back to regular blogging. Something more hand made. Something I can do from emacs. I am willing to sacrifice a bit more reach in exchange for a bit…
I often use elfeed to go quickly through my RSS subscriptions. There are some of them that I want to take more time to read. Yes, it is mostly text but it is super useful. I send the entries that I need more time to read to pocket. I do that because I can use pocket client in my mobile phone or in the desktop or wherever the hell I am. I can also use any spare moment in the bus or the airplane…
We all heard it. Probably some of us lived it. That beautiful moment when somebody asks: “why don’t we rewrite our full application?” Things to consider before starting I’ve always said that we humans have the beautiful power of learning from other people’s experiences so let me tell you mine: You will always lose features. Nobody knows completely what the application does up to the smallest…
Let’s go bleeding edge! We are going to compile the latest version of emacs. Just: git clone git://git.savannah.gnu.org/emacs.git ./autogen.sh ./configure --with-ns make bootstrap make make install I’m compiling the OsX version. In linux probably you will not need the with-ns flag. After some minutes you own built Emacs.app will be in the nextstep folder. The last “make install” does not actually…
Good commit messages are the unicorn of the person maintaining legacy code. I will try to review some commit messages I’ve found over the years with its pros and cons. I’ll break this into two categories: solving bugs and adding features. Solving bug commit messages The brief Fixing code Pros : At least it is not destroying code Cons : What the hell is happening there? I can commit anything under…
Now that we are hiring at Platform161 I spent some time thinking about values and culture at the workplace. There is one term that, in my opinion, is completely misunderstood. Ambition. Warning : All the things I am about to write are my opinions and of course they are highly opinionated. We had a discussion because of a candidate that came here saying that he aspired to manage a team of people in…
I just moved to a new Microsoft Sculpt keyboard. I am more than happy with it. I wanted to move to a split keyboard for a long time but I never had the guts to try. Indeed I wanted to move to a Model 01 but this makes a good intermediate step. This is the first Microsoft product that I buy that feels really beautiful. It is really nice to have it in your table. The position of the hands is really…
Tmux is an awesome tool. One of its greatest uses is that is allows us to pair if you share the session. Anyway the setup is always a little bit complicated if you want to do it really right. Let’s see what we can do. The simplest scenario Let’s start in our computer all alone. Tmux sessions are run by a daemon the same way as screen does. Let’s create a new session where we will pair tmux…