Thoughts, learnings, and updates from Tabs (Lady of Code)
Although I ditched the idea of New Year Resolutions in my early 20s and joked that my New Year’s Resolution was not to have New Year’s Resolutions, it was only recently a smidge of smugness set in. I still goal-set up the wazoo. In fact, I do celebratory recaps and yearly goal-setting with friends; I even designed a lil low-effort program for it. If I wasn’t intentional my life would be chaos…
Autonomy is the concept of self-governance—the freedom to decide without external control. Agency is the extent to which an entity can exert control and act. We have both as humans, and unfortunately LLMs would need both to have true artificial general intelligence (AGI). This means that the current wave of Agentic AI is likely to fizzle out instead of moving us towards the sci-fi future of our…
The rush to integrate large language models (LLMs) into production applications has opened up a whole new world of security challenges. AI systems face unique vulnerabilities like prompt injections, data leakage, and model misconfigurations that traditional security tools just weren’t built to handle. Input manipulation techniques like prompt injections and base64-encoded attacks can dramatically…
Is this your first foray into AI red teaming? And probably red teaming in general? Great. This is for you. Red teaming is the process of simulating real-world attacks to identify vulnerabilities. AI red teaming is the process of simulating real-world attacks to identify vulnerabilities in artificial-intelligence systems. There are two scopes people often use to refer to AI red teaming:
A system card accompanies a LLM release with system-level information about the model’s deployment. A system card is not to be confused with a model card, which conveys information about the model itself. Hooray for being given far more than a list of features and inadequate documentation along with the expectation of churning out a working implementation of some tool by the end of the week.
LLM breaches jumped 180 percent in the last year. If you ship AI features, you need a one-page map of the dangers—and the fixes. This five-minute TLDR walks through the OWASP Top 10 for LLMs, from prompt injection to unbounded consumption, with concrete mitigations you can copy-paste today.
As AI technology advances, so must security practices. System prompts drive AI behavior, so naturally, we want these as robust as possible; enter system prompt hardening. Increased reuse of system prompts affects their prevalence, affecting the number of attacks to manipulate them. No one would look at their AI’s mangled output and decide ‘Maybe the real treasure was the prompts we made along the…
Technical writing… I almost want to say ‘how hard can it be?’, but I immediately suspect I’d follow that up with a ‘famous last words’ at some point in the next few months. My original intentions were to write notes from Board Infinity’s Technical Writing course as an in-depth review. This ended up being fruitless due to the course being geared towards beginners - which I am not. Instead, I’ll…
In the middle of writing a rant and a half (thanks, Twitch chat), I ended up with a list. That list kept growing, so it’s now its own article instead. Below is a non-exhaustive list of things I consider when picking a tech stack for a project. The weighting of all of these differs between projects. What I’m looking for is: How flexible is the stack? Where does customisation to the project happen?…
First things first: Listen to your body. Don’t get other people sick. I write this article having fallen ill a week ago, home-bound and literally voiceless. I advocate against working while ill and believe people should rest most of the time. I, however, do not quite follow this advice (‘do as I say, not as I do’). If I’m staring at a screen anyway I’d lament any stagnation of my endless to-do…
Design has impacted how I handle myself in various situations across all spheres of my life - personal, professional, social, and everything in between. More specifically - trying to become better at design has led me to practice a certain subset of skills involving empathy and related characteristics. I try to do things to the best of my ability. When I first started learning about design as a…
Programming paradigms dictate the way programs are implemented - conceptually, they give them a specific structure, style, and characteristics. I use ‘paradigm-agnostic’ to mean someone who doesn’t constantly advocate specifically in favour of one programming paradigm. Do you need to be paradigm-agnostic? No. Plenty of developers make a great living having learnt one language, and perhaps a…
For one of my 100-Day Challenges, I chose to dive into Three.js , a JavaScript 3D library. It’s easy to start learning, and it becomes difficult to master with the inclusion of shaders. If you’re too lazy to click that and don’t know, it leverages WebGL . For the portion of readers who are consistently and ignorantly (fair, we all do it) in character: WebGL is OpenGL wrapped up for the web. OpenGL…
I’d like to make one thing clear before we approach The List: Behave like a professional before you start advertising. Make a free website, buy a domain, make your profiles, set up the relevant socials, and put some examples of your work out there so people can see what they’re signing up for. People will ask for this to verify your work, and to refer you. If you can’t verifiably demonstrate what…
We have on our hands another contentious topic (at least according to Tech Twitter/X): recommending a language to learn. People are often so unfoundedly opinionated on which language to recommend to coders and staunchly back specific languages much like the fanboying behind PS2 vs. Xbox of yesteryear (yes, emo millennial present 🙋🏽♀️). Why aren’t we recommending languages the way we’d pick them…
It was a dark and stormy night … Not that you noticed, seeing as you were probably holed up in your home, alone, buying a domain name for your next big idea before it has even materialised. Key point: alone, as in working solo, and not as in a B-rated horror film with a jump scare around the corner. To get from that domain name, or idea, to an actual project deliverable, you will require: A plan;…
Contrary to popular belief, a project need not be helpful to other people. If creativity is one of your core personality strengths, tossing aside the notion of usefulness now and again in favour of joy would do you good. Let’s get into it. What makes a project good ? A good project is one that properly serves its purpose. So first things first: Why are you doing this project? Who is the audience?…
I’ve been reflecting on my learning tech over the past five years. Like most developers, that’s included a vast array of tools and tech. Most of the following observations result from my interactions with Gatsby, Strapi, GraphQL, and tangential tech. I’ve also used tools that remained… Low-key. Bear in mind this is more of a dive into the things I most appreciated and my decision-making process…
This planning process actually happened during stream , where I made all the following decisions and set up a workflow on Trello. Here lies my first tweet . Roughly, items I will post will consist of: Articles: technical stuff on my Lady of Code blog, self-development stuff for System You Newsletter: personal ^ including above stuff [Links, Atlantis, challenge, pun/joke] Twitter threads: writing…
Look, I had to. Like many devs thinking we’re funny and nerdy, I’ve titled posts similarly every time I joined a new platform since my teens in order to pass initiation into the cool kids club (nerds are cool and I refuse to be told otherwise). It’s practically a bug we’ve all got at this point. Anyway - this is me committing to being non-committal about writing blog posts. I’ve put it off for…