The LLM hype and AI bubble seem unfazed by 2026. If anything, it seems to be getting stronger with no end in sight. One thing I don’t see discussed often, though, are the long-term effects of LLMs on the joy of programming . Lets assume that the current trend regarding LLM’s ever-increasing adoption holds for a long time, and we end up in a future where “programming” is assumed to be tantamount to…
This year I’ve had little time or patience for denser reads, so I read mostly novels, mostly scifi or scifi-adjacent (I’m now taking a break from literature and going into Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads), and a lot of Neal Stephenson. Here are the books, in no particular order, with some notes. Nostromo (Joseph Conrad) Great book, but quite a slog for the most part. Nothing really happens until…
TLDR We launched Podlettr - go check it out! For nearly two years, me and my good friend Sérgio Fontes, an accomplished product designer, have been working on Podlettr - a great way to quickly catch up with your favourite podcasts. As the name implies, Podlettr is a letter from your podcasts. Reading is faster than listening, and with some AI magic, we convert hours worth of podcasts into…
It’s been a year since I moved my company’s infrastructure away from AWS. Being in a small team that was unfamiliar with AWS, it was the right move. Having used Fly.io for side projects before, I went with them as our new host. While not perfect, the experience has been overall a great success. The main motivation was how simple and hands-off Fly is, especially when compared with its polar…
Since Rails 5, Rails has had an encrypted credentials.enc file which you can use to store secrets like API tokens and passwords. I’ve come to see the shortcomings of this approach, and now I’m back to the traditional way of storing secrets on environment variables. Although it might be a simpler solution when starting out a new project, the long-term problems of credentials.enc are significant.…
The “catastrophe scenario” of AI in the software engineering job market has gained quite a lot of popularity, with people pointing out that current models already “do a better job” (what does that even mean?) than many professional programmers. I’m not sure I completely buy into this. Personally, I’ve found that the most useful use of LLMs during software development is to speed up tasks that I…
I’ve been working on a side project with a friend for well over a year now, and in addition to the joy of working with someone you like on a problem of your choice, I’ve had quite a lot of “aha” (or “oh…”) moments. We’re both basically happy with the state of our little project, with just a few small tweaks remaining before we can send it off into the world, except for one not-so-small thing:…
So dreary I didn't need to compact this image. After about two years living in metro Vancouver, I decided to leave. I’m in a smaller city in the Fraser Valley, and it has been great! My first time in Vancouver was for an interview at Amazon in 2019. I stayed at a hotel near the downtown office for a couple of nights, which was less time than I spent in the 6 different airplanes and a similar…
OpenAI is so much fun! I’d like to preface this by stating that Amazon is obviously a huge company, and my opinions are just that, one person’s opinions. There will probably be some people that share my frustrations while others have had a completely different experience. I interviewed at AWS in early 2020, pre-pandemic. The interview process is grueling and I spent considerable effort preparing…
Sapiens in an image. Sapiens has no central point being made; rather there’s an intricate web of mostly interdependent theories and speculations. This makes for an enjoyable read, however at times it is easy to lose sight of the original premises used to build up on increasingly speculative conclusions. His reflections on early humanity, what the author calls Cognitive Revolution and the…
Hvalsey church ruins, Greenland. Credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Number_57 Collapse is a fascinating, if somewhat exhausting, read. The central point of the book is that environmental changes, man-made or not, have been responsible for many a civilization’s collapse. In the year 2022 that claim might perhaps sound obvious, but the fascinating part is learning how these stories unfold,…
I’ve been playing with dalle-mini the last few weeks. Part of what makes it fun to play with are the bizarre and obtuse outputs. They reached that sweet spot between laughably bad and frighteningly perfect: they’re good enough to be understood and enjoyed, basically. I think that incompleteness is part of what makes it so amusing to toy with these things, and conversely what will make future…
This could have been a subway. Since moving to metro Vancouver I’m continuously surprised with how common electric vehicles have become. Some may see the rise of EVs as an exciting turn towards a futuristic solarpunk utopia. I see the opposite: they are a dystopia of sorts. They are a dead end, a waste of resources in the wrong direction, a false hope. The proliferation of personal electric…
Immigration sucks. In addition to the personal toll it takes on anyone, it is also mind-numbingly tedious and baroquely complex. Why aren’t things better by now? This reminded me of the so-called “digital nomad visas”. Searching for that term will get you a thousand clickbaitey Wordpress sites with the “20 best countries with nomad visas” or whatever. But how real are they really ? I’ll admit the…
Here’s something I’ve been wanting to write for a while: all the times (the ones I can remember, anyway) I bombed a software engineer job interview. There are so many “how I aced interviewing at X”/”how to pass X interview” floating around that I thought the opposite story would make for an amusing read. My first developer job was as an intern at a big tech company in 2012. I think that was one of…
I’ve been using LinkedIn basically since I started working as an intern back in 2012. My usage is mostly limited to posting my blog posts, except the couple of times I used the platform to search for a new job. So most of the time, LinkedIn has been pretty slow-paced, with maybe half a dozen random recruiters reaching out per year. However, since the Covid-19 pandemic started, and particularly in…
A couple of years ago I interviewed at one of the largest Ruby shops out there. Screening went well, and some days later I was invited for an onsite. These were the good old pre-covid days, so an onsite really meant onsite . You had to travel to the office, wherever that was. The thing is, an onsite is actually radically different depending on where you live . It follows that onsites introduce…
TLDR A simple metrics-based ranking system is good enough to decide who gets how many resources. Computational resources – CPU time, memory usage, network traffic etc – are limited. This may be more or less of a problem depending on project/company size and so on; if you’re working on a smaller product with limited traffic, it might not be meaningful at all. Once past a certain threshold though,…
TLDR I built android-analytics , a web analytics tracker running on my phone. Say you run a blog, personal website, small-time business page or something of the sorts. Say you also want to keep an eye on how many visitors you’re getting. The first thing that most people think at this point is “Google Analytics”. It mostly works and is free. Its also hosted by Google, which makes it very easy to…
Try searching for “free dynamic dns https”, “free domain with SSL” or anything similar. There won’t be a lot of meaningful results. Sure, some of the results are pretty close, like this guide on how to get free SSL certification from Cloudflare, or this one on setting up a free dynamic hostname with SSL, but they all assume you already own a domain . If you’re looking for a completely free domain…