Tech briefs and notes by Jeff Sheets
Just casually (and slightly embarrassingly) announcing the geekiest project page I’ve ever built: the Omaha Fish Fry Tracker 🐟 Fish fries in Omaha are like a big deal , and amazingly fun and quirky and community at its best. Like the best fish and chips, sometimes baked, fried shrimp, meat wheel raffles, pickle cards (not pull-tabs cause I’m not in Minnesota and in Nebraska we call them pickles),…
I’ve had this idea in my head for maybe ~17 years. I remember talking about it when iPhone’s first started shipping custom apps in the app store. Build a simple website (or app) that tells us Husker fans what radio station is broadcasting the game near wherever I happen to be. That’s it. Super simple concept. Around 10 years ago I started building it as a static website. Figuring out the location…
The Excel to SQL converter you didn’t know you needed So I’ve been using Claude Code for SQL generation lately and it’s honestly magical. My 🤯 moment: I can copy/paste a bunch of Excel rows directly into the terminal - item numbers, descriptions, whatever - and Claude Code just gets it . Even a screenshot works. Like, I’ll paste in something messy where there are bold category headers above…
And why your CI/CD should use npm ci TIL that I’ve been misunderstanding how npm lockfiles work! I always thought npm install would automatically update to the latest versions within your semver ranges, but that’s not quite right. Though it was plausibly right for old versions of npm but changed a few years ago… How NPM Install Actually Works Here’s the key insight I missed: npm install will only…
Mike Judge recently wrote a viral post asking “Where’s the shovelware?” - basically arguing that if AI coding tools were really making developers extraordinarily productive, we’d be drowning in new apps by now. He put together compelling data showing flat growth across every software category despite widespread AI tool adoption. Mike’s frustration is palpable and his data is solid. He captures…