TJ VanToll | Principal Developer Advocate
A collection of the stuff TJ VanToll is working on and interested in.
Latest posts
Using Blues Mojo to Measure Power Usage—A Case Study
Detecting Anomalous Devices With Notehub Smart Fleets
Using Batch Jobs to Automate Notehub Workflows
Configuring Your Notecard for GPS Tracking—A Beginner's Guide
The Shocking Viability of Vibecoding
The hottest new programming language is English — Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) January 24, 2023 I’ve been aware of “vibecoding” and the growing set of tools that allow you create apps without writing code, but it wasn’t until the term made it to the front page of the New York Times that I decided to take these tools seriously. From the article: “Since talking about my vibecoding experience on…
I’ll Never Build an Ugly Demo Again
As a long-time developer advocate, one constant struggle of mine has been building good-looking demo applications. I have little-to-no design talent, and although I’ve worked with many talented designers over the years, I’ve always been hesitant to “waste” their time on the trivial sample apps I build. But over the last few weeks I’ve increasingly realized that this will never be a problem for me…
It’s Never Been Easier to Start in IoT—Because of AI
IoT development is super hard. I know this first hand as a long-time web developer that started at Blues 3+ years ago, and suddenly found myself needing to learn a bit of electrical engineering, how to read a hardware datasheet, and the basics of memory management in C. It was overwhelming. And I’m not going to lie—it still is today. Building physical things is hard, and most companies that do it…
AI’s Effect on Blog Revenue—My Data
When I started this blog in 2012 one of my motivations was to make a bit of money. In those days if you had a successful blog that generated traffic, you could work out an ad deal and bring in some recurring cash for your effort. And it worked—at least a little. By 2016 or so my blog was generating $40–$50 a month, which wasn’t life altering, but it was a nice bit of recurring revenue for keeping…