LLM Experiments: Recent Slop Projects Skip to the bottom for project list Slop that I generated and have been "orchestrating" for the past 2 months in order to "learn" LLM code generation and "development". Hehe. If I let my LLM subscriptions run out then I think I'll have enough to play with for a while. Favorites gnome-topbar is something I've been daily driving since starting on it. It was…
Why I Quit My Job I finally quit my third professional programming job. You must be thinking I'm insane for quitting a nice, easy job in the endtimes of LLMs and professional programming as we know it. The fact is, I've been planning this exit for a few years and I'll list below why. This is a continuation of this post that I made when I became a decade old programmer. I'm already feeling too lazy…
Bitcoin Open Source: Contribution Tracker [AI SLOP] I bought one month of an evil-corps LLM model usage and have been "vibe-coding" like the cool kids. Mostly it's because I can write a bunch of instructions, leave the computer and wash dishes and then come back and there's something done and I say "oooh! a present! it's slop!!! YUM". Anyway, I vibe-coded a tracker that runs nightly using Github…
Bitcoin Open Source: My Introductory Contributions It's almost the end of month 3 of the BOSS Challenge and I want to go over my contributions and thoughts on my work. Note: this isn't really for anyone uninterested in Bitcoin, so it can be safely ignored if you, for some odd reason, subscribe to this blog. Projects I was given a list of open source projects in the Bitcoin space to choose from…
[BOSS] Bitcoin Core Dev Build with Guix No AI was used to write this post. Intro I just recently finished up the first month of the 2026 BOSS Challenge , which is a multi-month initiative, hosted by Chaincode Labs, to get people interested in Bitcoin open-source software (BOSS) development. It consists of programming challenges and open source contributions to projects in the Bitcoin ecosystem. In…
Revisting My Previous Thoughts on Crypto Let's just say I've been evangelized as a Bitcoin maximalist. Instead of redacting my previous thoughts on the crypto industry , I will read through and respond to myself from one year ago. A bit of self-reflection, if you don't mind. I will state that I am not anti-crypto, per se, but I am anti-whatever I am about to describe. I am now anti-crypto, but…
3D Printing and Open Source I've been dabbling in a bit of DIY project electronics and wanted to design a few enclosures, but didn't want to send out to have something printed or mold injected and then have it not be what I wanted. So, instead, I decied it made more sense to spend a hundreds of dollars on a 3D printer. It turns out that my timing was perfect, cause there is a company called Bambu…
Old Functional Programming Email I clicked a dead link to Google Groups recently and landed back at a list of my old groups which happen to be for university classes that I was in. After browsing around for a while I found a post titled "Functional Programming" from a teaching assistant named "R". I recalled the context of this post immediately and it was basically dumb (actually dumb cause the CS…
Advent of Code 2024 - Elisp This year I completed AoC using Emacs Lisp. I would say that this year was a more legitimate completion than last, since I used less hints and reference solutions. Here is a link to my solutions. Sorry that they are uncommented and probably incomprehensible. Also a link to my AoC helper package which allowed me to read problems, fetch inputs and submit answers, all…
Emacs Secrets and use-package After following an article from the author of Mastering Emacs , I was quite pleased with source controlling some encrypted secrets that I use in Emacs regularly, such as my elfeed feeds or IRC password. In short, it looks like this: A file, secrets.el.gpg that contains: ( setq secret-1 " foo " my/erc-password " hunter2 " ) From use-package declarations in init.el I…
Test Post With Link [rss bugfix] A relative link to another post for RSS generation testing. Don't mind me, just fixing a bug in poogo (my static site generator) and giving it a test. Relative links, ex. to other posts, were working on the web, but broken on RSS.
Professional Bugfixer A semi-satiricle note about professional programming. When your time becomes limited in life, for instance, when you are no longer a child (maybe still a manchild) or student, it becomes a lot harder to be the type of programmer that companies want. Putting in long hours, designing complex systems, leading a team of developers - I constantly wonder how much this is actually…
Never Miss A Mention With ZNC (note for me cause I will forget this) ZNC allows you to have channel "playback" when you reconnect with your client, but it's easy to lose track of mentions, or not be able to see a mention on an active channel that surpasses 500 messages (ZNC max buffer) while you're away. For this you need to enable a ZNC module. First, navigate to the ZNC user, then the network…
Toggling Fools Using ERC To contradict my last post, I recently decided to replicate my Weechat IRC config in Emacs' ERC. Problem There is a nice Weechat feature that allows you to modify the message color for messages sent by nicks that match a given regex. ERC can easily do this as well and the easiest way to do this is by adding some nicks to a list of "pals" and "fools". After making fools'…
Tech Complacency This is a short memo about how I have reached complacency with my tech usage, namely with my operating system and editor. I have alluded to this in a few past posts and probably also contradicted myself. I'm not ashamed of this because I believe this is a common issue among computer addicts - at least the ones that behave similarly to me. When people discuss something like…
Some Thoughts on the Crypto Industry I've been working closely with numerous cryptocurrencies over the past four years and I cannot get past an observation (maybe limited by my own perception) of the industry and its technology. I will state that I am not anti-crypto, per se, but I am anti-whatever I am about to describe. I think crypto can provide a useful utility for people, namely transferring…
Pre-Guix System Install Thoughts Ok, listen. I said a few posts back that I wasn't going to distrohop again after Gentoo, but I lied. I just purchased a new Stinkpad, and I am going to give GNU Guix System a shot. It's an AMD machine, so there should be no need for any Nvidia hassle. In my mind, it will go smoothly! I'm making a public statement to hold myself accountable -- I shall give Guix a…
Learning Guile for Spring Lisp Game Jam 2024 Today I finished my entry for the Spring Lisp Game Jam 2024 . It's nothing really special, just a conversion of my Tetris clone, dotris, written in Guile Scheme. I wanted to use the game jam to learn Guile while being held accountable for actually doing something. I've been looking at Guile and reading the manual for a few months, toying with simple…
RSS/Atom Feed Reader in BASH! I'm on a Bash spree lately , or as some might say, "going absolutely bonkers", "getting down with the sickness", "getting a few screws knocked loose"...whichever you prefer. I just really had a craving for, what I call, "the arts and crafts of programming", AKA gluing a bunch of Unix/CLI tools together until you have something that kind of works. Imagine sitting in an…
My New SSG and Blog Welcome to my revamped blog that I made with my latest tinker project, poogo . Poogo is a static-site generator written in bash, which utilizes the Github markdown API to convert Markdown into HTML. Hugo -> Poogo With this I can say goodbye to Hugo ( sudo emerge --unmerge hugo ) and stop complaining about how I don't want to learn Hugo themes or figure out how to work it. I…
Distro-Hopping from Arch to Gentoo This past weekend (starting on a Thursday) I decided to scrap my Arch install and install Gentoo . I suppose you could say I fell for the old 4chan meme . Distro-hopping History Year ~2005 Ubuntu Installed on old laptop from a disc I got in a PC Magazine. Smashed the wifi card into the motherboard and that was the end of that install 2010 Ubuntu On Macbook. This…
The Open Source Influencer I've been interested in tech content creation recently and have been trying to guess the future of this modern programming career path. I'm constantly intrigued by devs who are able to escape wage slave jobs and become self sufficient somehow, whether it is by starting a business (the old way) or the new ways of social media influencing or content creation. Creating a…
My Return to a Custom Neovim Config At the end of 2023 I got antsy. I was finally going to do it...again. I was about to venture on leaving LazyVim and create my own Neovim config from scratch using lazy.nvim with inspiration and knowledge that I gathered from LazyVim (the greatest Neovim distro to date). My Vim Journey My first exposure to vi/vim was after I installed Linux and needed to edit…
A Late Start in Computer Programming Recently I've been giving advice (sometimes unsolicited) to people who want to shift into computer programming as a career. Being a late bloomer in programming is definitely manageable, but I believe it requires careful planning and a specific behavior. Overview This has been beaten like a dead horse by #learn2code tweets and Youtube videos, but these are the…
Ten Years a Dev Introduction This year will mark my tenth year working as a professional software engineer. Lately, I have been contemplating on my experience and my next steps and goals that I would like to achieve as a programmer. I also want to be sure that I don't fall into the same traps as I did before. #This post is intended as notes for my future-self.# Hopefully this will help me organize…
Mentorship The most valuable thing I got out of my first job was that I was being mentored by a senior guy - something I feel like will never come my way again unless someone is willing to mentor a doofus in his thirties with ten years of experience. He wasn't a modern "senior" engineer who has five years of experience either. He had about 30+ years of experience under his belt. It was really…
The If-Else Programmer I had a half-joke where I would tell people that all I did at a previous job was write if-else statements to fix every problem that came up. There are two reasons why I evolved into the if-else programmer: Ideas and creativity were ignored. Anything a developer offered to improve the code was rejected and deemed as not needed by management. The value was only found in things…