Posts tagged with “dev”
41 posts with this tag.
- Coding agents and the plasticity of code23 Dec 25
Code has always felt rigid to me. Brittle, even. Most of the ways you poke, prod, or change it will break it. And even when you know what you're doing and when you're making a change that's unambiguously a good one you often need to break it in one place and then manually fix it up in a dozen others to compensate....
- Fixing slow Zed agent startup times17 Dec 25
I've been using Claude Code via ACP (Agent Control Protocol) in Zed, and while the integration is brilliant, starting a new Claude session took noticeably longer in Zed than running claude directly in the terminal; ~30s vs about 5s. And it was particularly frustrating because there's no /clear slash command via ACP---the only way to clear the context, which I d all the time is to re-start the agent, which (because of the delay) breaks my flow....
- Switching from Jekyll to VitePress2 Dec 25
This site has run on Jekyll since 2014 (or even before, I think; but some secrets are lost to time). Ten years is a good run for any technology choice, but I've finally made the switch to VitePress. The source is open, so you can check it out for yourself....
- 11ty and Vite for modern static websites24 Nov 25
I've been using 11ty for static site generation for a while now (not this site---that's Jekyll---but for other stuff) and it's great. But for a recent project I needed proper asset bundling, hot module replacement (HMR), and access to the npm ecosystem without building my own pipeline. Enter Vite....
- The great 2025 email yak-shave: O365 + mbsync + mu + neomutt + msmtp12 Sept 25
For years I was a happy user of mu4e in Emacs. But then a few years ago my employer turned off password-based IMAP auth and broke my (Office 365-based) work email, so I had to make alternative email arrangements....
- Running Claude Code within Zed23 July 25
After several months using Zed's built-in Agent panel I've switched to Claude Code. The main reason is cost. I'm still using the same models---still primarily Sonnet (and occasionally Opus) 4---but using them via the Agent panel incurs per-token billing via the Anthropic API. I was racking up a lot of costs (around 100USD/week) even with a bit of restraint, although still using it fairly heavily during all work days....
- Automated RPi Web Kiosk Setup in 202516 July 25
As part of a recent art installation I've needed to set up lots (well, dozens) of Raspberry 5s to run as fullscreen Chromium "kiosks" with a pre-set URL (network connected, but with no keyboard/mouse)....
- Agentic Elixir superpowers: Zed + Tidewave + AshAI6 June 25
For a few years now whenever I need to build any sort of networked interactive experience, I reach for Elixir (with Phoenix LiveView and Ash). It's an extremely productive combination, especially when you want to do more complex client/server information flows than the standard request/response UX. I've also (for the last year or two) ditched Emacs for Zed. Again, if you take the time to master these tools I think they're excellent....
- Format Markdown on save in Zed using Prettier20 Sept 24
One thing I've particularly enjoyed since switching to Zed is format-on-save, which is turned on by default in most programming modes. However, it's not turned on by default for Markdown files....
- Jekyll build speedups for Ruby 3.22 Feb 23
There's a bunch of buzz about Ruby's new YJIT in v3.2.0. I have to develop and maintain a bunch of Jekyll websites for work, some of which are getting into "non-trivial build time" territory (or maybe I'm really easily distracted, but a 30s build is enough for me to break my flow)....
- Handling Square Webhooks in Phoenix22 Jan 23
My brother's cafe donates a dollar to the local community centre for every coffee sold, and over the summer I built him a live "donation counter" which displays a small "thankyou" animation when anyone buys a coffee. It's a web app which they run on an iPad sitting on the coffee machine....
- rclone: exclude all git repos11 Jan 23
For a long time I've used rclone for remote backups and it's awesome. I have a script which syncs all the files I care about on my laptop to cloudstor (which, being on the Australian university network has the benefit that I get 1Gbps upload when I'm on the ANU network). My institution (the ANU)...
- So this is how it feels when the robots come for your job30 June 22
- So this is how it feels when the robots come for your job: what GitHub's Copilot 'AI assistant' means for coders30 June 22
I wrote a piece for the Conversation about GitHub's new Copilot AI programming assistant. You can head over there to read it if you like....
- Redacting craiyon prompts with imagemagick22 June 22
I've been messing around with craiyon (formerly DALL-E mini), because who hasn't been doing that recently....
- Pulling apart Zoom attendance csv dumps in tidy R23 May 22
My team ran some Zoom training last week and today I needed to figure out who actually attended across all the days, and for how long....
- Running an AI neural style transfer model under Singularity1 Feb 22
I've recently been given access to a beefy AI server (6x RTX3090s!) which is managed via SingularityCE, whose homepage boldly asks and then forgets to answer the question: "What is SingularityCE?"...
- Deploying a Phoenix app (with LiveView) on fly.io27 Oct 21
Things to note:...
- Cutting ruby CI pipeline times with pre-installed bundles21 Oct 21
I (and, increasingly many of my colleagues) are using Jekyll to create open (CC-licenced), hackable, acessible course websites & teaching content for our classes. We use a self-hosted GitLab server for all the websites sources, and then build/deploy them with GitLab CI. It works well, it means I don't have to fight with our LMS to do interesting things, and it means I can open my learning materials to everyone (not just those who are privileged e...
- openconnect setup for institutional VPN access18 Oct 21
My institution's IT policies have recently changed and port 22 is now blocked from off-campus. That's a real pain if you use ssh to push/pull from our on-prem GitLab servers (which I need to do all the time)....