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Your Jagged Circle of Competence
Personal growth sits where human strengths and AI capabilities intersect.
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Writing and Essays
A collection of posts, spanning engineering, leadership, and experiments.
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Today I Learned
AWS Service Comparison and Cheat Sheet
Note: these were created primarily with ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, with a bit of back and forth prompting, pasting in AWS docs and correcting things. AWS main topology and infrastructure options Feature AWS Regions AWS …
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Today I Learned
Creating Diagrams with ChatGPT and Mermaid.live
It turns out that ChatGPT (and other large language models) are great at generating diagrams as well as text. If you ask ChatGPT to make a diagram then it might try to use Dall-e and draw one from scratch. Dall-e and oth…
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Today I Learned
Introduction to TypeScript
I recently started work on a new project and started transitioning the JavaScript into TypeScript, so thought I'd write some notes. TypeScript is made by Microsoft and basically enhances JavaScript by adding a whole load…
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Today I Learned
The Unimaginable Sizes of Graham's Number and Other Large Numbers
I was talking to my kids about large numbers like a googol (10^100) and a googolplex. I knew bits and pieces about bigger number but not enough to confidently explain it until now. Addition, multiplication, iteration and…
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Today I Learned
Making JavaScript Behave Like Python for Script and Module Distinctions with Bun
While working on a JavaScript project using the chalk library to stylize terminal output, I found an interesting thing about handling JavaScript files as both importable modules and executable scripts, much like Python's…
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Today I Learned
Setting Up Vuls for Package Vulnerability Scanning on Linux Servers
When managing Linux servers, it's crucial to ensure they're free from vulnerabilities. I recently explored various package vulnerability scanners and stumbled upon Vuls, an open-source tool that impressed me with its pow…
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Today I Learned
Dokku Setup
This is an overview of how to get a server set up running Dokku, with wildcard domains. Out the box Dokku image from DigitalOcean: https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/dokku Locally Git setup: DOKKU_HOST=ssh.example…
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Today I Learned
AlphaGo's Impressive Victory Over Lee Sedol
In 2016, DeepMind's AlphaGo program achieved a historical milestone by defeating Lee Sedol, one of the world's top Go players. While the raw skill of AlphaGo was impressive, one particularly interesting aspect was its un…
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Today I Learned
Using Docker Compose Watch instead of Bind Mounts
Docker Volumes The standard way to keep files in sync between a Docker container and your host is using volumes. These use (normally) use bind mounts under the hood. You can do this on the command line: docker run -v /pa…
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Today I Learned
Distributing Python Packages on PyPI
I ran through Packaging Python Projects today to get Clipea installable with pip install clipea-cli. (I originally wrote Clipea in PHP to get it working quickly but someone kindly ported it to Python.) pip packages are h…
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Today I Learned
Making a custom "GPT" for ChatGPT
First thing's first: GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer but for some reason OpenAI have reused the name for one of their products. What's a Generative Pre-trained Transformer really? These are artifical ne…
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Today I Learned
How til.dave.engineer works
The site is a basic Eleventy site. You can install with npm install and build with npm run build. Use npm run serve for development. Most of the code that turns the repo of markdown files into a website is in .eleventy.j…
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Today I Learned
Making API Specifications with Wiretap and AI
I work with APIs most days and occasionally come across one without an accurate API specification. This happened recently and I thought it would be worth creating a spec before starting to use the API: that way I could m…
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Today I Learned
Patching Transitive Dependency Vulnerabilities in PHP Projects with Composer
We encountered a challenge recently with a security vulnerability in a transitive dependency. This was where our project depended on a library (let's call it acme-corp/foo), which then depended on another library (let's …
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Today I Learned
Getting started with Amazon Lex
Today, I was setting up an Amazon Lex chatbot and came across a couple of challenges. In simple terms, Amazon Lex is like a more structred version of ChatGPT. It uses advanced natural language understanding (NLU) and aut…
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Today I Learned
CSS Variables
Revisiting CSS: A Pleasant Surprise I don't often write CSS. To my surprise, I discovered that modern CSS now has its own native variables, known as Custom Properties. These are now widely supported across all major brow…
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Today I Learned
Tidy up local and remote branches in git
Your remote tracking branches This cleans up the big origin list you get when you do git branch --remote git remote prune origin Local branches that have been merged This removes your local branches that have been merged…
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Today I Learned
Exploring OpenAI's GPT-4 Vision API and a handy shell script to query it
OpenAI recently made their GPT-4-backed vision capabilities available to API developers. Here's OpenAI's Vision API Guide. After seeing this demo on Twitter and examining the code here, I decided to experiment with it my…
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Today I Learned
Extracting an Installed APK from an Android Device
I was trying to get a copy of an Android app APK file today. This can be really handy if you need to back up an app that's not on the Play Store anymore, or if you're trying to debug a problem and you don't have the orig…
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Today I Learned
Docker Shortcuts
Drop into bash on the most recently ran container: docker exec -it $(docker ps -ql) bash
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Today I Learned
Vector Databases Overview
I was having a look around at vector databases to have a play with document search and realised that suddenly there's support all over the place for them, even from the big players. ELI5: geo databases query 2 dimensiona…
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Today I Learned
GPUs are non-deterministic
This means they can do the same calculation twice and get different answers. Be careful if you use GPUs for security related things. This is because of how floating point arithmetic works in CPUs/GPUs - the same thing th…
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Elsewhere
Post-Quantum Cryptography: It’s already here and it’s not as scary as it sounds
A beginner’s guide to building Quantum Computers, breaking encryption, and stopping quantum hackers.
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Elsewhere
Amazingly Alarming Autonomous AI Agents
Let’s see if we can make our own autonomous AI agent in 25 lines of code.
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