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Playgrounds for Developers: Uses and Design Patterns
If there is one thing that makes it easier for me to look at new software — and share functionality with others — it is a well executed example playground. In recent times they have become staples of...
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Introduction to LocalStack, a Drop-In Replacement for AWS
This post was going to be about System Initiative, a “Lego for deployment” service that I looked at last July and which has recently gone public. But I noticed that their demo seems to be tightly...
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How System Initiative Treats AWS Components as Digital Twins
When I last looked at System Initiative (SI), in July 2023, it was still in closed beta. But in September this year, it was launched publicly, so I wanted to see what it looked like now. At first...
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Why LLMs Within Software Development May Be a Dead End
While the title Does current AI represent a dead end? is clearly made to encourage debate, there is a case within this academic article that is particularly pertinent to software developers: “Current...
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Nue: A New Static Site Generator Taking on Next.js
How goes the war? The war against… bad caching, slow load times, security breaches, scalability problems, SEO, or whatever we are told we have to fight this month when developing for the web. Web...
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Rediscover the Joy of Early Web Development With XSLT
I was a bit surprised to hear a recent talk by a teenager about the joys of eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT). It’s an old web language, having debuted in 1998, so my initial...
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Introduction to Markwhen, a Markdown Timeline Tool for Devs
As a developer, I like Markdown. The argument against its use is that the format is not ruthlessly enforced — it allows divergent versions and similarly named patterns, for instance. Yet its weakness...
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Introduction to Using Grep With Regular Expressions via Warp
I have written several posts on regex, and its combination with grep is one of the more practical combinations on the command line. But on reading Ian Miell’s post about grep, I was reminded why I...
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Top Dev Tools and Web Developer Trends of 2024
Sometimes a technology grabs the limelight while also creating space and resources for other things to grow in the canopy. The extra money flooding in to the LLM space has had a secondary effect of...
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Developer Tools: What’s Ahead in 2025?
As a revolution approaches, the first visible change is a change of attitude. Developer tools aren’t usually an area where rapid revolutionary change occurs. But adding large language models (LLMs) to...
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Duck DB: Query Processing Is King
One of the ways in which modern databases silently helped rather poor programs during the first dot-com boom of the late ’90s was that they handled asynchronous queries — often when the rest of the...
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Getting Started With CodeGate, an Intermediary for LLM Devs
I suspect that the idea of being an intermediary between a remote LLM and an end user is a strong idea in itself, which is why I think looking at CodeGate will be valuable whatever your current plans...
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Avalonia: An Open Source Option for Cross-Platform UI Work
The problem with .NET has always been that Microsoft were somewhat slow to embrace non-Windows systems. To find a UI library that uses C# but runs on a MacBook is harder than it should be. One...
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Warp vs. Ghostty: Which Terminal App Meets Your Dev Needs?
After the recent review of Ghostty on The New Stack, I thought I’d take a look at it from the point of view of a Warp user. They are both terminal apps (GUI shells, if you like), although Warp is...
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How To Set Up and Run a Local LLM With Ollama and Llama 3
I’ve posted about coming off the cloud, and now I’m looking at running an open source LLM locally on my MacBook. If this feels like part of some “cloud repatriation” project, it isn’t: I’m just...
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Developer’s Introduction to the Replicate AI Playground
Right now, there is a whirling gyre around what to look at next within the LLM world. Should a developer be playing with existing models, extending existing models, or creating those models from...
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Introduction to Bolt: Does It Suit Professional Developers?
As a developer, I know my responsibility is to create or work with maintainable solutions — and we usually consider that to mean writing in such a way as to transmit knowledge to other human...
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Augment Code: An AI Coding Tool for ‘Real’ Development Work
I’ve been working in Visual Studio Code with Copilot running, just for the completions. But I’ve found them to be fairly solid — a bit like a junior dev who has an idea what you might want to write...
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Jujutsu: Dealing With Version Control as a Martial Art
Like most developers over the years, I got comfortable with a handful of git commands that I needed daily — and tried not to get into large merge battles. Even though I have regularly pushed the use...
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Gemini Code Assist Review: Code Completions Need Improvement
It was never going to be long before Google got into the game of code assistance with Gemini. The headline is the number of completions being offered for free on their platform — 90x what GitHub...
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Developer Review of Warp for Windows, an AI Terminal App
While I have been using the Warp terminal on my MacBook for some time, there has always been one problem: it never had a Windows version. While most tech these days is Linux-based, there are still a...
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Poisoning the Well and Other Generative AI Risks
One of the recent groups damaged by illicit AI generation are YouTubers, the video creators who host their own shows on YouTube. There are numerous cases of YouTube videos — specifically informative...
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Introduction to the OpenAI Agents SDK and Responses API
As OpenAI introduced what everyone else is calling the Agents SDK, it admitted that using the existing capabilities in a joined up fashion “can be challenging, often requiring extensive prompt...
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Developer’s Guide to the Built-In Tools of OpenAI Agents SDK
In my previous post, we looked at using the new OpenAI Responses API with the Agents SDK. In this post, I’ll look more closely at the built-in tools featured — and show how they can be used. I’ll keep...
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Cascii and Why Developers Should Use ASCII Diagrams
“Is that something devs do regularly, ASCII diagrams?” This post is an answer to this editorial challenge. It started after hearing about the Cascii app and reflecting on the fact that the development...
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Claude Code and the Art of Test-Driven Development
While I mostly like code completion, LLM assistants have given me quite a few problems with Visual Studio Code. When changing large language model (LLM) extensions for reviews, VS Code almost had a...
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