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Why Capistrano Got Usurped by Docker and Then Kubernetes
While listening to the much appreciated intellectual property and digital rights advocate Cory Doctorow reading a little of his new book, I heard him mention the place in California called Capistrano....
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Tailwind CSS for Developers: Style without Using CSS Code
“Rapidly build modern websites without ever leaving your HTML” is the claim of Tailwind CSS, which is a popular framework in the HTML/CSS/Javascript jungle right now. It has sensible core defaults...
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An AI Safety Institute Benefits Big Tech, but Little Else
In what is known euphemistically as “legacy planning” in British politics, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak hosted the first AI Safety Summit at the beginning of the week. Invited were a range of famous...
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Here’s What a Software Architect Does in an Agile Team
So, you’re an architect. With AI twisting industry roles yet again, the question still gets asked: what do you do on an agile team? I don’t want to pretend this is a new debate; there was even a...
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Make Your Dev Life Easier by Generating Tests with CodiumAI
Many developers still claim they don’t like writing tests, so the idea of generating them using AI was always going to appeal. Of course, tests are not necessarily a secondary issue — with Test-driven...
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How to Conduct an Interview for a Senior Developer Role
In a previous post, I advised how to get through an interview as a candidate. This post brings you the view from the other side of the desk. Here, I discuss how to interview an outside candidate for a...
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A Web Developer’s Guide to Parsing HTML with C#
A question that appeared in my last post within a set of interview topics was: “Why is regex bad at parsing HTML?” So, what methods should one use to parse HTML? Developers use regular expressions...
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How a Developer Might Improve the Geolocation App what3words
Last month, I bumped into Terence Eden in the post-COVID revived tech meeting BarCamp London. Mr Eden, a prominent person in the UK tech scene, was helping to run this popular unconference. The last...
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The Promise of Riches from AI Wrappers
Whatever you decide to watch, YouTube will eventually place on your feed one of those videos that feature outsize claims in the title. Like a carnival barker at a circus, they announce the amazing...
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Large Language Models in 2023: Tools and Assistants for Devs
This year has been the breakout year for Large Language Models (LLMs). But developers are still at the early stages of working out how best to leverage their power. When I was told that a potential...
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AI Engineering: What Developers Need to Think About in 2024
Over the last year, many large language model (LLM) projects have been emerging quickly from the depths of research. Looking toward the upcoming year is less about following trends and more about...
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What Temperature Means in Natural Language Processing and AI
One of the issues that keeps bubbling to the surface with increasing use of ChatGPT is the occasional inclusion of obviously incorrect information within responses, which have been accurately...
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Introduction to Eleventy, a Modern Static Website Generator
I entered the world of Jamstack and static site generators when I launched a page with Publii and Netlify some time back. Since then the term Jamstack has been knocked back by Netlify. Nevertheless,...
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Getting up to Speed with Eleventy: Config and Collections
Last week, we set up Eleventy, a static site generator, and put it through some basic steps. I used the Warp command terminal and the Zed editor to create a nice cat-based index page. Have a quick...
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Introduction to Zig, a Potential Heir to C
I haven’t used C for a long time. At the very start of my computing days, I would see machine code on an austere school computer. When my friends went on to write their early 8 bit games, they used...
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Introduction to Web Components and How to Start Using Them
While an open innovation platform like the web encourages a wide variety of uses, the drawbacks of the chaos come in the cacophony of voices defining what the web currently is. Usually at this point...
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How to Exit the Complexity of Kubernetes with Kamal
When I wrote a recent post on Capistrano, I didn’t imagine that I would ever need to mention it again, as it is a relic of early app deployment history. What I didn’t realize was that Capistrano was...
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How to Set up and Run a Local LLM with Ollama and Llama 2
Last week I posted about coming off the cloud, and this week I’m looking at running an open source LLM locally on my Mac. If this feels like part of some “cloud repatriation” project, it isn’t: I’m...
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Introduction to Jupyter Notebooks for Developers
For years now I have seen people talk about Jupyter Notebooks, but I was never sure exactly what they were for. They are tied to Python and academic use, so I never found it convenient to fire one up....
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Using AI to Help Developers Work with Regular Expressions
Regular Expressions (regex) in this age of AI is an interesting area, because surely AI can analyse text well enough to make the tool itself redundant. The only problem is that as developers, we want...
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