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A Developer’s Guide to Understanding Markov Chains in AI
Muscling in on the theoretical mathematics used in Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help you transition towards the skills that AI developers use. Or at least, it can help you appreciate what is going...
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Tips for Developers Moving Sectors in the Software Industry
An important career pivot for any developer — whether forced by layoffs or perhaps a desire to start something new — is moving from one industry sector to another. This might even involve a complete...
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Anti-Agile Project Tracker Linear the Latest to Take on Jira
Some months ago, I looked at the issue and project tracker Plane. This is part of my ongoing mission to find sensible replacements for the old warhorse, Jira. Now, when agile planning, there have...
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The Glamorous Toolkit: Testing a Software Exploration Tool
We’ve always been rather conservative when viewing code, data and other software structures. We’ve used file browsers, sometimes with some type of preview modes. Then we pass on code or data to...
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How to Run a Local LLM via LocalAI, an Open Source Project
Earlier this year I wrote about how to set up and run a local LLM with Ollama and Llama 2. In this article, I’ll look at an alternative option for running large language models locally. While Ollama...
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A Developer’s Guide to Getting Started with LlamaIndex
A Large Language Model represents a moment in history, forever frozen in the time they were built. Leveraging an LLM that doesn’t include current or unreachable information is a problem that most...
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Applying Agile Techniques to AI: Lessons from Amazon Fresh
I live in West London, not San Francisco, so I never expected to enjoy any Artificial Intelligence firsts. But the first Amazon Fresh opened in Ealing in 2021. When I visited late one night, it was...
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How to Speed up Regular Expressions under Production Pressure
I feel a bit guilty about pointing out the advantages of using regular expressions in several posts, without ever mentioning how slow they can be. In many application cases, regex speed is not an...
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Coding Test for Llama 3: Implementing JSON Persistence
While building a decentralized Twitter in a previous post, I included some code that implemented JSON persistence. With the launch of Meta’s Llama 3 this month, I thought it’d be a good opportunity to...
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SQL Schema Generation With Large Language Models
I’ve looked at both regex and JSON persistence generation with LLMs, but it is Structured Query Language (SQL) that many believe is handled well by AI. To help celebrate SQL’s 50th birthday, let’s...
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Getting Started With OpenAI’s GPT Builder, and How It Uses RAG
After being impressed by their first ChatGPT experience, many users may be motivated to try to tailor the experience to their specific domain. We know that retraining an LLM is not a simple task, and...
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From Cards to Clouds: A Family Tree of Developer Tools
What with the 60th birthday of BASIC and SQL turning 50, I felt inspired to look back into software development’s past. Then when I saw Ian Miell’s diagram that he originally made for a presentation...
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Reviewing Code With GPT-4o, OpenAI’s New ‘Omni’ LLM
This week OpenAI gave us access to GPT-4o (“o” for “omni”), which aims to compete better in speech recognition and conversation. It’s is almost certainly a stronger LLM, too. But can it do a code...
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Reversible Computing for Developers: Understanding the Basics
There’s been a lot of talk about how AI is impacting software engineering, mostly focusing on the positive use cases for developers. But there is a mounting suspicion that the sheer amount of...
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GPT-4o and SQL: How Well Can an LLM Alter Its Own Schema?
Although no large language model (LLM) has ever ridden a bike, they clearly understand the role of cycling within the domain of human transport. What they seem to offer software developers is a...
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A Developer Guide to Using Glamorous Toolkit On AT Protocol
In this post we will explore the AT protocol using Glamorous Toolkit (GT), a moldable development environment tool. The AT Protocol sits beneath the Twitter competitor, Bluesky. The last time we...
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Introduction to Virgil, a New Language by Wasm’s Co-Creator
I came across a quote from the author of the language Virgil, Ben Titzer, who also happens to be a co-creator of WebAssembly: “I’m not looking to compete with Zig,” Titzer said. Having recently played...
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Work With SQL via Plug-Ins: An Introduction To Using Steampipe
SQL has always been a data lingua franca, allowing hard data to be extracted from different domains. This is why I was specifically intrigued by the way Steampipe can read app data through SQL. It has...
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Introduction to Gleam, a New Functional Programming Language
When my colleague read my Virgil post, he immediately suggested I look at Gleam. It is cool and new — version 1 was released in March this year — and comes out solidly on the functional side of...
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Return to the Rails Way: Installing Ruby on Rails in 2024
One of the first posts I published here was about Sinatra, because I was fairly sure most people were unfamiliar with this “mini” version of Ruby on Rails. Maybe I also assumed that Rails was a...
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