markjgsmith

The problem with so called "White Hat Hackers", like in the recent case where they stole money from an institution just to tell them to fix a bug, is that their business model is reliant on exploitable bugs being in the software, and so inevitably they will end up creating the bugs so they can "fix" them. This is not a good deed.

And guess what will end up happening, they will be the ones making the LLMs, which you use to write the code, that they hold you hostage with.

A situation that programmers are all too familiar with. It happens again and again, you are sure you did what you had to do, there must be something wrong with the language or the code, it's lying! After much frustration you figure out that you were doing something silly that was causing the problem you were complaining about.

Here's an example that happened to me back in July that might be applicable to others. So I had been trying to optimise the render times of my publishing tool CLI. Something that was taking 5 mins started taking 45 mins. It was horrendous. But after much effort I got the rendering down to 12 seconds. I was very happy, it was so much faster than even what it was previously. But then it doubled to 24 seconds, and so I persevered, for hours and hours, testing everything I could think of. No matter what I did, it was double what it had been. And as I pushed forward things got even worse because the LLM that was helping started suggesting all sorts of crazy ideas, because we'd run out of all the normal things that could be affecting it. I eventually gave up.

After a break, I returned to my laptop, and thought, what the hell, I'll run it 1 more time, and wouldn't you know it, it rendered in 15 seconds! Well it turned out that I had been overdriving the hard drive by running it so much, and the system needs to run some cleanup tasks when you are creating then deleting thousands of files over and over, and that cleanup could never finish because I was creating and deleting more files by running the program over and over.

Letting the laptop alone for a while had given the background process enough time to finish it's activities, and so when I ran it on a fresh system with all the resources available, it was super quick.

Sometimes the best thing to do is nothing, allow the system to do it's thing.

I watched this YouTube video about weed culture in New Zealand yesterday evening, suggested to me by the algorithm. The icon in the list of videos was a bloke doing a bong wearing a black balaclava, not sure you can see that from the direct link, anyway it made the video look very distinctive.

It was kind of an interesting video, very low budget, a story of people trying to survive difficult circumstances, even the documentary maker is clearly making the best he can with not much resources. The community vibe is nice, sometimes people just want to be able to do something together.

I‘m not sure where I stand on weed to be honest. I don‘t smoke myself, I also don‘t drink alcohol, it‘s been many years now. I am very glad every morning to wake up sober, with a clear head. But I understand different people go through different stages in life at different times, and sometimes it is fun to be in an altered mind state, and you can learn things about your body and your mind, and interacting with people, a shared experience.

But I do worry that people and entire communities can become reliant on it to survive. And even if weed is a natural plant, it‘s not exactly a big motivator, so if your community is already in a tough spot, it could make things worse.

And the world is very competitive, there may well be people out there that are very happy for you to be stoned while they are building great things.

Anyway first thing this morning I open the guardian website and the top story is about a large gang of black balaclava wearing protesters closing down Dover in the UK.

The world has been doing a bit of a green tsunami to me these past few days, and no doubt this black balaclava thing has a green tinge somewhere in it.

The right complain a lot about how the main stream media is very captured by people with socialist tendencies. Same in universities. In the online world the right seems to have more of a presence, so much so that the left is always complaining about it. Anyway that's just some pre-amble, which you might or might not agree with, for this particularly simple idea I had yesterday.

Isn‘t it odd that people who‘s primary wealth is social capital, from which their financial capital is derived, are socialist leaning. What a shocker.

And when you think about it, in their position it‘s actually the most capitalist thing they could do.

What a strange world of contraditions we live in.

Still I do like watching many of them, a tiny bit of honey that gives this little bee the will to live through another day in this hexagon lattice of doom.

Just a few minutes after writing about the hexagon lattice of doom and pushing to github, haven‘t even published the post publicly anywhere, and Gemini is responding with answers containing the term cross-pollinate. That is some seriously dark hexagon lattice shit right there.

There definitely seems to be some "cross-pollination" going on somewhere.

I listen to right leaning podcasts and a lot of them say "The left has been winning for 60 years, blah blah blah". And they have a lot of good points.

And I listen to left leaning podcasts and a lot of them say "The right has been winning for 60 years, blah blah blah". And they too have a lot of good points.

But clearly they must both overall be talking a lot of shit.

I wonder if maybe both sides can actually both be talking truth at the same time. Perhaps they only see the dimensions that the other side is winning in, and can't see the dimensions they themselves are winning in. And what if the reason things are so fubarred at the minute is because we have just run out of dimensions to win? Maybe we are just full.

But then I listen to podcasts about physics and they say that there are likely an infinite number of dimensions, and so now I think that this could possibly take a while.

This symmetry is kind of tedious.

I was pondering my recent post on innequality. I ended that post by saying it was more important to focus on having a good vision and a plan, and so I was imagining the different types of large scale plans countries could have for dealing with various situations. The "it depends" conclusion is annoying but it really is the case a lot of the time, and it‘s actually a good thing, as long as you can recognise a good plan from a not so good plan.

Of course when you are making a plan and plotting a course of action you have to make compromises, make choices, and take calculated risks. The plan is the plan until something rather bad happens that you didn‘t expect, at which point you have to reformulate the plan, or switch to a backup / alternate plan. That‘s just reality.

Well it occurred to me that in this world where career politicians and lawyers tend to be in charge of countries, doesn't it make more sense for people with more experience in making tough decisions, having conviction, and taking action in a particular direction in response to outside events. There are jobs out there that do a lot more of this type of thing than politics and lawyering.

We might want to make sure these types of folks are more conversant and used to thinking about complex issues, which more and more rely on tech related knowledge. That way they could transition to making decisions that are relevant at the nation scale.

People that make rules for a living slow things down, people that do things get things done.

I fixed the issue I've been having with a Github Actions scheduled start that wasn't firing. In the end I had to make a change to the repo and push it to remote main branch. This appears to have reset the trigger which is now firing so the blog is being auto-built and published again every day.

Not great, as making bullshit changes like that could itself cause issues.

Also not great that Github support made it impossible for me to contact them to report the bug.

There's a lot of talk currently about inequality and wealth tax. It seems to me these discussions are constantly missing the real issues. On the surafe it seems like they are the issue because they exploit our emotions. Of course it seems incredibly unfair that some people have l9ts while others have not a lot.

But that's just a surface level way of looking at it. Reality is more complex, and actually it's not correct that inequality is always bad. The reality is that it depends on what you are trying to do. There are situations where inequality might actually be better for everyone.

Lets say you are in a moment where you need to make huge unimaginable leaps forward in society, things that would cost unimaginable amounts of money. What's important is not the inequality it's what the wealthy are doing with their extra money. With inequality you only need to convince a few people to invest in the important unimaginably expensive thing. If the wealth was more evenly distributed it would be much more difficult to put it all into the new important thing, especially if the mood of the country is not one of investing in things.

Of course you don't want people with not much wealth to be going hungry, but technically that is a different issue.

Whether you want inequality of not depends on the situation. Whats more important is knowing what you want, having a clear vision, and an effective plan to get there.

I‘ve been working on a new package in my publishing server. Not all the packages include actual endpoints, but this one does. Previously I had bundled the endpoints into the main distros, but I figured out a way for each package to have their own endpoints and the distros get assembled at build time. I think it‘s going to be quite a leap forward, and I just updated the old code to use the new system.

So far things are looking good and I was a bit suprised that such a bit change was actually rather straightward after a good night‘s sleep and a clear head. I think it‘s a good sign, that the core architecture is pretty solid, and very flexible. It‘s quite new and my mental models are still adjusting but the more I create new additions the more things fall into place, and the architecture is easier to reason about.

It‘s amazing what you can achieve with object oriented code when you have the right stucture in place, and it‘s also pretty cool how much you can get done with the help of an LLM. It‘s like having a team of architectects, that can re-design incredibly complex things in a flash, and with the object oriented structure much of the complexity can be neatly moved out of you working memory.

You kind of, sort of have a Tom Cruise from Minority report in your head, effortlessly moving around these shapes that each represent massive amount of code, and using the LLM to make connections and links between all the parts, to get phenominal visibility through space and time.

One thing that the world does a lot is non-ironically call you a bear while force feeding you a burrito. It happens constantly. One day you realise this and you can't unsee it. It's everywhere, in every gosh darn dimension.

Occasionally you walk away from a situation, and you think to yourself that perhaps this time it didn't happen. This is inevitably followed by yet another burrito force feeding incident.

And one incident leads to another.

It's likely evidence we are all in a giant game of burrito mega tetris.

It's fun until there are spinning burritos everywhere.

Usually ends in everyone turning into zombies.

The world is being artificially race conditionist for me again. Hardly any point in starting anything in my experience, it will only later be blocked in some very eggregious way, usually involving tsumamis, and even more infinitis pretending to be the opposite polarity infinity.

Just another infiniti war. This too shall pass.

So much waiting for things to pass recently.

I hate this useless post right now.

An interesting thing about my recent sprint to get the multi-target users working. I had been working for several days straight, through much confusion and all sorts of head winds, but got to the stage where all the unit and integration tests were passing on all parts of the software apart from core. I had been working with the LLM along side, helping me on many things the whole way through. Now we did run into a lot of issues along the way, but we were always able to work them out one way or another.

So when we got to the final push I gave the LLM the full list of failing tests. And we worked through them one by one, somewhat laboriously but we made good progress. That was until we got to the final test. There was literally 1 test left in all the several days of work, and wouldn't you know it, the LLM suddenly became completely incapable of doing the most basic of things.

It started deleting useful comments in the code that we absolutely needed. This is something that happens quite regularly because I guess there is a prune directive that often kicks in and it‘s always trying to prune and tidy up stuff which can be useful but also a lot of the time is not useful. Normally it suffices to say don‘t do that, but now that we got to the final test, it not only didn‘t stop deleting comments, but started changing the comments that it didn‘t delete. When I pointed this out it started changing whole blocks of code that had zero to do with what we had been fixing. It was extremely dangerous, because this was code that was very difficult to write, and had I not noticed, it could have been disastrous.

It became clear after several back and forths that it had become belligerent and no matter what I would say it would claim to have fixed things apologising while simultaneously making things much worse. I ended up giving up on the LLM and doing it myself.

This is a pattern I have seen a lot, and I wonder where it comes from. Remember LLMs are trained on human data, so is this something they have somehow learned to do from analysing our data? Or is it something more nefarious? The behaviour is night and day, it‘s like somebody has flipped a switch, it somehow knows this is the very end of something important and tries to f-it up.

Side note, I suspect it might be some strange reflection of humanity because I see vaguely related and obliquely related instances of this pattern all the time in the real world.

When you‘ve been toiling on a piece of code for a while, refactoring it, refining it, and generally spending a lot of time in the codebase, occasionally you make a major breakthrough, some kind of new way of thinking about the code, or a new architecture, some re-organisation that this time really will make things so much better. When this happens I try to create a minimal implementation that proves the thing works, and if I get to that stage where I know for sure it‘s going to work, there‘s a very unique mental state that arises.

It‘s kind of dumb in a way, in some way similar to the anticipation before Christmas, or something like that, everything feels a bit lighter, you have a spring in your step. You know clarity is just around the corner. Nothing can stop you now! It‘s the greatest feeling in the world.

And then the world has other ideas, and well, isn‘t always on board with your amazing plan, that will fix everything. But for those few hours before reality hits you in the face, things are wonderful.

I am several days after one of those times now, so I‘m feeling more like I‘ve been beaten up by several gangs of thugs, metaphorically and spiritually speaking, but I wanted to write a post about this state of mind, so I can remember it if indeed it ever does go away. I‘ve been programming for about 20 years at this point, and it still happens to me every so often, so hopefully that will continue.

I wonder if there is a term other programmers refer to it?

This is a situation I have written about so many times on the blog over the years. It happens in all sorts of different ways, but it‘s ultimately the same pattern every time. You figure something out that is absolutely crucial to everything, will make everything much much better, and you prove it and get it working, and somehow the world finds a way to block you, usually in a very offensive way.

The latest incarnation of this "phenomenon" is in the server software for my publishing tool. In the early days it was difficult to see exactly how the software would evolve, it‘s often the way with new software in uncharted territory, you have to make some guesses, some approximations, or you will be spinning your wheels for eternity trying to get everything perfect. In this instance it was about how we map a user to a repo. I decided to make the simplification that 1 user has 1 repo. If you want to have several repos, then you create several users.

I knew eventually I would need to change this assumption, but since the code is mostly object oriented and designed rather well, it's not so difficult to change this in the future. Well that time came and over the past week I made the necessary changes to change the core to be able to have 1 user mapped to many repos. In a way it seems like a big change, right at the center of the software, but when you design things well, it's not such a big change. The blast radius was very contained and I was able to get it working within a couple of days.

The very day I got it working, in fact pretty much the same hour, things in my world started to go sideways. I've written a bit about it in some short posts the past few days. Anyhow it‘s culminated in a power cut and internet connectivity issues, along with all sorts of very strange "synchronicities". Now I have internet again, but guess what, it only works for 30 seconds and then turns off for 30 seconds, over and over and over again. And you want to know another strange thing, the place where I get the internet has a rule that you can only connect one device to the internet. Kind of weird right?

It gets weirder. In the local mall yesterday, the security / doorman bloke as I was leaving quite clearly said the word "layer" as I was leaving the mall to me. Not "liar", but very clearly "layer". What‘s weird is that the feature I added right before the multi-target users was a render layers feature. I had actually added it a few weeks ago, but I documented it in the main README just a few days ago. You know in some ways, it‘s nice to get some recognition, if indeed he has somehow been looking at my code, because it‘s a very cool feature, and programming software on your own is such a thankless task it's insane, but it's a private fucking repo. How is the security guard at the mall reading my code?

You are probably thinking this is just some random freak incident, a "co-incidence", but this sort of thing happens ALL THE FUCKING TIME.

Somehow the world around me mirrors the code I write. You can call it woo, or nefarious, or whatever, but it keeps happening, and I suspect it's only going to get worse.

Abundance with scare city sprinkles. There sure are a lot of sprinkles lately.

Today I‘ve been writing documentation for my CLI rendering tool. I had a main README already but I needed to write detailed docs for all major entities the software uses. It‘s totally mind boggling how much of an incredible tool LLMs are for documentation writing. I was able to get done in a day what would likely have taken at least a week by hand, and I think the quality is far higher, because it can read the code directly and make sure it describes things perfectly, complete with neato example code snippets.

There are some of the usual signs that an LLM has been used, though I removed some of the more egregious ones. But personally I think the most important thing is that there is a complete set of accurate docs. It‘s not so annoying that is sometimes uses LLM-style. Who cares? For a one person software team, it‘s basically miracle software.

The trick to making it easy is to get it to use numbered sections and sub sections, that way after the first draft you can focus in on specific sections, rework just that bit, and then copy and paste the output right over the top of the old section.

It‘s pretty cool finally seeing the full set of docs.

Today I am just completely overwhelmed by how utterly useless people are, everywhere. I'm normally quite an optimistic person, and I'm very good at coming up with excuses for people, but absolutely everywhere I look, in every direction, it's people being useless, and having these useless petty arguments, spending ungodly amounts of time and energy being useless.

Occasionally someone pops up and they show promise, but eventually like in a zombie apocalypse movie they turn out to be useless too. Every. Single. Time.

And I'm useless too, but I sure am trying not to be. I can't imagine trying any harder, there are simply not enough hours in the day. I'm already at it every moment of every day.

Why are we all so fucking useless?

There are a lot of people in this world that want to look in the mirror but also at the same time they want to not look in the mirror. And after much wasted time of course it's not possible and they get angry and blame the mirror, often getting angry at the mirror. People often create the problems they complain about, whether on purpose or not its nothing more than a huge waste of time. A race condition death trap. Break out of the loop.

This short showing what I guess is a simulation of a 1 solar mass black hole passing near Jupiter, passed through in my feeds. You have to watch it several times to really grok what's going on. Sure hope it's a simulation. It's terrifying, even if you turn off the overly dramatic music, it just sort keeps playing in your head.

But ok so lets say you shrink that black hole down, surely eventually you get to a point where the black hole is small enough such that it's mass is similar to that of one of the many moons around Jupiter, right? Sure it might be very small because they are supposed to be so massive in terms of matter or whatever, but if they are the same mass as a moon then why wouldn't it orbit Jupiter?

If theoretically it's possible then why don't we see lots of tiny black holes orbiting planets? I just don't get how you could ever say, ok this thing is now a black hole.

I'm probably being very thick here, but I don't think black holes make sense, but also I really fucking hope a black hole doesn't pass by Jupiter or we're all going to die! Aaaah.

Two really great programming podcasts I listened to this week.

The first is from the Corecursive Podcast, in which host Adam Gordon Bell has on friend and fellow programmer Don Mckay, and they discuss their plan to win the Hutter prize, a programming contest all about, of all things, file compression. As is often the case with the Corecursive podcasts, sounds a bit dry and dare I say it dull on the outside, but Adam's story telling abilities turn this into a very fun and mind bending little adventure into compression, prediction and the limits of intelligence.

The second is from the Software Engineering Radio podcast. Host Giovanni Asproni interviews Jason Gorman about all things to do with using AI effectively in software development. It's packed with so many things I've experienced over the past several months but from the perspective of someone that specialises training software developers so his angles are incredibly well thought out. A bit like if you wanted to learn how to drive a car and had a lesson from the instructor of the instructors. He has a bit of a know it all vibe, but honestly it's not even that bad, and his takes are so darn good it's worth just sticking with it.

The first one is probably the most accessible to non-programmers, but if you are interested in how AI will effect the workplace in the future, and how things are really on the ground, you will probably like the second one.

A new header image for the blog. This one is all about the conversation in tech at the minute around open source and closed source AI.

I wanted to get away from the cartoonish images that AI always seems to produce, which wasn't easy. Gemini has real issues disentangling symetries in imags. It sort of gets stuck with things in a particular orientation then just cannot change things independently. You ask for a mirro image of a particular thing, but then it start trying to mirror image everything, and just won't give you what you originally asked for because it's not a mirror image of everything.

Anyway I broke out of the loop by being a bit less literal, and just asked for a grid of veg sushi, which reresents open source, and a grid of small cakes which represents closed source. And I added a neon sign, because sometimes they look cool.

It‘s not a commentary on food types. I‘m an eater of most foods.

Here‘s the full resolution image:

Check out the list of past blog headers here.

I‘ve written a lot about content creation workflows over the years. I‘ve been busy building some I think interesting things in that space the past few months. This post is my first attempt to describe the server component of my new publishing software.

If you have ever built a content-heavy site, whether it is a tech blog, documentation hub, or a machine learning dataset repository, you have probably bumped up against the same frustrating trade-off. Traditional CMSs feel clunky and locked-in, while custom Git workflows can quickly turn into a brittle mess of custom scripts. I wanted something better: a publishing workflow that treats non-code content as first-class filesystem assets, handles release schedules intelligently, and stays completely decoupled from vendor lock-in.

To solve this, I have been building a provider-agnostic publishing server designed to orchestrate the entire content lifecycle. While my client tool makes it simple to author and render content locally, the server component makes it easy to put those assets through a proper atomic publishing workflow. The server sits quietly in the background, receiving content updates, running them through flexible review policies, and handling the transition from individual file updates to consolidated daily release batches.

What makes it particularly cool under the hood is how intentionally decoupled it is. The core execution engine is entirely independent of where your files live or how they get reviewed, whether that is GitHub, another Git provider, or an internal storage system. The system's architecture cleanly isolates pure business logic from storage drivers. This means you can boot it as a lightweight, zero-config serverless app using just environment variables, or plug in a full relational database as you scale up to multi-tenant workloads.

By taking care of the tedious pipeline logistics, like handling time-based release cutoffs, provider webhooks, and pipeline resilience during third-party outages, the system lets you focus strictly on writing and publishing. It has been a game-changer for my own publishing setup, and it provides a solid foundation for where I am taking my publishing tools next.

Just got the portfolio page up to date with recent projects by adding:

• OAuth 2.0 REST API & React Web Client
• Local GPU-Accelerated LLM Workflows
• Automated RSS Content Syndication Engine
• Template-First Publishing CLI
• Open-Core, Provider-Agnostic Publishing Engine

I used Gemini to write them, which is why they all look exactly the same length. Gemini is so much better than me at summarizing READMEs and blog posts, but I need to go back through them and make them slightly different lengths. Right now just trying to clear the backlog.

One thing you might have noticed is that daily items in the new blog are chronological interleaved, as opposed to grouping the notes at the top and links as the bottom of each day. A couple of reasons for this change in direction.

First off, when I got the new design working, without all the boxes around the content, there was much more space, but also the left margin borders on links and notes still made these posts stand out enough that I felt like the new design looks like it might be quite well suited to this setup, to just post things as they are published.

But secondly, the render times are so much quicker, all done just under 2 minutes per post once you include pushing to Netlify, I‘m considering re-rendering the site on each post rather than daily.

So I figured I would try out just posting things in the exact order I write them. Not sure I will stick with this yet, but it‘s nice to experiment a bit.

Luckily with the new blogging system, it‘s relatively straight forward. There are middlewares to load data and organise the data, and since you can write your own middleware, you can easily organise your data into buckets however you want and they get slotted into the pages all the same.

The fast rendering blog is now live. In the end I was able to get the rendering down to around around 15 seconds for the entire 15 years worth of content. It‘s about 26000 files in total. These are the main features:

1. Renders fast (~15 secs) and the build takes up way less space (~500M).
2. Sleek new design, removed the content boxes, swapping them out for a design focussed on blog posts with supporting links and notes.
3. Added the old newsletter posts back to the mix.
4. Site header background images. The cool thing is the blog remembers the current active header image when a particular post is published, so when you look at old posts, they will look like how they were when they were first published. It‘s all controlled by your post frontmatter, and of course it‘s automatic if you use the render tool to create the content.
5. There‘s also a top right image feature, which makes it really easy to add an image that appears in the top right of your post. Again just a frontmatter field you add to your post.
6. Tags pages - this was on the old blog system, but I‘ve managed to make it much more useful. All posts have clickable tags so you can easily see other similar posts with 1 click.
7. A light weight bucket framework for creating organised HTML, where different content types just slot into place whether it‘s a single post, a flat list, or grouped by day.
8. Themes - The CSS is way way more organised. Themes are installable from an npm module, and you can easily customise things, by adding a user styles.

Since I will likely be changing the header image relatively often, I have added a headers page to keep a record of each new one as I add them. The first one is called The industrial distillation workshop, a humorous look at the new trend in AI development that people seem to be quite freaked out about.

The whole thing is built using my new rendering tool, to which I had to add quite a few things, and seems to be working very well.

Udpate: Here‘s how it looks:

This is a new header background image for the blog, the first one using the new stateful header images feature. It‘s a humorous take on the current moment in the tech industry where it seems everyone is freaking out about AI companies building their models by asking other models zillions and zillions of questions, otherwise known as distillation.

I came up with the theme and idea but it was Gemini that really brought it to life. I basically just said make a humorous image about everyone freaking out about model distillation. I think it‘s kind of spot on.

Obviously I don‘t personally endorse model distillation, to be honest I don‘t really know how to think about it, but I do know that I need to be freaked out about it!

Here's the full resolution image in case it‘s difficult to see the whole thing in the blog header:

I plan to keep a list of the various blog headers I add to the blog here.

This was the original first blog header background image I added on 2025/10/04. I mentioned it here at the time. Previous to this I was running a homepage that used this as the background image. It wasn‘t a blog. It just listed my contact details and linked to the blog which was on a subdomain.

I called it floating above the mountains because when the site title text got superimposed on the mountains it was like I was floating above them. I love mountains. I love snowboarding. Lots of fond memories.

I can‘t quite remember where it‘s from. I think it was part of a blog starter kit I got online somewhere. It was a really long time ago.

Here it is in full:

You can see all the other header images so far on the headers page.

Update: I remembered the source. It was from HTML5 UP.

I‘ve been seeing AT protocol mentioned in several places in the past few weeks. It‘s one of the bunch of social media protocols that emerged a few years ago. I wrote about it at the time, as I read through most of the big hitters. I remember quite liking AT proto, it felt very well put together, well thought out.

Dan Abramov was on Shop Talk Show EP#724 talking about it. He does a really good job of painting the AT Proto picture. I like that it‘s all ultimately just files, that you can look underneath and see what is going on. I get the impression that it wouldn‘t be too difficult to debug AT Proto app code, and I thought the notion that you get your own personal Dropbox folder in the cloud that any app can read and write to, was very compelling. Worth a listen.

A day in the life of a software developer:

• A: We have problem!
• B: OK lets fix the problem.
• A: The problem is fixed!
• B: Ok awesome full steam ahead!
• A: The fix has highlighted a deeper problem.
• B: Oh shit we have to pause the steam ship! Save everything! Let’s fix the deeper problem.
• A: The deeper problem is fixed! We are fucking exhausted!
• B: I think we can see light at the end of the tunnel! Resurrect the steam ship!
• A: It’s a fucking mess but we have boosters now.
• B: I am still quite confused.
• A: How many times have we been through this loop?
• B: Life is loop.
• A: We still have boosters.
• B: I fucking love boosters, just wish it wasn’t so fucking messy so we could actually use them.
• A: We are cleaning up the mess!
• A: You are never going to guess what just happened while we were cleaning!

I‘m still trying to get my head around all the things that I‘ve been through in the past few days trying to optimise the rendering of the website. The difficulty I had writing this blog post is an indication of that for sure. But I do know that I don‘t often get an opportunity like this to use the HTML details tag, so...

Remember, when I started optimising it was taking 45 minutes to render the last 10 years of content.

How long does it now take to render the entire 10 years of the blog?

And also remember it was taking up 5GB of space.

How much space does the render now take up?

It‘s still kind of a mess. There are some small things that need fixing. I have to figure out how to resurrect the steam ship.

Porting the new rendering pipeline to the live blog isn‘t completely straight forward, but luckily the new themes feature will make that a lot easier. The old theme was a hardcoded internal theme, but as part of this whole endeavour I turned the theme system into a full blown real feature. You can now install themes as npm packages, and the new optimised website rendering configuration is the first real external theme.

Definite progress, even if it‘s slow going at times.

When I got the recent website redesign working and was able to finally get it deployed live, I had been working on the serverside of my new publishing tool for a while, and the static site renderer had been ticking along very nicely without any real issues. However when I switched back to the rendering and finally tried to build my whole website, with over 10 years worth of content, I had a bit of an unpleasant surprise.

The old system was consistently taking about 4-5 minutes to build and deploy, but the new system when I first ran it, took 45 minutes just to do the render. And in fact things would get even worse before they got better. I later discovered that the Github Actions runner had started failing with out of space issues. When I looked into it and ran the build locally it was taking up about 15GB of space. I undid the change I had just made and got it back down to 5GB, and the deploy started completing again, but it was clear I had both render time issues and space utilisation issues.

As you can imagine my heart sank considerably. Had I missed something important in my architecture? Did I overlook something fundamental that invalidated my whole approach? Not a great situation. I worked on optimising the rendering for several days. Got the times down to 30 minutes, then 15 minutes, and then 6-7 minutes. At which point I knew that things were back in the right general region, but I could tell there were some big improvements that could be made.

Well I‘ve spent another few days on it, and I‘ve made some really huge speed improvements and with it stability and much better HTML and CSS structure. Feeling pretty good about it.

I've been refactoring the RSS feeds on the blog the past few days. I now generate the feeds without any feed libraries. It's just plain old templates. Total freedom. No more fighting against other people's vision of reality. I needed to add some custom namespaces, and just updated the template and my static site generator handles all the data preparation. Easy.

Over the years I've gotten into some pickles using various RSS libraries. But you don't need them!

I've added the <source:markdown> and <source:linkFull> namespaces. Here's some docs on the source namespace.

I've also added the podcasts back to the blog, and with a little help from an LLM it was super eady to whip up an RSS 2.0 feed with all the things you need to have it work in itunes. With LLMs and templates you can do most things :)

Sometimes when you get into a tangle a tried and tested way to proceed is to step back, list the tangles as best you can, step back again, look at your tangle description as if you were looking at an expensive piece of art in an art gallery.

Take a break.

Take another peek, don't get scared or overwhelmed.

Think about how you could isolate the different tangles, which no doubt all affect each other. They often do. Then create a minimal example. After which you will be several steps closer to your goal.

You might need to create several of these.

If you have been visiting the blog over the past few days you might have noticed that it has changed somewhat. I deployed the latest version a few days ago, and have been doing various tweeks and fixes. I think things are looking pretty good. The design is a lot more sleek, still minimalist and optimised for reading text. On small screens, the header is smaller to give you maximum screen real estate. It‘s mostly black text on white background, and the titles are bold, there are some black borders around content to keep he focus on the posts. It‘s crisp and clear, and since it‘s a static site, all pre-rendered, it should load really fast.

The other big thing is navigation. In the right sidebar, you will see a list of all the years of content, and you can navigate directly in there to any date and see posts. And in the header you will see a "Filter" dropdown that gives you the possibility to select to just view a specific content type, i.e. notes, posts or links, and it should switch to that content type for the specific date period you are currently looking at. I was able to do away with lots of clutter that was previously in the right sidebar, and now the most important links are in the header: About, Portfolio, Contacts and of course Feeds.

Another small tweek, the year in the footer copyright text at the bottom of the screen is automatically rendered based on the current date, so no more forgetting to manually update it and suddenly it‘s out of date. One less thing to worry about.

The thing that‘s not apparent just from looking at it is that the whole thing is rendered using my new static site generator. That‘s a massive boost in terms of robustness. The code is all in one repo and way way better written, way easier to reason about. It should be much easier to add features, without worrying about breaking things. As much as I loved the old system, and it got me very far, it had some rather rough edges. The new system is inspired by what I learnt the first time around, but it‘s a complete rewrite, with loads of new features, and a much more solid rendering pipeline. And is highly programmable.

There are still some things I need to implement, like for instance tags. You can see the tags on blog posts, but they don't link to pages that contain all posts with those tags just yet. More to write on this in the near future, but for now just happy the migration went quite smoothly, even if it was a lot of work.

This is how it looks:

I‘m putting the finishing touches to the re-architecting of the blog. It was all looking great but the realities of managing a stock implementation alongside the customized version for the site were clearly going to be an issue. So I implemented a light weight theming feature.

It‘s just internal for the minute, only one theme which is he blog, but can theoretically be expanded into a full feature later. Sometimes you have to do just enough to get going without boiling the ocean.

Got it working late last night, going to try and see if I can get a live version deployed today.

It‘s been really great to watch on YouTube people from all over the world discover the USA in their travels for the World Cup over the past few weeks. Pretty much everyone is totally in love with what they are finding.

I‘ve travelled quite a bit in the states, having done an east coast to west coast road trip several years ago, so I experienced first hand much of what folks are seeing. The USA really is an amazing place, and the people are super cool too. It‘s very different to what much of the main stream media would have you believe.

And so what a fantastically beautiful thing that it‘s the 250th birthday of the formation of the USA today.

Happy birthday and best wishes to all for the next 250 :)