markjgsmith

I've never been to Syria but I've seen first hand people living in very difficult conditions in other parts of the world so I can imagine how this might feel for the Syrians. All we in the west have heard for so many years is all these terrible things happening in Syria, so I'm just so happy there's some hope for them finally. Best wishes for all. #

It's interesting to see that the US and the Saudis are getting on. This article made me smile a bit. It wasn't all that long ago, probably a decade ago, that I got pulled over into secondary at the US - Canadian border. I was going for a weekend snowboarding in Vermont. What was the issue? I had UAE stamp in my passport, because I had been to Abu Dhabi a few years before. Why had I been there? I was doing solutions architect work there for a US company! They were building a new television broadcast center there and I was integrating our software into their internal workflows and systems.

Anyhow the trip went well, I found the emeratis to be very friendly. It was kind of wild as the plane was landing in the early evening, looking down across the vastness of the desert, to see in the distance tiny pickup trucks and people riding camels battling the sand storms.

How times change. I hear and see lots of tech entrepreneurs visiting the region the last couple of years. #

I just rewatched the very cool Harold White space warp drive explanation that was featured on the latest Rogan. It's at 25:42 if you want to skip straight to it. The thing that I keep wondering is that if you are traveling at say warp 5, how do you ensure you don't smash into anything? The stoping distance at WARP5 has got to be spectacularly long, and I would have thought that across such large distances the chances of hiting something that is vaguely space ship sized must increase. #

Netlify support did finally get around to updating their cli github action, so all my deploys are working again. Thanks to those that took the time to post their similar experiences in the thread. #

Hey Netlify, are you okay?

This is day 2 of Netlify blocking all my deploys that are coming from inside Github Actions workflows. I have no idea what's going on because they appear to be ignoring my posts on their support forum. I'm fairly certain the issue is on their side because I reset the code to the exact version that created the current live website, a known good version since that made it out without any issues, and that is now getting blocked too.

So far I can still deploy by building the site locally and deploying direct, but that's really sub-optimal because the workflows in the Github actions do all sorts of extra things. And who knows how long this will last. Hey Netlify, are you okay? #

All sorts of strange issues today. As well as all the deploy problems, I had some really quite bizare interactions with GPTs today. I have previously had some good experiences working on CSS with AIs, but today was with javascript, and it was really quite terrible. I was trying to do something very simple, and the AI was repeatedly failing, and adding complexity while doing so. So I asked it to remove the styling that it had added without asking me, and it said yep removed it. And it hadn't. This went on for at least 30 mins. Over and over it would say that it had removed it, but then it still hadn't, and it would even check itself and say, oh yes I didn't remove it, then still fail to remove it.

One thing that hadn't occurred to me before, and I can't believe I hadn't thought if this, and I also can't believe I haven't heard anyone talking about this yet. How do we know that the GPT companies aren't just barely training their models, then releasing them to billions of users half baked, so that the users train them for free without knowing it. Surely this is bound to happen as VC money dries up. #

Having some errors with the deploy to Netlify this morning. This is just a test post. Bit of a mystery since the status page doesn't show any relevant errors or incidents. #

There's definitely some type of issue on Netlify this morning as far as I can tell. I've openned a support case. The good news is that since I run a static site all powered by git, I can continue writing posts locally and they will sync up later, the bad news is that nothing new is currently being added to the live site. #

Well I am able to deploy directly to Netlify, hence you can read this post, but deploys via Github Actions appear to be completely blocked for me. I haven't seen that before in all the years I've had my sites on Netlify. It's a bit strange. No reply yet on the support forum site, almost 7 hours after reporting it. Not great. Especially since deploys to all my sites are currently affected. #

What with the Trump tarrifs, new US trade deals being struck, and the new pope, it feels like a lot of big things are sliding into place. I wonder whether this could be the beginning of a nice bit of momentum for everyone. #

This whole transition to using AI tools is going to be very complex. Of course that's nothing new to hear, but I get a sense that some are starting to get a feel for the size of the issue at hand. Reality is very very complicated and it took humanity literally millions of years in a shared reality to build the current non-AI "solution". I feel like we need to be careful, but also not too careful, sometimes you have to press on reguardless. But also, empathy, kindness. #

Running my static generator in the VSCode debugger

I configured the VSCode debugger to run my static site generator. It's been a while since I've been debugging like this. It's awesome to finally see the code running with all the debug tools. Makes it so much easier to get back into code that I wrote years ago. I wanted to make a quick note of it here, it's one of those things that you configure then don't think about for ages. Now I can refresh my brain with this blog post.

Crucially VSCode supports debugging programs launched via npm. Since I use npm scripts to run my code locally and in Github actions, I wanted to use the same method in the debugger.

The trick to getting it working was to use the npm launch configuration, and to also add a new 'debug' npm script, which was a copy of the existing 'build' npm script but with the additional '--inspect' node arg. Then when you run the debugger in VSCode, and after you have set a breakpoint somewhere near the top of your code, the command line window opens, and VSCode runs the program, halting at your breakpoint and you can step through the code, examining variables, callstacks and use all sorts of other cool tools. #

Nothing huge or major today, but I did fix a long standing bug on the linkblog that had been causing a display issue on some links. Basically if you used a file editor that adds a newline at the end of files when saving them, then that caused the linkblog link created from said file to not have space between the link text and link domain, which looked kind of bad. I was having to use an annoying workaround using the linux truncate command to remove the newline after each save. Anyhow that's fixed now. #

Figured I'd try for one more feature for the redesign. Here's a bunch of text. Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. And if I've done this right, there should be a picture in the top right of this note. #

Long overdue site redesign

Just a quick post about the recent site redesign. I have been wanting to do a bit of an overhaul of the site design for a long time at this point. That wasn't possible until now because I was coding everything on a very small screen. Now that I have a laptop, the redesign became possible, and also somewhat more urgent because (1) I could see how bad the site looked on desktop browsers and (2) I'm looking for a job. The fact that it was quite a painless redesign is confirmation that my static site generator is working well, and perhaps my long term vision might be possible.

Here's a couple of screenshots that show the before and after for prostherity:

The biggest annoyance with the old design was that the text was too wide on desktop browsers. Though it looked okay on mobile, it spanned the entire screen on desktop. Second to that was the top of the page looked very empty and bare, and the menu items were confusing, but also far too minimalist. That's the best I could do without being able to open up devtools.

The new design takes a traditional blog layout approach, with a sidebar on desktop that contains the menu items. That frees up the header section considerably, cleaning it up, making it look neat and tidy. The main content now has text that doesn't span the entire page, making it much easier to read. I also added some borders around the different posts so it's completely clear where each one starts and finishes, even when the page displays posts of different types.

Along with the visual redesign I re-organised all the pages, updating the breadcrumbs making it less confusing when browsing the archives. It's often a good idea to cleanup things both visually but also logically. Hopefully the site is a lot easier to read on desktop now.

I've added some javascript and CSS to create a hamburger menu button that appears in the top right of the screen on small screens. That way there is no need for a wasteful sidebar taking up valuable screen space on those devices. Clicking / taping the hamburger menu opens a centered list of menu items. Clicking / taping it a second time closes the menu. Load the page on a mobile device or resize your browser window to test it out.

That's it really, it's still quite minimalist but is a good foundation to build on. At some point in the future I plan to make some more frontend changes to give it a more styled look. I just need to decide what direction to take it in design wise. For now it's good enough.

Thanks to Gemini for helping with some of the trickier CSS and javascript. It was actually very fun pair programming with an AI. #

Just discovered a small bit of collateral damage from the site redesign. A lot of the site links on the about and portfolio pages were 404ing. I've updated them, so they now point to the correct place. Sorry, the links should work again now. #

Just had a strange but interesting conversation with ChatGPT about Belgium politics and belgians. I learnt a lot. Wish I could have asked it to draw a few more pictures. I felt a good representation necessitates much more creativity. Then again perhaps my questions could be better too.

It asked me to try again tomorrow. Anyways, check out the conversation. #

Following yesterday's redesign, I've been re-organising the menu items and pages on the blog this morning so they make more sense. It's not exactly right just yet, but it's better than it was. The problem is that "blog" is what we call the entire site, and the main page of that site is a page that display the blog posts, notes items and links all interleaved. But the menu items give you a way to view these individually as well. However since /blog is the site main page, then where do you put the page that shows just the blog posts? Bit of a connundrum. Well I've opted for /posts. As in 'only the blog posts'.

The whole things is compounded slightly by the idea of archives. Basically this is just a way to find posts by navigating a date folder structure. I won't go into it here, but you'll see the problem if you click around a bit. Integrating individual posts with the ability to have archives isn't trivial. I've noticed others are having similar issues on their blogs. Anyways, things are getting better slowly, bit by bit. #

I ended up figuring out the archives issue I mentioned earlier. I was able to change just the breadcrumbs at the top of each page which show the current location. It wasn't as complicatd as I had thought, but just difficult to see. It wasn't actually all that difficult to change, which is a really good sign that my static generator is very flexible. Of course there are some simplifications that could be made, but on the whole, it's working rather well. I think it likely won't be too much effort to get it to a state where I can release it as open source. #

My new favorate thing: Writing CSS code with Gemini. CSS is actually kind of fun again. And now the blog looks half decent both in a web browser and on mobile. More changes to come no doubt. Technically I guess this is vibe coding. #

When X Web Services?

It's great to finally see some competition for SpaceX from Amazon when it comes to internet delivered from space. Bezos will be sending up 3236 low-Earth satellites to create Project Kuiper, which will beam satellite to consumers globally. Congratulations are in order, no doubt it's a tough challenge to build such a satellite network.

I wonder though if Bezos is aware that Amazon Web Services, his juggernaught cloud provider solution, which i many ways made his current space venture possible, is rapidly being seen by developers as overly complicated and difficult to use. Don't get me wrong, it's still a phenominal service, and has pioneered much of the web infrastructure that underpins a lot of things around us, but many are turning to smaller more focussed infrastructure providers that are much more streamlined. I get the feeling that AWS needs a big overhaul. A massive spring cleaning if you will.

And that thought leads me to wonder what a web platform provider service from X would look like. Based on it's recent ventures in AI and it's know how building UI in it's Telsa cars, you gotta think it would be pretty awesome, don't you reckon? #

Concerns about AI “Vibe Working”

The past few weeks I've been experimenting a bit with AI tools. I installed the most popular LLM / GPTs on my mobile device, and I started using them pretty much the same way as you would use Google search, and that sort of worked. I got results from my queries back instantly, and I suppose it was kind of cool that I didn't have to go trawling through web pages. I was impressed.

I kept reading about folks using these tools saying that you need to use them in a different way to regular web search, and so I started using the chat interface a bit more in the way chat interfaces were intended. Actually having conversations with the AI, and I think it was super interesting. We talked about my development projects and later about how the Trump tarrifs were affecting stock markets. It helped me brainstorm a new direction for my static site generator, and together we also came up with a set of metrics to watch in order to determine when the market had bottomed. It felt pretty cool.

So programmers everywhere are using AI to do incredible things, apparently. They are "Vibe Coding" entire SaaS applications in hours. And it all sounds like amazing and incredible and next level and whatnot. And you watch videos of programmers live coding entire apps. And you think, okay, could be intersting I suppose. And you ignore the hand wavyness of some of these videos because, you know, vibe coding.

And so since I am currently job hunting I thought, perhaps these AI tools might help. And my initial experimentation was actually kind of interesting. Grok helped me get some ideas about possible approaches. Cool. And since that sort of worked I figured why wouldn't I be able to do somethibng a bit more than just brainstorming. Surely just like the programmers vibe coding the universe, I should be able to re-write my LinkedIn profile. I mean that can't possibly be that difficult, right?

So me and Grok got to it. At first it was pretty cool, we looked at my current profile, and I explained brielfy what I was trying to do. Grok even suggested that we incorporate some of the things we discussed when we spoke previously about my development projects. So far so good. But this is were it started to go off the rails. Grok was outputing a lot of stuff. So much stuff. I didn't have time to read through it each time. And so I would just say do this and do that and remove this and remove that. But Grok kept adding weird stuff, making stuff up, and forgetting which parts it had changed and which parts were actually kind of good. And so I asked it to go back a few versions, and of course it couldn't.

With almost infinite patience, I tried to get Grok to narrow down what it was doing to one specific paragraph. Then one specific sentence. And eventually it was just clear that we were not going to get anywhere useful. So I bailed and decided to edit the whole thing myself. I went through and deleted a whole load of old cruft, and added a few new things, and within a few minutes I had a reasonably good profile, check it out :)

If I am being completely honest it was kind of narly. I was in a co-working space, and things around me seemed to be working against me too. It didn't feel good at all. It was more like one of those situations where you thank your lucky stars you made it out in one piece. And now I look back at the vibe coding youtuber and I notice that he's basically doing the same thing. Notice that he bails when he realises that the app he has coded is starting to do weird things.

My impression about these AI tools is that you really need to know what you are doing. You might temporarily get some boosts in certain aspects of what you are doing, but actually if you aren't careful you run the risk of being pulled or pushed into sitations you don't want to get into.

If you are curious about these AI tools, whatever profession you do, whether it's in tech or not, my advice: Find some task that you know you are very good at. Try to do that task, under time pressure, in an environment that isn't all that conducive to working, and see how you get on. The tools will no doubt improve, but it's worth getting ahead of the game a bit.

And of course, I am available for hire, if you are looking for someone with lots of experience, with a passion for technology, find out more about me here and get in touch. #

The ankle injury appears to have made some good progress. It's feeling less painful and wobbly today, and that's good because I did a bit of walking yesterday, so I was half expecting it to be all swollen today. I think I've also mostly recovered from yesterday's horendous alergy flareup, though sinuses are stil a bit red and irritated. Difficult getting going this morning though. #

Bit of a disaster getting places today because of a general strike, but the weather is nice. Having to make sure I'm not putting too much weight on the ankle, and not walking too much. Working on the mobile device today, listening to tech podcasts and writing cover letters as best I can. #

Seen on an old bronze / brass plaque, turned a metalic green by time and weather, over a small bridge in a small town earlier:

"Hommage a la 1ere armée americaine et la brigade piron - 5 September 1944"

Reminder that something big happened here 80 years ago. It's just part of every day life. #

Very difficult day today because I had another alergy flare up day. Completely exhausted. It's just impossible to do anything when you are repeatedly being punched in the face. That's not far off what it feels like. Seriously. Anyway still got some stuff done despite a very antagonistic world.

Why you trying to punch yourself in face world? #

The ankle had been getting somewhat better following 2 days of almost no walking. I went to the shops earlier though, just a 10 minute walk away, and it definitely still was feeling weak, I couldn't put any weight on it. I've been back now for a few hours and it feels quite painful again. Having an injury like this is basically the last thing I need right now. Very difficult to focus and stay motivated.

The weather has cleared up a bit, with some sunshine this afternoon. It even got a bit warm, reaching to the low twenties (Celcius). #

Vibe job hunting

I was listening to the latest All-In Podcast earlier. Great epsiode. Loads of insightful commentary about the Trump tarrifs, Google's AI workflow design issues, and Elon & DOGE. The show often reminds me of the weekly sales calls I used to be on when I worked in enterprise software sales. Well anyway, hot off the back of yesterday's vibe coding blog post, it occurred to me that perhaps I could use some AI in my job search. I was thinking to perhaps write a few relevant blog posts. Perhaps Grok might have some ideas.

Here was my first question:

Hey Grok, I'm looking to get back into the European tech startup scene. I have a lot of experience in US startups and 10 years ago I was working in the European tech scene, across the continent, but things have changed since I've been gone. You have access to the latest conversations on Twitter/X which gives you an interesting and relevant perspective. What do you think, broadly speaking, are the main topics of concern for European tech startups? And can you help me identify some areas I could position myself towards, by writing blog posts, for prospective employers to become interested in hiring me?

Here was my second question:

Thanks Grok, that was a really excellent first attempt, with lots of interesting angles. Reminds me of my previous role in technical enterprise software sales. It seems a bit too enterprise software / startup strategy for me as I have moved into a career more focused on software development. Here's a blog post I wrote yesterday which might be more directionally aligned with my goals. I'll also post a link to a blog post that talks about some of my recent development projects. Could you read both of these, including the linked articles, get a bit inspired, and reformulate your previous answer with this new direction?

Vibe coding

Development strategy ideas

Grok's code snippets made me laugh. It actually did read my blog and had based it's code on some of minebut sort of had gone hilariously high level. And some of the stuff it was saying was clearly made up, but I thought that on the whole it actually was quite good at outlining some vague thoughts and approaches. I was particulary impressed at how it morphed it's answer directionally using the updated question.

I'm still getting used to using these AIs. It's very different to searching using a web browser. But perhaps we are still at the stage of trying to figure out where and how AI can be inserted into our workflows. That's a very different type of workflow and solution design than I am used to, but it could be kind of interesting.

Now you'll have to read the answers yourself to see what you think. While I don't think the All-in guys need to be worried about being replaced anyime soon, I was actually really impressed with Grok's answers. It probably won't be long before we will all have our very own All-In podcast gang in our pockets to help us with big difficult life changing moves. It's kind of mindblowing. #

I've noticed that all the links in yesterday's 'today's links' section all have words missing at the end of the link text. It's because the editor I'm using to edit the files adds a newline at the end of files when you save them, and that causes the link posts generated from them to not have space between the text and the domain. I wrote about it previously. I tried to modify the editor to not add newlines, but that didn't work for whatever reason, so I found a workaround which was to use the 'truncate' command. I thought it was only removing newlines, but turns out it was just truncating the file by a small amount each time, so if I ran it multiple times, which I was doing by running it on all the links each time I created a new link, then after removing the newline, it would start removing actual words. Oh noes!

Maybe at some point I'll find a better solution, but for the minute I jut need to remember to only run it once per file after saving the file.

Computers are fabulous, but also kind of annoying sometimes. #

Vibe coding

I've been hearing the term vibe coding being thrown about quite a lot recently, and especially in the past week. Of course there is a vibe coding wikipedia page. They describe it as a software development methodology that is strongly influenced by AI tools. An example that popped up earlier today in my Twitter/X feed was from Peter Levels, who described one of his most recent projects as using this technique.

Peter Levels: "Vibe coded my own $4.99/mo socal media screenshot service in 2 hours in Node JS"

I thought the thread was pretty interesting because it reminded me of personal projects that I have worked on. He basically created a self hosted tool to take screenshots of websites, and used it on some of his existing websites to save thousands of dollars per month. I was having trouble figuring out exactly what the tool did and more importantly why it was so useful from the thread, and wouldn't you know it others were too so somebody in the thread, Brandon Watson, used Grok to generate a well reasoned case for the tool. Vibe coding all the way down it seems.

Is what he did much different from my self hosted linkblogging SaaS? There are certainly a lot of similarities like a queuing system for backend processing, everything running on a simple VPS instance, but the main thing seems to be that with AI tools he was able to put it all together very quickly. Pretty cool I guess.

Not sure my blogging environment recent developments meet the definition since I'm still not using AI tools, but I've always felt that I channel some sort of vibe when I build stuff. Maybe I need to get in on the vibe coding action, and of course blog about it afterwards. I do note that there are many that are rolling their eyes at this "new" trend. #

I've been checking out the NodeJS certifications that the Linux foundation are selling. They look kind of interesting, though I find their marketing a bit confusing. I guess the JSNAD and JSNSD would be most appropriate for a web developer. It's a bit confusing whether the certification is included in the training course or not. I know some industries really like these types of certifications. #

Cold and drizzly rain day today where I am. Ankle still hurting quite a lot, so I'm trying to keep that leg rested and perched up on a cushion. All the new blogging scripts, bash aliases and of course the laptop, are making writing much more enjoyable. #

Start with aliases and scripts

It's always amazing to me how far you can get with just bash scripts and bash aliases on a unix/linux based system.

I often find when I'm configuring a new environment that it's a great place to start. As you go about your workflow of whatever activity you are trying to accomplish, you start adding small repeatable commands into aliases, which speeds up whatever you are doing, eventually moving more complicated things into a few small scripts, which you then of course trigger using some more aliases. With enough thought you can optimise it so that with just a few key strokes, you can achieve what used to take tens of minutes maybe even hours in seconds.

That's what I have been finding setting up my new laptop with a basic blogging environment. I can now tap a few keys and all the necessary markdown files get automatically created, in the right place, with any needed folders created too, and the frontmatter in the markdown files has the meta data inserted. That used to all be manually done, which not only is time consuming but very error prone. I've also got some aliases that automatcally create a new feature branch in my Github repo at the start of every day, and it automatically gets merged at midnight. What's even cooler is that by using bash heredocs in my blogging script, I can copy and paste urls, post titles and body text into environment variables placed on the same line when executing the alias and all that data gets inserted into the frontmatter, with nice defaults if I don't set them.

I can also navigate directly to important folders on the file system by typing single letter aliases, which are clever enough to know where in the filesystem you wan to go based on the current date.

It's really amazing what features are available in the standard operating system if you use the command line. All these features have been tried and tested for multiple decades by programmers all over the world.

Of course most regular non programmer people will never use such a setup, but when you have your workflow working smoothly, it can act as a sort of prototype for a possible web based tool, which other regular normies could use. #