markjgsmith

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. #