People ask what the future of programming (and other IT tasks) looks like with tools like Chat-GPT and Github Copilot. My take: AI is basically a summer intern. Horse Whips and Buggy Factories The trajectory of technology is always Manual effort -> Partial automation -> Full automation -> New careers built babysitting the automation. Information was remembered and only communicated…
You’ve seen the stories about orcas attacking ships and wreaking havoc in the ocean, right? Well why let the orcas have all the fun?! Now you can swim through the ocean and sink ships too! I was bored so on Saturday I installed the Unity engine and Visual Studio and started learning C#. On Thursday I launched Shiprekt on itch.io…
If you’ve followed my project Inexpire, you’ll know I originally was building it using a React static site backed by AWS DynamoDB and Lambda. After a short while without making any significant progress, I switched back to my comfort zone (Rails) and hammered out a working app using technology I was more familiar with. Well, I’ve given it another shot…
A year or so ago I mothballed one of my projects by dumping the database to AWS DynamoDB and throwing a static JS site up on AWS S3. This allowed me to still query the data, but only pay for it when I was actually using it rather than keeping the $20/mo server running 24/7. Recently though, I’ve decided to…
A few years ago I switched my “business” code from Github to Gitlab. The reason for this was… well, I was bootstrapping a business. Every dollar counts, and Github’s private repos were $5/mo while Gitlab was free. Unfortunately almost immediately after I switched everything, Microsoft bought Github and started offering free private repos. I should have switched back immediately. But…
In a massive update to Inexpire, I’ve added tracking tools for my hobby farm. If you are unfamiliar with Inexpire, I wrote about it in a recent post. Inexpire was built to track canned goods and other long-life-yet-perishable items that I might forget about until after they’ve gone bad. I built this tool partially because we stocked up on food…
Recently I launched a new web app called Inexpire. It’s something I’ve been kicking around for about a year but finally got it out the door. Since I’m a fan of “build in public”, let’s walk through the app. What is Inexpire? Inexpire.com is a web application designed to track expiration dates and inventory numbers of things in your house.…
Salesforce bought Heroku in 2010. What have they done since then? To be fair, I started using Heroku in 2015, 5 years after Salesforce bought them. But the last time they updated their pricing was 2015, and the last new notable feature was 2015. What have they done in the last five years? This article is mostly sourced from Hacker…
Adding text to an image… how hard could it be? Turns out not that hard, but still quite complicated. Here‘s the story behind Memendous.com. Concepts used:AWS Lambda/API Gateway/S3A custom Lambda LayerServerless FrameworkPython 3.x with Pillow (for the backend Lambda)Vanilla JS/HTML for the front endAWS Amplify for hosting I‘ve been looking for more serverless projects to get under my belt, and…
AWS Lambda ships with some software packages pre-installed, depending on which language runtime you pick. But what if you need something else? Typically in a serverfull environment you would install the package (or add it to your Cloudformation/Terraform/etc scripts) and be done with it. But in Lambda your options are a bit more limited. You can‘t just install something and…