Aging Coder

I keep using chatbots for the same kind of question, over and over.

What I Thought the End of Coding Would Look Like I started writing a story almost 28 years ago, back when I was still taking CompSci at college and spending a lot of time with the kind of ideas that feel inevitable when you’re young and the future looks l…

A quick weekend build In my previous post, AI-Assisted Coding on a Budget, about AI Assisted coding, I included a short section about how I created an Interactive CV.

Introduction Six months ago, I wrote about LLMs and coding with cautious optimism.

Book Review: Vibe Coding by Gene Kim and Steve Yegge I’ve never reviewed a book on this blog, but as AI agents like Claude Code begin writing the majority of real-world software, Vibe Coding felt impossible to ignore.

Back in 2015 and 2018 I wrote a small trilogy of posts about NativeScript, React Native, and what I dubbed the "MobileNativeJavaScript" (MNJS) movement.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) When I first heard about RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) in the context of large language models (LLMs), I expected it to be a complex and technical concept.

Introduction This will be just a quick little follow-up to the last post where we created a model and some saved data for returning recipes with similar ingredients.

Introduction to Unsupervised Learning Over the last few posts, we explored supervised learning—building labeled‑data pipelines, tuning models, and using supervised learning to be able to extract structured recipe data from a noisiness that is a web page (…

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Speeding up the Training Loop When developing and evaluating different machine learning models, rapid iteration is key—especially as experiments shift from feature engineering to focused model evaluation.

In the previous post we built a simple model to extract recipe data from a web page.

First Results: Building and Running the Initial Model In the last post, we looked at how an old side project —Recipe Folder— left me with a rich but messy dataset of recipes labeled by real users.

How to Do Supervised Learning: Lessons from an Old Recipe App *Heads Up : This is a technical post and requires enough understanding of programming to be relatively comfortable in Visual Studio Code This is the first in a series of at least 4 articles whe…

Good lord, has really been 6 months since I last wrote a post about LLMs and coding - how the world has changed since that time.

As we get more and more experience with LLM's I am starting to get worried that I am spending more time relying them and letting my brain atrophy rather than exercising one of my key skills - debugging problems.

I've been using LLMs like GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude for the past couple of years to assist with coding, automate repetitive tasks, and even do language translations—both for computer languages and for generating initial translations for…

People often ask me (ok, some programmer friends of mine sometimes ask me) what I would use to build a mobile app these days - would I still make a cross platform app with Cordova or Ionic these days.

Has it really been 6 years since I last blogged?

Has it really been more than three years since I wrote Lessons Learned, hard to believe.

A recent experience being asked to look into a React Native mobile has clarified some of the questions I brought up in my last aritcle on React Native, lo those 2 1/2 years ago.

Introduction Note: This is the third article in a probably four part series, it will not make much sense without reading the other two: Creating A Google Home App where we get a very simple Google Home App up and running.

Introduction In the previous article, Creating A Google Home App I detailed how to get a very simple Google Home App up and running.

Introduction A while ago I got an email from a Recipe Folder user asking how to get the Google Home integration working with Recipe Folder.

Introduction Well over a year ago, Google (well, at least Google developers built it -- it's said to be made with "contributions by Google and the community"ref), introduced yet another Mobile Toolkit that allows building apps for both iOS and Android.

Brief This genesis of this article was a conversation attempting to explain the reasons for choosing one Javascript Framework (or really collection of Frameworks) over another to a non Frontend developer.

The State of Mobile Frameworks 2016 It's been over 2 years since I posted The State of Mobile Frameworks and a fair amount has changed in that time, so now is probably a good time to dive back into that thorny topic.

Cordova or Native?

Finally after three and a half years, I'm all in on TypeScript.

Today, dear reader, I have a cautionary tale to tell.

When updating RecipeFolder from a PhoneGap/Cordova hybrid to a Native Java app I initially experienced a euphoria on how quick it was to develop in Android now. 6 months in, and still without having actually shipped the update that euphoria is long gone.

Regular readers of this blog, or a casual reader who has looked at my posts will quickly realize that I am a big fan of hybrid apps.

After almost three years running on Jekyll-Bootstrap, and getting the feeling that The Minimum theme wasn't doing it for me any more, I've bit the bullet and switched to a stock Jekyll build.

Every now and then when a technical person tries Recipe Folder out, I get asked about how the application was built and what it runs on.

In my last post's comments, Dave (no other name), suggested that I try (or to be honest try again) React Native.

Update: Recent experiences with React Native can be found in the post: React Native -- A Tempting Quagmire It's been 6 months since I wrote First Thoughts on NativeScript and you would think by now with my formidable blogging output I would have written d…

Over the past few weeks there has been a hullabalou on the interwebs that started with the post from about Nolan Lawson about Safari being the new IE, which had follow up posts like Benjamin De Cock's Chrome is the new IE and a long rebuttal on the Debug…

Data Url Viewer There is a great site called utiliti.dev that has a much better version of this tool, I would recommend using that instead.

On March 5th Telerik released NativeScript, a new way of developing Mobile Apps aimed squarely at web developers.

Update: This post is getting pretty long in the tooth, so I have updated it: Three More Years of Phonegap / Cordova Lessons It seems hard to believe, but it's been almost 5 years since I started doing PhoneGap development!

Kris's Podcast List 2015 2014 was the year of the podcast , with Serial hitting a million downloads per episode, and Gimlet launching as a business whose vision was for high quality podcasts that where podcast first (not radio shows that re-issued as podc…

Ever since ng-europe last month, people have been freaking out about Angular 2.0, initially I had written up some thoughts about this in the days following, but I decided to wait a while for things to settle down before writing about this.

This is Part 7 in multipart series on the State of Mobile Frameworks in 2014, see Part 1 - The State of HTML Mobile Frameworks in 2014 Part 2 - Mobile Frameworks -- JQT (Formerly jqTouch) Part 3 - Mobile Frameworks -- jQuery Mobile Part 4 - Mobile Framewo…

I just got a new computer, and joy of joys it came with Windows 8.1.

This is Part 6 in multipart series on the State of Mobile Frameworks in 2014, see Part 1 - The State of HTML Mobile Frameworks in 2014 Part 2 - Mobile Frameworks -- JQT (Formerly jqTouch) Part 3 - Mobile Frameworks -- jQuery Mobile Part 4 - Mobile Framewo…

Before I go too deep down this rat/rabbit hole, I should state that Libraries are what has allowed programming to develop from where only the best of the best can produce software to a place where a plumber like me can still produce some pretty amazing st…

This is Part 5 in multipart series on the State of Mobile Frameworks in 2014, if you haven't already read the previous articles, they are here: Part 1 - The State of HTML Mobile Frameworks in 2014 Part 2 - Mobile Frameworks -- JQT (Formerly jqTouch) Part 3

Things I have learned in too many years of programming# As a little break from my continuing opus on the State of Mobile Frameworks I've decided to write one of what may end up being a series of things that I have learned in my 20+ years of programming.

Things I have learned in too many years of programming As a little break from my continuing opus on the State of Mobile Frameworks I've decided to write one of what may end up being a series of things that I have learned in my 20+ years of programming.

This is Part 4 in multipart series on the State of Mobile Frameworks in 2014, if you haven't already read the previous articles, they are here: Part 1 - The State of HTML Mobile Frameworks in 2014 Part 2 - Mobile Frameworks -- JQT (Formerly jqTouch) Part 3