/dev/jcheng

I played around with the Nemotron Lightning 30b model this week.

I spent much of yesterday pouring my mental energy into designing a better AI-assisted code review process.

I started using AI coding agents in March of 2025.

AI And Software Development When ChatGPT was released in Nov of 2022, it was already a better programmer than me.

I recently needed to setup a new Python project and in the course of doing so, learned about uv1 , “an extremely fast Python package and project manager”. uv is great.

Farewell to Google Search Let’s say you were in the market for a new laptop.

Generative AI 2024 Retrospective 2024 witnessed a parade of increasingly more powerful AI model releases, culminating in OpenAI’s groundbreaking “o3”.

This is a review of Open WebUI, an extensible and user-friendly self-hosted WebUI for LLMs.

OpenAI took the world by storm in 2023 with the relase of ChatGPT.

Once you know a programming language well, the process for learning a new language is not very hard.

Writing code with ChatGPT.

I had two weeks off at the end of 2022.

My notes from Turn the Ship Around!

Bitch is a book from zoologist Lucy Cooke on correcting misunderstandings and cultural biases in our biological science.

Chaos theory When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future. - Edward Lorenz Code If you can’t write it down in English, you can’t code it - Peter Halpern, via Jon Bentley Prioritize There is

This is a story from Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s StarTalk podcast.

In Chapter 1.3 of [Ball’s Writing an Interpreter in Go][1], we encounter one design decision of his Monkey programming language.

Staff Plus Live 2021 was a virtual conference held by LeadDev.com on Sept 14, 2021.

Just the act of measuring something can change outcomes.

A lexer takes the source code, a sequence of characters, and group them into tokens. e.g., it makes the first decision on how to process the strings 100-10, -100-10, and -100--100 into groups.

Writing an Interpreter In Go by Thorsten Ball will be my personal introduction to writing an interpreter.

It happened.

Back from a long vacation.

Humans and incentives, and why some metrics (or objectives and key results) should not be public. http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2021/06/01/count/

Systemd, the good parts https://lobste.rs/s/po98o2/systemd_good_parts

My thoughts today led me to reading about nuclear wastes.

Grammar visualizer https://dundalek.com/grammkit/ Which leads to a JS parser generator https://pegjs.org/online And also leads to a JS parser generator with a visual debugger https://ohmlang.github.io/editor/ This also prompts my interest into a graphviz/…

I used to favor automated integration testing.

Lots of small things today.

In this part of the series, we’ll write some hands-on Temporal code and run it.

I spent a couple of hours evaluating 3rd party libraries.

Go does not allow cyclic imports.

Oldie but goodie.

An increasingly distributed and fragile world Workflow platforms are important because software engineers are increasingly adopting distributed systems in their architecture.

Two book recommendations https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/designing-data-intensive-applications/9781491903063/ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/making-software/9780596808310/ Designing Data Intensive Applications: Don’t let the name fool you.

Introduction It is hard to describe what a Workflow Platform is.

The Peseverance rover lands on Mars.

TextRank identifies connections between various entities in a text, and implements the concept of recommendation.

This blog is such a great example of why it is difficult to creat great software.

Sascha Chua is a great resource on Emacs-y things https://sachachua.com/blog/

Maybe Emacs doesn’t need to be a fusion reactor.

Replicating a database can make our applications faster and increase our tolerance to failures, but there are a lot of different options available and each one comes with a price tag.

Concept: Poison pill One strategy is a poison pill: a special message on the queue that signals the consumer of that message to end its work.

Meet GPT-3.

From Monolith to Microservices tldr; baby steps (lots of them) similar infrastructure to TeleSign – on prem similar infrastructure to TeleSign?

In A Tour of Go, it states “Go has pointers.

https://rootsofprogress.org/immunization-from-inoculation-to-rna-vaccines When you get your covid shot (probably in 2021), take a moment to think back on the 300 years of progress that got us to this point. https://github.com/wbolster/emacs-python-black T…

By configuring your Docker containers to talk to a custom DNS server, you gain more control over how your container look up other services – database, other microservices, etc., It turns out Docker networking isn’t completely straight forward.

What are your favorite CLI apps?

Writing about why Emacs is hard for new users, I can’t help but think back to how important it is to name things well.