Blog | www.joshfinnie.com

Four weeks, four small paid software products, and the constraints I'm setting so the month produces something other than another folder of unfinished repos.

How working as the architect to an AI coder removed the syntax tax on unfamiliar languages, and what still has to come from me.

A fourteen-part series building a production-shaped RESTful API in Rust with Axum, Docker, and PostgreSQL, using a Pokemon API as the running example.

Revisiting the JSON-LD I added to this site two years ago, finding two real bugs hiding in it, and moving to a slot-based pattern inspired by Stephen Lunt's Astro structured data post.

After years of tmux and a recent stretch running Zellij, I replaced both with Herdr, a background runtime built around keeping AI coding agents alive across reboots.

I used Impeccable, a design skill for Claude Code, to document this blog's actual design system and then critique it against its own rules.

A few months ago I hand-rolled a copy-to-clipboard button for my code blocks.

A while back I added ESLint and Prettier to this blog.

How I wired this Astro blog up to standard.site, the AT Protocol lexicon for long-form publishing, with a well-known file, a single head tag, and a sync script that does the boring work.

The XTEINK X4 is a $69 credit-card-sized e-reader whose factory software does not deserve the hardware.

diffai is a terminal diff viewer with inline commenting, built specifically for the two-pane workflow of reviewing code changes alongside Claude Code.

A walkthrough of kairgos, a Go SaaS skeleton with multi-tenancy, async AI inference, JWT rotation, and a background worker — built before a single business feature ships.

Part 6 of building a full-stack URL shortener in Rust.

Part 5 of building a full-stack URL shortener in Rust.

In the final part of the Django Bootcamp, we add user authentication with Django's built-in auth system and deploy our bookmark manager to production with Railway.

How I built firesym, a terminal fire simulation based on the DOOM PSX fire algorithm, using Rust and ratatui.

Part 4 of building a full-stack URL shortener in Rust.

In this beginner-friendly guide, we build out the views and templates for our bookmark manager — listing bookmarks, viewing details, creating new ones, and deleting them.

In this beginner-friendly guide, we define our bookmark model, run database migrations, and explore Django's built-in admin panel to manage our data.

Part 3 of building a full-stack URL shortener in Rust.

The avocado toast discourse isn't just stupid.

The software engineering job market in 2025 and 2026 is broken in ways that are new and strange.

Part 2 of building a full-stack URL shortener in Rust.

In this beginner-friendly guide, we create our first Django project, explore its file structure, and build our first view to display a page in the browser.

A practical guide to writing Python docstrings effectively, covering the __doc__ attribute, help(), Google, NumPy, and Sphinx styles, choosing the right structure, avoiding common mistakes, and generating docs with Sphinx, pydoc, and MkDocs.

AWS SES is one of the most cost-effective ways to send transactional email, but getting it configured properly takes a few non-obvious steps.

A step-by-step walkthrough of how I added a copy-to-clipboard button with a language label to every code block on my Astro blog using a single component and no external libraries.

Part 1 of building a full-stack URL shortener in Rust.

This beginner-friendly guide covers the basics of Python, setting up virtual environments, installing pip, and why Django is the best choice for building powerful web applications.

A look back at the albums that defined my year, from experimental hip-hop to art rock to electronic pop.

Examining the MIT Iceberg Index's claim that AI could replace 11.7% of U.S. wages, and why the real-world execution of mass replacement is unlikely to succeed.

Slash your LaTeX Docker build times by 85% and reduce image sizes by 95%!

Tech giants are investing $400 billion in AI infrastructure while cutting thousands of jobs.

Amazon blamed AI for cutting 30,000 jobs while posting record profits and raising CEO pay 37%.

Discover how Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs) solve the format chaos of traditional resumes, turning unstructured documents into reliable, structured data for programmatic generation and analysis.

Discover how rubber duck debugging can transform your coding experience.

Learn how to build a word count command line utility in Rust from scratch.

A step-by-step guide to building modern web applications with FastAPI and React in 2025, featuring Vite for faster development and UV for improved Python package management.

Reposting a paper I did for my UMGC AI Ethics class.

I noticed while checking my copyright date that I have been blogging for 15 years now.

A brief review of the music I found and fell in love with across all of 2024.

I recently took some time to add ESLint and Prettier to my Astro blog.

I recently finished Buildspace Nights & Weekends.

In this blog post, we talk about what JSON-LD is and how I implemented it on my Astro.build blog.

In this blog post, we walk through building an example app with Rust, Axum and HTMX.

In this blog post I talk about my exploration in switching to using PNPM everywhere instead of NPM and NVM.

A deep dive into Python's Collections module.

I have been playing around with Threads by Instagram for about 24 hours, it's surprisingly good.