lee meichin

Proudly announcing my new AI Agent framework: GSTFD.

There's been a mixture of hype and controversy about this new AI agent thing called Openclaw[^1].

Alright, I'll start off by saying that 'brogrammer' here is intentionally incendiary but I'm in my DGAF era with my clickbaity blog titles and maybe I'll make a valid point by the end of the post.

I titled the post as I did because lately I've been feeling a bit Toothless.

This graph about the decline in the number of questions being asked on Stack Overflow has been going around the internet over the past few days: Pundits are attributing this to the increasing usage of AI by developers, which effectively bypasses a site li…

Here we are: a new year, a new opportunity to look forwards and inwards.

For a few years I had all my shit hosted on a multi node Kubernetes (K8S) cluster, which I put on Hetzner Cloud.

The life of a software engineer involves more than simply writing code.

My relationship with AI has been quite unusual over the past year or so, and despite working for startups exclusively devoted to building AI based tech I didn't use much of it in my actual workflow.

Once upon a time we engineers used to argue the merits of TDD and whether or not it was dead.

For the past few years I've reflected on the months gone by and committed them to paper.

I remember an article that hit the front page of Hacker News some time ago.

I'm not exactly old, but at some point in history 37 was considered old.

It wouldn't be a new year if I didn't put my editor setup on a diet, and with the release of emacs 29 last year I've been able to simplify a lot .

Another year passes, another year to reflect upon, and as far as living in interesting times goes, once again I couldn't remotely expect where I would land.

There have been a few posts going around recently floating the idea that all code is tech debt[^1], all code is legacy, whatever.

I rather suddenly found myself back on the job market recently (by choice, before anyone asks).

I was going to call this post Cargo Culting but I think the term is inaccurate as much as it is antiquated.

I recently switched my emacs config back to Org mode, because Org is absolutely amazing for literal programming no matter what language you're using.

A few months ago I started a new job at a company that uses Elixir as its main language on the backend.

Recently I took a month off work in between jobs to give myself a chance to reset.

Growing up in Britain, one learns how to stiffen one’s lip in the face of adversity.

I recently left my remote job, one I'd been working at for close to three years in total.

The term 'hedonic treadmill' was coined back in the 1970s to describe the tendency to revert to a baseline state of happiness over time.

Everybody loves to talk about self documenting code, self documenting architecture, self eplanatory everything.

I have a feeling that this post might say more about me than anything else, but given that I mostly write about my own experience anyway that probably isn’t such a problem.

This isn't going to be a deep dive into YJIT, benchmarking it and such like, just a few quick tips to get started with it yourself.

At the start of the year I wrote a post about my outlook for this year.

Another day, another post about burnout.

I like to maintain a single configuration across machines.

I have a friend who once explained to me the concept of a comfort zone and what it means to go outside of it.

This is a bit of an unusual twist for me, in terms of what I generally write about, because I don't really care about the world of celebrity that much.

If there's one thing I like writing about more than anything else, it's compassion, empathy, and intuition.

As they're wont to do, a certain tweet was floating around the interwebs for a while the other week.

I've been working fully remotely for almost 18 months now.

I recently read a post called No code reviews by default , by a startup called Raycast[^1].

There was one time where I thought that being a software developer meant that I just had to get good at writing code, because to my mind the main thing I was producing in my time at work was, well, code.

About six months ago I wrote a post about rewriting the tech that publishes this blog.[^1] It seemed like a good idea at the time to try and build something out in Racket and Pollen, and it was a learning experience.

I recently realised that despite many new additions to the Ruby language and ecosystem, I've never really had an opportunity to take advantage of many of them.

I was browsing HN over my coffee this morning and came across an interesting thread[^1] linking to a post titled When Buddhism Goes Bad [^2].

I finally got around to paying some money for Beautiful Racket [^1], a fantastic online only book that introduces you to Racket by guiding you through building a few language implementations.

Way back in 2002, or perhaps 2003, I'd acquired a copy of Macromedia Dreamweaver and started playing about with HTML.

I think everyone needs at least one blog post under their belt that describes mistakes they've previously made in their careers.

Over the past decade of my wondrous career I've rather haphazardly stumbled in and out of the realm of agile leadership.

I'm driven by ambition, as are many of us.

I'm sure everybody goes through the 'angry programmer' phase at some point in their career.