Blog • Chris Dzombak

👋🏻 Currently looking for work!
Please see my LinkedIn profile and get in touch, or see ways to support me in the interim.

… has too many hobbies.

Latest — 08 Aug 2025

Getting Good Results from Claude Code

I've been experimenting with LLM programming agents over the past few months. Claude Code has become my favorite. It is not without issues, but it's allowed me to write ~12 programs/projects in relatively little time, and I feel I would not have been able to …

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Getting Good Results from Claude Code

I've been experimenting with LLM programming agents over the past few months. Claude Code has become my favorite. It is not without issues, but it's allowed me to write ~12 programs/projects in relatively little time, and I feel I would not have been able to …

Navigating and Rewriting Legacy Systems

As I'm navigating this job search process, I've been asked several variants of the questions, "how do you work with a legacy or poorly-documented codebase? how would you rewrite one?" I figure this answer might be useful for others.

Quick Devops Tool: gha-secrets-setup

Here's a small script I wrote a few days ago, gha-secrets-setup. This script accepts a GitHub repository URL and checks its GitHub Actions workflows for secrets references. Then, using the gh CLI tool, it checks which secrets haven't yet been configure. It interactively prompts you for …

Use Your Type System

Today I'm discussing a trivially simple technique that I've rarely seen used in production codebases. In programming, we often need to deal with simple values that can be represented by simple, generic types built into our programming language or provided by libraries: types like integer, string, …

Functional Documentation

Without application of force to keep internal technical documentation up to date, that documentation will quickly become inaccurate. Consider internal documentation about a codebase at your company. This commonly takes the form of text files checked into Git, a Notion or Confluence page, comments in the code, system design documents, …

Some TODOs for the new site

As I prepare to make this new version of dzombak.com live, I wanted to make a note of some things that are left for me to do.

Recent Posts

Navigating and Rewriting Legacy Systems

As I'm navigating this job search process, I've been asked several variants of the questions, "how do you work with a legacy or poorly-documented codebase? how would you rewrite one?" I figure this answer might be useful for others.

An improved nginx_ensite script

GitHub - cdzombak/nginx_ensite: Quickly enable/disable nginx sitesQuickly enable/disable nginx sites. Contribute to cdzombak/nginx_ensite development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHubcdzombak I have long used a script called nginx_ensite to quickly test and enable Nginx site configurations. (It also comes with a sister …

Quick Devops Tool: gha-secrets-setup

Here's a small script I wrote a few days ago, gha-secrets-setup. This script accepts a GitHub repository URL and checks its GitHub Actions workflows for secrets references. Then, using the gh CLI tool, it checks which secrets haven't yet been configure. It interactively prompts you for …

How I share Bird Buddy photos online

I've developed a simple and fast workflow, along with several purpose-built pieces of software, for sharing Bird Buddy photos online here. I had several goals for this process: 1. Photos should be shared to a Lychee photo album on my picture-sharing subdomain 2. Uploading the photos should be …

A Lychee photo library tool for titling photos

One more Lychee tool announcement: GitHub - cdzombak/lychee-meta-tool: Quickly find & edit untitled photos in your Lychee photo libraryQuickly find & edit untitled photos in your Lychee photo library - cdzombak/lychee-meta-toolGitHubcdzombak lychee-meta-tool provides a streamlined, focused view of the photos in your Lychee library that are missing titles. …

Avoid unbounded inboxes; avoid stress

Unbounded inboxes create stress. This includes things like email and text messages, and I can't help you with those. But I have tools that will help you keep your Instapaper and Feedbin queues manageable! GitHub - cdzombak/feedbin-auto-archiver: Avoid stress: Automatically archive old unread entries in Feedbin.Avoid …

Recommendation: Microphone Setup for BirdNET-Pi

I run BirdNET-Pi at home and am excited to share that I have (finally) found a quality, ~$100, microphone setup for it! Listen to this recording: plenty of detail and clarity, and very little noise: American Crow 92 2025 07 31 birdnet 10 22 510:00/6.0241× This recording …

feedfilter: an RSS feed postprocessing tool

One of my newest open-source programs is feedfilter. As the name implies, it takes an RSS feed as input and produces a filtered version of that feed as an output. Filtering is performed on an item-by-item basis. The filtering decision for each item can be based on the item' …

I vibe-coded an AI photo organizer for Lychee

I mentioned recently my use of the Lychee program for hosting my photos/pictures website. I recently uploaded a backlog of a few hundred photos to the Unsorted section of that site, figuring I could organize them later. Then I realized: I could use AI to help organize them! So …

Use Your Type System

Today I'm discussing a trivially simple technique that I've rarely seen used in production codebases. In programming, we often need to deal with simple values that can be represented by simple, generic types built into our programming language or provided by libraries: types like integer, string, …

CO2 Monitoring and Alerting with Aranet4 + an4mon

In my home office, I use an Aranet4 CO2 monitor to track carbon dioxide levels. CO2 levels can climb surprisingly quickly when the door is shut while I'm in meetings or calls. I want to CO2 track levels in InfluxDB and integrate the monitor with Home Assistant via …

Announcing the DzSolarized VS Code theme

dzsolarized-vscode is a new Visual Studio Code theme, derived from Solarized, that reflects my personal tastes and preferences. The most outstanding and unusual feature is that the terminal is in "dark mode" even when the rest of the UI is in "light mode." Try it today; …

Functional Documentation

Without application of force to keep internal technical documentation up to date, that documentation will quickly become inaccurate. Consider internal documentation about a codebase at your company. This commonly takes the form of text files checked into Git, a Notion or Confluence page, comments in the code, system design documents, …

Neat Image noise profiles for the Sigma sd Quattro H

I've developed Neat Image noise profiles for the Sigma sd Quattro H camera. These profiles cover JPEG images and RAW (X3F) images processed with Sigma Photo Pro 6. You can find additional details and download the profiles from the Neat Image website. Alternatively, the files are available here. …