Latest — 29 Oct 2025 #latergram: Wild Birds at the Detroit Zoo, April 2024 The Detroit Zoo features a wild colony of Black-Crowned Night Herons, and this gallery features a number of photos of them — the first time I've ever seen one on the wild! …
Getting Good Results from Claude Code: Writing Good Prompts Key to getting good results from Claude Code (and similar LLM programming tools) is writing good prompts. This is one area where your own programming expertise comes into play; you need to use it to provide guidance to the LLM and nudge it in the right direction. Good prompts are …
Give your LLM Coding Tools Their Own Tools Model Context Protocol (MCP) allows LLMs to call "tools" that can do anything: interact with your filesystem, search the Web, hit an external API, or even help guide the LLM through a structured problem-solving process. A single MCP server provides one or more tools; for example, a research …
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, …
#latergram: Bird Photos from Kensington Metropark, July 2025 ℹ️ This post doubles as a testing ground for a new feature I'm developing for the open-source Lychee photo gallery software. …
A Tool for Working with Git Worktrees Git worktrees have received a fair amount of press recently, since Claude Code et al. encourage using them when you're running multiple agents in parallel (to keep them from conflicting with each other). I've found this useful, but working with Git worktrees directly is somewhat cumbersome. …
Setting Up & Testing Spotlight + Samba + Elasticsearch It's possible for Samba to use Elasticsearch to allow macOS Spotlight to use server-side searching on SMB shares. It's annoying to set up and debug, but/and this blog post aims to document everything I've learned. Versions It's critical to understand that …
Getting Good Results from Claude Code: Writing Good Prompts Key to getting good results from Claude Code (and similar LLM programming tools) is writing good prompts. This is one area where your own programming expertise comes into play; you need to use it to provide guidance to the LLM and nudge it in the right direction. Good prompts are …
New Derivative of my Ubiquiti Cloud Key 3.5" HDD Adapter Thingiverse notified me today that Chris Dagenais has created a derivative of my 3.5" adapter for the Unifi Cloud Key Gen2. It seems to be well thought through and it has clear instructions and commentary, so if you're in the market for such a thing, check …
LLM + MCP Use Case: GitHub Actions Workflow Updates One use case for LLM coding tools (GitHub Copilot, in this case) I've found recently is updating the dependencies of GitHub Actions workflows. In a professional context this is done with manual review of the updates, of course, but given I have a huge number of personal repositories …
Celebrating 250(+) Public GitHub Repositories I noticed that I have 262 public GitHub repositories! Some of those are inactive forks, and a number are unmaintained today, but still: that's a lot of software. I figured I'd celebrate by sharing a few highlights here, arranged by category: Popular, New, Useful, Weird, and …
LLM Q&A Technique: Context Priming Even the best LLMs, equipped with web search & research tools, can inevitably hallucinate when asked questions about obscure topics — in today's case, how to accomplish various tasks using the NATS CLI. I combat this by using a technique called "context priming." (I didn't …
Ask Claude Code to fix CI I teased this yesterday, and this is actually going to be a pretty short post. One thing I've used Claude Code for recently in small personal projects is to fix GitHub Actions CI failures. Often these are linter issues, but sometimes the workflow itself needs to be fixed, …
Give your LLM Coding Tools Their Own Tools Model Context Protocol (MCP) allows LLMs to call "tools" that can do anything: interact with your filesystem, search the Web, hit an external API, or even help guide the LLM through a structured problem-solving process. A single MCP server provides one or more tools; for example, a research …
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.
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 …