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 …

Teaser for upcoming Claude Code posts

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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.

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. …