… has too many hobbies.

Topic:

Programming

49 posts
Oct 2012 – Oct 2025

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 …

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 …

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

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.

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, …

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, …

Hacking slightly better sum types without Go generics

Go doesn't have real sum types, but we can at least hack together an exhaustive switch helper, without requiring generics.

macOS Scripting: How to tell if the Terminal app has Full Disk Access

My macOS system configuration script requires Full Disk Access, so I wanted to add a warning if the user's terminal app doesn't have the required permissions. This check should be performed right at the beginning of the script, because if the process fails halfway through, the …

HTTPS Requests with a Small Set of Root Certificates on ESP8266 + Arduino

Part of the Getting Started with ESP8266 + Arduino series. In yesterday's post, I walked through best practices for making secure HTTPS connections using a root certificate store on ESP8266 with Arduino. In that example, I used Mozilla's full list of trusted root certificates for my certificate …