The old WordPress install had served its purpose, but it was time to move on. This site is now a static build — markdown in, HTML out, no database, no PHP runtime, no plugins to keep patched. Why static The appeal is straightforward: no attack surface, no hosting complexity, version-controlled content, fast as hell. A static site is just files.…

On AI I’ve had a bit of time to reflect on where my career has taken me over the years and one thing that comes up consistently is machine learning and expert systems. No one was calling it AI back then and there was still a sense of the past AI winter looming. I was working on a government contract…

Modern HTML I was looking around recently to see what the state of HTML5 was. I don’t even know if HTML5 is a buzzword anymore. I remember back in the day when we were trying to “fix” html and make the Web ok again. We always championed the idea of semantic markup and clean CSS. These were reactions to the…

Modern CSS I’m writing a little UI and I was looking around at CSS frameworks. I know that Tailwind is pretty much what everyone uses now. I used to be on a team at Yahoo that developed the concept of Atomic CSS and Tachyons. These were minimal CSS-only frameworks that didn’t rely on React or anything. I’m looking into modern…

Sagemaker I’m looking into AWS Sagemaker now in order to run some machine learning models. I’m working with a team of Data Scientists who are developing models and I need to get my head around how this works from an Engineering standpoint. I’m doing some basic investigation on all of the different types of hosting and environments. It’s clear to…

Learn and Burn I’m deep in the throes of machine learning right now. Not in the LLM sense but in the traditional classifier model sense. Not generative AI but decisioning and clustering. Old school. I have done some of this in the past but it’s been a few years. I’m working with some Data Scientists that know the math and…

Python versions I’m a little slow on the uptake with version management of language runtimes and environments. For a long time I just followed the Linux distribution convention of global versions of dependencies and compiler versions for my system. This changed during my years doing NodeJS development where the language and tools were changing daily it seemed. Node Version Manager…

Sharpening the Saw I’ve been deepening my Maker practice over the last year or so. I’m working with physical things, making electronics happen, doing art and making things out of metal. Loosely this could be defined as art. It’s more of a multi-disciplinary exploration of building things. I’m working out details of organizational systems for tools and materials. Also of…

The quest for modularity I was reading some of Avery Pennarun’s blog posts on system architecture and design. There was a set of bullet points that stood out to me that I will copy below: The top-line goals of module systems are always the same: Isolate each bit of code from the other bits. Re-connect those bits only where explicitly…

Middleware everywhere I’m a huge fan of composition via middleware. Some people call them plugins, as we did back when I was working on Ubernote. We had plugins for all sorts of things. The only thing you need is a stable API and a default way of invoking things. This turns out to be important later when considering how to…