I've been doing a lot of setting up lately. Between K3S, Docker, Robots and so on. I've become good friends with the shell, yaml files, bash scripts, and much more. This article shows a nice one-liner approach:

For a while now I’ve seen mentions of the Tailwind css library. I’ve been a Bootstrap guy forever. The attached article is a good explainer to learn about Tailwind and Rails. (The world of tech never stops even for a moment)

I think many technology savvy people are way underestimating the usefulness of large language models, LLMs, like ChatGPT, the best known LLM. But there are others. And they are improving and changing on a weekly basis. But my respect and admiration for their capabilities also makes me (helplessly) worry about how they WILL be used to cause serious harm in the future. The attached article is a great run down of current capabilities of these systems.

An amazing tour de force in mathematical visualization. Honestly I can follow the first half and then I am lost. But I really appreciate the creative and beautiful animations.

This article is part of a series on … testing with python! It is an excellent overview of mocking, explaining the why, but more importantly showing lots of examples and assessing how well and conveniently they work. Worth reading.

I often say that ideas are cheap. And by that I mean that everyone has a million decent ideas. The art/trick/skill is to know how to turn that one idea into something that people want, use, benefit from, and maybe are willing to pay for. That's why I don't often worry about "who had that idea originally" (and that includes me) but am more impressed with "who was able to execute successfully around that idea". And so, I don't doubt (from personal experience) that LLMs now and more so every day, will accelerate finding, sorting through, testing and challenging, ideas that lead to startups that work. Here's a paper on that very question.

Ever wanted to understand UTF8 better? Every programming language does it a little different but utf8 is utf8. This article explains it well, in general, and specifically for python.

Here's an interesting article, which does not really deliver on the title IMO. I am not even sure how to count the first language. For me, was it Basic (the language that got me hooked) or Pascal (the language used in college) or Assembly language (the first language I used professionally.)

What a wonderful tool!

You are supposed to get magic automatic styling with this one css file. Like a lightweight minimalist bootstrap. Looks interesting!

This is almost exactly how I feel about Ruby and Python. I use Python more now and I really like the way they did type hints. I really dislike what Ruby did. Who needs a second file to deal with. It's back to C header files! So fundamentally I know Ruby better and there are multiple things that I miss. Surprisingly I have gotten totally used to Python's indentation based blocks. I hated those initially. Now I still hate Python's braindead way of creating and working with classes. But... Python is growing on me!

A pretty thorough critique of GraphQL. I used to really like the idea of GraphQL. But I now believe that it solves a problem that most developers (i.e. "you're not Facebook") do not have. And that a much simpler REST API is a better starting point for just about everyone.

I just finished binging this Acorn series, 6 seasons. Show was made in Australia. Really good!

Another tool that maybe useful to you. It changes markdown into html/css/js. Still looking. But you might find this useful

Another tool to turn markdown into html and css. This is FYI. So far I am still looking.

I was looking for a nice package to create slides using markdown files. This one is very nice except it cannot export to straight html/css/js. But other than that, I do recommend it!

Such a simple question. And yet it is great to see the options for enhancing a service offering and thereby justifying a certain price.

Very useful tutorial on how to turn bits of source code into nice images suitable for presentations.

Simple but useful idea.