Community

Short-form technical ramblings. Formerly VP of Architecture at Community.com, I'm Member of Technical staff at Mozi and co-author of "Docker: Up and Running" from O'Reilly Media.

Activity

The RAG vs. CAG war is raging. The times of small context window sizes are over. 1M tokens will become the norm (for this year). #ai

At work, Tom Patterer and I built a working #Erlang/#ElixirLang C Node in #CrystalLang. This is pretty great. Blog post to come in the next few weeks.

There’s a lot of good vibe in the #Zig programming language and toolset. There is  some  clever out-of-the-box thinking and quite interesting tooling. How about bootstrapping your self-hosted compiler with WASM rather than the old C++ version of the compiler? 

https://ziglang.org/news/goodbye-cpp/

I spoke at the Augmented Software Engineering meetup here in Dublin last week.

My talk was on getting the most from code-completion #LLMs, and specifically Supermaven with its 1 million token context.

Neovim - Supermaven Talk.pdf 1.19 MB

Now that #Apple's machines have the same CPU architecture as their devices, I cannot understand why we have not seen the iOS Simulator move to a real iPhone VM. It would solve so many problems for developers.

Web and app designers: no one born in 2025 is using your app/site.

Defaulting the birth year selector (looking at you, airlines) to the current year means every single person who uses your software has to scroll further, for nothing. On a phone that is a PITA. If your software/site is for 12+ then make it 2013 at least. If it's 18+ then 2007 at least. Better yet, make it 2000.

Good, quick overview of (some of) the current models and their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to supporting the software-development process #ai #software - https://docdd.ai/articles/best-llm-for-development

Something got unhappy and died on my K8s cluster that runs this service. I was dreading figuring it out. Luckily, I discovered that past me  from a few years ago left some notes about what to do when this happens. YAY, PAST ME! Thanks for that.

2024 was a busy year at a busy new startup!

GitHub Contribution Matrix 2024