Software History

Earlier this evening, I had an idea: what if I could use OpenAI's GPT-3 model to generate an appropriate emoji for a commit message? I have seen emojis used in commit messages and I am curious about the visual representation of the information with which they are associated.

A thoughtful, interconnected site structure is great for both people and search engines. There are many components of designing the structure of a site, from choosing the right URLs to creating breadcrumbs to help people navigate around your site. Linking to relevant content -- from similar articles that together form a linear track to linking to related editorial content -- helps people understand what you have to offer on your site, and helps search engines discover new pages on your site.

This is the seventh post in the Advent of Technical Writing series, wherein I will share something I have learned from my experience as a technical writer. My experience is primarily in software technical writing, but what you read may apply to different fields, too. View all posts in the series.

I have been using the webmention.io dashboard to check my webmentions. This is all I needed in a webmention reader. I'd check my webmentions every now and again because it was uncommon that I would receive one. When I did receive a webmention, I'd add writing a response to my mental to-do list and I would get around to sending one whenever I could. I like the manual process. It's fun to write and send a webmention.

This is the sixth post in the Advent of Technical Writing series, wherein I will share something I have learned from my experience as a technical writer. My experience is primarily in software technical writing, but what you read may apply to different fields, too. View all posts in the series.

At this week's Homebrew Website Club meeting, we had a discussion about Raspberry Pis. Most of the people in attendance had a Raspberry Pi. We all showed each other our Pis and where we had them set up. It was fascinating. I had to admit to everyone that my Pi has been sitting lonely in a drawer for a while. I haven't done much with it. I have a Sense HAT. The Sense Hat sits on top of the Pi.

While designing my LLM-powered chatbot that is designed to answer questions with reference to a limited subset of my writing, I have been thinking about source attribution. The intent is to help people better evaluate the veracity, balance, and context associated with an answer returned by a model. Hallucination and it’s implications are at the forefront of my mind. I want to do what I can to ensure people can easily fact check the outputs of an LLM retrieval system.

A few weeks ago, I learned that the IndieWeb community aims to archive all of the Etherpad documents from meetups on the wiki. Etherpad documents are made available at online meetups so participants can document ideas and what happened in the call. Archiving these documents to the wiki makes them easily searchable and ensures their contents are preserved not only in a document that could be edited further down the line.

During the

On my website home page, I have a

As a programmer, I often feel tempted to brainstorm ideas for

The reason this blog still exists today, after going through so many iterations, is that I always self-dogfood. This is a term in the IndieWeb community that means that I use my own creations. On my blog, everything has been built by me, for me. I haven't thought about whether my code could be used by other people. It probably could. It's all on GitHub for anyone to use. I have licensed my code under an MIT license so anyone can use it.

The IndieWeb is all about scratching itches. When I think about what I want this site to become, I often say to myself that I am building a home for myself on the internet. Starting on the IndieWeb, this was enough. I needed to let my creative spirits run wild. I needed to try out different ideas. I looked at other people's websites and thought about what I could implement.

Have you ever wondered

Writing an extension for Mozilla Firefox has been in my mental to-dos for a while. I like the idea of having my own new tab page. I used to use an extension called Momentum which displayed a nice image alongside the time. For my purposes, Momentum was a bit verbose. Every time I loaded a new tab, I had to render an image. Sometimes it took a second for that image to render. There were many customization features that I did not need.

In the first part of this series on my experiments with the Adafruit thermal printer I recently purchased, I mentioned how I was working on other modules for the thermal printer. A

How would you like to send me a message that gets printed so that I can read it on paper? You can do this by sending me a webmention, which is a way of sending comments from your own website that I will then receive. Using webmentions, you can retain ownership over the comments you send other people. I know that webmentions are not widely used, and do require a bit of technical knowledge to use, but for now I can say I support printing webmentions.

I was just chatting with a friend and an idea came up that I have been thinking about for a few days: an email to RSS converter. This service would let you subscribe to an email newsletter via email and then send all posts from that newsletter into an RSS feed.

There are two types of posts I write about programming. The ones I like writing most are those where I discuss how I built something, or how I intend on building something. It's fun to explain how I build projects. I like the technical details. This is not one of those posts. This is a post about what it's like to be a developer. The developer life, if you will.

This is the fifth post in the Advent of Technical Writing series, wherein I will share something I have learned from my experience as a technical writer. My experience is primarily in software technical writing, but what you read may apply to different fields, too. View all posts in the series.

I am tempted by all of the IndieWeb websites to add more features to this site. Yesterday evening, I had somewhat of a realization: the parts of my website that stand the test of time are those that are simple and do not require any overhead.

On this Tuesday evening, I found myself wondering: about what could I write? A question indeed. This was one of those times when I didn't have anything in particular on my mind, and went searching for inspiration anyway. As I thought I should prepare for bed, an idea came to mind. I could go to my bookmarks archive and see if I have read anything recently that would inspire me.

I have a blogroll page on this site where I list the blogs which I am actively reading. I love having a blogroll because it makes it easy for people to find other blogs to explore. If I am subscribed to a good blog, the least I can do is add a link to my site so that other people can discover that same blog. However, my current process for updating my blogroll is quite laborious. I have to remember to add links to my blogroll and then add them manually. This isn't too bad if I am adding one or two links but it starts to get tedious if I want to add many links to my blogroll. I am subscribed to around 100 feeds and I don't list them all on my blogroll.

MIT's Scratch makes programming playful. Drag and drop blocks, then connect them together. Moments later, you can have a program that does exactly as you instructed. One doesn't even need to call it programming; instead, we can call it play. Like Lego blocks, you connect the blocks and make something that, at the end, is yours.

Sometimes I feel like I have to be working on a coding project otherwise I am somehow behind. I do not like to feel that way. I like to code because I can build something meaningful, but what I build is only meaningful if I have a good idea. I'm slowly training myself to step back and to stop worrying about not having a particular project to work on. Making small changes to my existing work is more meaningful than starting something new.

On Thursday, Aaron noted an idea for a service that would, given a URL, return the profile photo associated with the h-card on that URL. I found the idea intriguing, noting my interest in building it. I agreed that it would be great to have an API to call to retrieve a photo, similar to Gravatar but using h-cards.

One of my favourite patterns in the Python programming language is the

This is the tenth post in the Advent of Technical Writing series, wherein I will share something I have learned from my experience as a technical writer. My experience is primarily in software technical writing, but what you read may apply to different fields, too. View all posts in the series.

I have enjoyed crafting my daily update that is printed with the thermal printer. So far, my daily update includes, among other things, my schedule, the weather for the day, my RSS feed, a news update from The Guardian, and a tech news update from The Guardian. But I wanted to keep experimenting with the printer. Then I got an idea: why don't I try to add an IndieWeb word of the day to the update?