Retro Computing

I have been very excited with where we are as an industry right now. To me it feels like how computing felt when I was a kid and getting into computers. In the late 80s I started exploring computers with Apple Basic on the Apple IIc and IIe computers available at school and our public library. That was my first taste of programming.

When I got into 9th grade my parents got me an old IBM PC with a 20MB hard drive and 640KB of RAM and MS-DOS 5.0. They also got me a copy of Turbo Pascal 7.0. Turbo Pascal had this great framework for building text-based user interfaces, called Turbo Vision. It was pretty exciting to be able to build out something that felt like a real application with very few lines of code. Even the IDE for the language itself was all done in Turbo Vision.

I saw a message on a Catholic Facebook group the other day about a thing called “100 Days of Dante”. The idea is to read a little bit of Dante’s Divine Comedy each day for 100 days. This is one thing that I have always wanted to read the entire poem, but have never gotten around to it.

A few years ago when Father Mike Schmitz was doing the Bible in a Year podcast for the first time, I heard about it on X (Twitter at that time.) All the Catholic people on there seemed to say he was solid, and at that point I was unfamiliar with Father Mike. I started listening to it on day 6 and was immediately hooked. I ended up making it the whole way through reading along most of the time while I listened to the podcast. That approach worked so well I went on to do the Catechism in a year when he did that as well and made it through the entire catechism of the Catholic Church for the first time in my life.

Intro

Lately the topic of the day is AI agents and vibe coding. I have been playing around with some of the ai tools and figured I would jot down my thoughts. This is also a chance to dive into a bigger test of the tools and see where they help and where the limitations are.

The History

Initially it started out with the copilot style of AI which really was just a much better line completion than say intellisense from an IDE. At first, I have to say I was pretty impressed when I could just drop a comment in my code which was basically a TODO for me as I went and the AI would fill in the code for me. I guess this must have been around 2023 when I started experimenting with this.

I haven’t updated the site in a long time, so I finally decided to do so. I was on paternity leave a few months back and in that time when I wasn’t exhausted or busy with my son I spent the time thinking, reading and doing some exploring.

One of the things that has concerned me a lot in the last couple of years is the rampant censorship that is being pushed. Finally to type this now with Elon purchasing Twitter, maybe things are going in the other direction, but it seems to me that the reason we are in this situation is because of the increasing amount of centralization of services that has occurred under web2. There used to be tons of independent blogs and competing blogging hosts, and you see so much content shift into Medium. RSS readers were huge and you saw Google kill its reader as more content got centralized.

I started writing here at the end of November in 2014. At that time I figured out how to setup Wordpress on an EC2 container in AWS and figure out how to secure it. From a general devops standpoint it was a great exercise for me to get better with AWS and just generally how you configure and lock down a website. As the years have gone on I have occasionally upgraded my container to the new long term stability releases of Ubuntu as they were released. Earlier this year I decided to do the same and upgrade to the latest version of Ubuntu. Finally after keeping this container going for 6 years, I just got an error when trying to upgrade Ubuntu. I decided that that point I should just build a new container and migrate the blog over to it. It had been a couple of months, but I decided since I had the whole week off at Thanksgiving to undertake it at that time. As you can see now it has been successful as nothing looks different here.

I haven’t been active on here lately just due to how busy we have been in getting our product on the market. That being said I did end up writing a post for our company blog about the engineering process we have built up over the last couple of years. I figured I would share it on here as well. Check it out here: https://wndyr.com/is-what-were-doing-driving-value-as-engineers/

I am a strong proponent of Agile development and I like the mind shift around thinking about value creation and who is the ultimate customer for what I am building. I hope that it is useful for you as well.

In the past when I was a Java developer we would run Sonar on our projects for static analysis. I have always liked the dashboard view it provides and the way it can find all sorts of problems in a code base that are often overlooked. When I learned that Sonar supported Go I knew that I would eventually integrate it into our environment. Since I had already built out our continuous integration pipeline in Bitbucket, I figured it would be easy to integrate Sonar into our builds. Little did I know that there wasn’t much documentation out there on the internet showing how to do so.

The 2000s

With the turn of the new year it got me thinking a bit about the change in the decade. Hard to believe it has been over 20 years since I was celebrating the change of the century with my friends in Minneapolis. Things have changed drastically since then. At that time I was 6 months into my career. I had joined a telecom startup and moved to Texas after graduating from the University of Minnesota. The 2000s were a decade of change and growth for me. It had me working really hard to get established in my career. Going through a couple of acquisitions and finally moving into my second startup. I met my wife then and got married, and we transitioned from apartment life to having a house. We traveled as much as we could. Mexico was much safer back then and we explored a lot of central Mexico as well as trips to Europe every year.

Wow what a year. It has flown by and as you can see I haven’t gotten to the blog since I upgraded the site earlier this year. Looking in my drafts it looks like I was intending to write a post about travel, but I didn’t get back to it. Anyway given that the year is rapidly ending I figured it was time to start looking back on it.

I never imagined how busy this year would be. We went from the start of the year where we created a plan on what we were going to build for the year to drive to an MVP. We were building out what we thought would be our alpha release, but discovered in user testing that we needed to pivot. Along the way one of my employees left. We then drove the new concept to an early access release grew the engineering team and it has been an amazing ride. 2020 is going to be focused on product market fit and hopefully upon achieving that, rocketing into a growth phase. Given how crazy it was to build what we have built on such a lean team a lot of my themes for the year fell to the wayside especially this blog. When you are super busy and tired this is an easy thing to drop.

My site was down for much of today as I finally took the plunge and rebuilt my image from ground up. This was something I had considered doing for some time now. The old site had been through a couple of ubuntu upgrades and was chugging along, but I always thought it would be good to do a fresh install. However I never really wanted to dump the time into it. Then I saw this article: https://www.anandtech.com/show/14284/amazon-offers-another-amd-epyc-powered-instance-t3a