Category: programming
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Vector Database with Django and pgvector
I have a small Django project I have been playing with for a while. There’s more about it in this series of posts. The application just keeps a list of items (mostly weblinks etc) and lets me organize them. I’ve been experimenting with using embeddings for finding similar items or suggesting tags etc. I am…
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Latency, UX and LLMs
Latency is well understood to be detrimental to the user experience. No one likes to wait. But there are multiple ways this affects the UX In some cases the latency of interaction can change our relationship to the entire process. We see this a lot in software development where the turnaround time from making a…
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OpenAI Playgrounds
I knew about these but I hadn’t really been using them much until someone really showed me how cool they are for “playing around” with GPT. Its obvious when you say like that but I am often not very smart. When doing experiments with the chat interface I often want to try out different paths…
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GPT4 Helps me Code
Spent some time yesterday giving some of my crappy code to GPT4 and asking it to make it better. I gave it this: and asked “Can you simplify this code” The response was pretty good. Then I asked “Can you add type annotations?” And got back: It also added this note: Note: The trace is…
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Do the hard thing more often
When we were developing Uru the game build process was pretty complicated. We had built all of our own tools etc from scratch including 3DSMax plugins to generate game data and we also had a custom asset management system. A lot of complexity had accreted over time to make just creating a stable build of…
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Making a Chrome Extension
I have a little personal project that is basically a web app to save and share links. Not very original, but its been fun to work on and explore some ideas. I decided I wanted to write a chrome extensions so I could quickly add a new link. I started with ChatGPT: How can I…
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Grug Dev
Someone posted this in a slack: https://grugbrain.dev/ Its maybe a little bit long and the joke wears thin by the end but also I wish I had written it. In a clever way it talks through so much of different sorts of dysfunction in Software Development. You can also read it in translation here. Some…
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Could vs Will
A long time ago, when I was working at Cyan on Uru we had a visit from a tech guy from the publisher. He was trying to assess where things stood. He interviewed all the devs on my team before talking to me and he then met with me and said. “You are more than…
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Productivity of Software Teams
People love talking about productivity in Software development. So much so that this conversation is probably a key contribution to low productivity. Since Covid, we’ve been asking if remote work is as effective as in office etc. Many of the bigCos are now pushing people to go back into the office. They give all kinds…
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Ways programming languages got better (mostly)
I was talking with an old friend the other day about how programming has changed in our lifetimes. There’s plenty of room for old people grousing about how tool chains are too complicated, abstractions are too deep, or kids today don’t know how to do X. There are however a lot of positive changes in…