Programming

I work for an AI startup, Gluino. We are literally building an AI system to help people do work. Still, I’m a bit of an old-fashioned human. I carry a pen and paper with me everywhere. One of the things I wrestle with is how to use AI responsibly and to the best of its ability to help me. In this series of posts, I want to discuss how I’ve used AI in the past, how it has helped me, and how it hasn’t. I will also mention some interesting uses of AI that I have seen or heard about, hoping to inspire responsible use of what we call AI. ...

My first dive into understanding computers began in 7th grade. I was on a Mac when I first started to learn to program. It wasn’t too long before I connected to the Internet and began to learn about Unix and Linux systems. I remember writing my first CGI script in C on a Solaris box. One of the reasons I was such a computer person was a learning disability I had been diagnosed with. I was a slow writer. I wrote about 30 words a minute by hand. Compare that to the 70 words or so I can type per minute, and you have a compelling reason for me to invest in working on a keyboard instead of using a pen. ...

One of the projects I’m working on for Gluino has me thinking about data structures again. Data structures are ways of storing data in memory (either program memory or on disk), and the choice can be significant. I’m working on a list of requests with scores and values. This list grows dynamically as items enter and leave it. It could contain 0, 1, or many items. Let’s discuss the implementation of these structures in a more common programming language better to understand the difference between a list and a vector. Simply put, a vector is like an array of memory, whereas a list is more similar to a linked list. Here is some C code creating an array, which is akin to a vector: ...

I’ve committed to building websites with Hugo about ten years after it was cool. I’ll admit that I sat on the WordPress bus for too long. I’m currently redesigning zacroyoga. The challenge is that I still need to be a theme designer. Designing a theme would be fun, but I like the PaperMod theme, but there are certain areas I want to extend beyond it. For example, on zacroyoga, I don’t want posts on the front page. The front page is a landing zone. It will have information about me and acroyoga and places to visit. I will put posts on a separate page. ...

I’ve been working in a tailwind environment for a couple of weeks on this Clojure project. I have some more opinions about it, and I figured I’d share. Firstly, Tailwind is pretty powerful. One of the reasons we are using it is because of its plugins like DaisyUI, which should allow us to theme our app more easily. Looking at the documentation, there are classes for everything you need to style your front end. The challenge is that it is not always clear how to go from a known CSS property to a Tailwind style. I find myself constantly referring to the documentation. ...