If, you like me, are tired of listening to Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart agree agreeably on The Rest is Politics, then I might have something for you… 🥁🥁🥁 It’s an 11-part podcast series on Web Development – planned, researched, scripted and read aloud for your entertainment by ROBOTS!!! Huh? Well, not robots robots; I’ll […]
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Streetscape Now Does More Things Than It Did Previously
I published an article announcing the release of my new road network visualisation app Streetscape 10 days ago, and since then I’ve made a number of significant improvements to it, which I’d like to bombard you with today. Firstly and perhaps least spectacularly, there’s a new Guidance page to teach users how to interpret images […]
How Vibe Coding Led to a Crypto Mining Attack on My Web Server
I was surprised the other day to learn that my web server was under attack. I was remoted in to the DigitalOcean Droplet instance where my web server is hosted (I moved off of AWS a few months ago), when I noticed that system load was unusually high. Investigating further, I checked out CPU usage […]
Behold! It’s the Road Network Visualisation Tool You’ve Been Waiting For
11 months have passed now since I last did you a post, and much has changed in that time. I’ve had a baby, for one thing. But onto more important matters: the other day, I released a new app! It’s called Streetscape, and you can find it here. What is it? Streetscape is my way […]
GPT-4o – Hype and Building Stuff
Hype GPT-4o is OpenAI’s latest frontier model, announced by CTO Mia Murati in a livestream yesterday at 18:00 UK time, and at first glance the new capabilities that it promises are extremely exciting. The “o” in GPT-4o stands for “omni”, a reference to the native multimodality of the new model, which was trained end-to-end on […]
Behind the Breakpoints: Exploring the Inner Workings of Debuggers
Using a debugger has been a core part of my workflow ever since I started life as a professional software developer three-and-a-half years ago. However, until very recently, I never really understood the internal mechanics of debugging, and this meant that when debugging the debugging process itself, I was often unable to reason about the […]
The Great Migration
The other day I launched my very first AWS EC2 instance and migrated this website, and a couple of web apps, onto it. It was a long time coming – the annual cost of web hosting with Bluehost has increased from a discounted £51.72 in 2021 to £118.30 in 2023, while my Soccer Simulation app […]
LexiDeck: Enhancing the Anki Experience with Automated Flashcard Creation
My memory is notoriously terrible, and I’ve devoted a lot of energy over the years to compensating for that fact. Way back in the day this meant getting to grips with a clunky application called SuperMemo, built around a fascinating spaced repetition algorithm that promised long-term knowledge retention. I later discovered the flashcard software Anki, […]
How ChatGPT’s New “GPTs” Feature Can Help You Develop Software
OpenAI’s Dev Day took place on November 6th and it’s fair to say there was a lot of hype leading up to the event. Nowhere was this more palpable than the hive of optimism that is the subreddit r/Singularity, which I am slightly ashamed to admit that I follow avidly. Confident predictions of an AGI […]
Learn Español with the GPT-3.5 API
I’ve been using ChatGPT on a daily basis ever since last December, but it was only the other day that I actually got round to having a play around with the OpenAI API for the first time. It was an interesting experience that culminated in the production of a useful little language-learning app, that I […]