David Walz

My Approach to Using AI with Programming

It’s pretty clear at this point that AI, in one way or another is here to stay. I imagine at some point the hype will settle, hopefully not crash and this plane will land safely in some new exotic paradise. I’ve observed other developers that range from AI enthusiast to AI avoiders and like a lot of things, I feel like I fall some where in the middle. In terms of AI and my usage of it, I’ve described myself as “cautiously optimistic”.

I feel like if you are on one of the extreme ends of this range, you might be carrying more risk. If you don’t use AI at all, you might be missing out on learning new things and maybe even productivity. If as a AI enthusiast you over rely on AI, you might be accumulating security risks and technical debt by building a large code base that you don’t fully understand.

AI suggested improvements to Conway’s Game of Life

Screenshot of the a terminal displaying Conway’s Game of Life.

Conway’s Game of Life is a fun little simulator of life using cells (blocks) to represent a life form. When a given cell has the right number of neighbors it comes to life and if it has too few or too many neighbors, it dies. There are a many blog posts out there that can help you get started creating your own Game of Life (GoL). Some are written in Python and use pygame I’ve checked out others that use the terminal to display a grid with text.

What’s Been Crossing My Radar

Every so often I end up with a long list of links that I don’t quite know what to do with. They’re articles, blog posts, projects and discussions I’ve come across on Hacker News, Slashdot, and elsewhere over the past few months. The are topics I find interesting, thought-provoking, or just worth coming back to. Rather than letting them disappear into the void, I’ve collected them here in one place.

https://www.jacobelder.com/2024/01/17/director-of-toy-story-also-drew-bsd-daemon.html
https://noamzeise.com/2024/07/05/mini-monitor.html
https://www.theverge.com/24144774/drinking-fountain-bubbler-button-of-the-month
https://blog.ablspacesystems.com/p/building-e2
https://blog.jsbarretto.com/post/software-is-joy
https://huggingface.co/nanonets/Nanonets-OCR-s

Working with Translations on WordPress

These are some notes for how to set up your custom plugin and/or theme to be translation friendly. As a WordPress developer, if your custom theme has English strings that are hard coded or stored in the code base, you can set them up so they can be localized and translatable.

Installing and Enabling SSH

I’m just adding this here because every few months I need to install SSH on a Linux server. I end up googling it and going to some really annoying website with flashing ads.

Modernizing My Old iPod Classic

I’ve got this shoe box in my home office closet that is full of old Raspberry Pis and other single board computers that I’ve played around with over the years. This is also where my old iPods ended up. I was flipping through this box a couple weeks ago and found my iPod Classic (5th generation), this is the generation that was the first to support video playback.

Strange Radio Towers I Spotted on Roadtrip

I was taking a small road trip from Missouri to Iowa using I-35 and spotted something strange. Well, two things, one was a Tesla Cybertruck in the opposing lane. Which at the time of writing this post, are a rare sight to see in the Mid West. The second thing I saw was radio tower that look both ancient and epic at the same time. Usually I see radio or cell towers that have these things that look like flat white panels or something that looks like a large white drum. This however had large gray horn shaped features aimed in two different directions. I imagined this had nothing to do with cell service and would more likely be receiving alien messages from space.

Dump of Interesting Links

It seems like every day I find an article or blog post that grabs my attention. Most of the time this happens during the work day and I just don’t have to time to stop what I’m doing to read the whole article. I’m creating this post/list of interesting links as a way to revist these links that I collect in my daily notes. These are a mix of development, computer hardware, design, art and sciences. In this particular list I will break out the WordPress and web development links and move those to the bottom of the list.

#5FTF – January 26th 2024

Once a month at WebDevStudios we dedicate an entire day to giving back to the open-source community. It’s called “Five for the Future” or #5FTF. Contributions can be done through bug fixes on open-source projects, answering questions on forums, providing translation services for projects and even building our own project from scratch.

Open VSC with “code” command from terminal

macOS

These are the steps to add the ‘code’ command to your terminal on macOS to open a file or directory in Visual Studio Code.