My mission to gain more technical independence has me questioning any and all third-party services I use. While I do value having visibility into my websites traffic, relying on Google for anything has been top of my mind during this process. For my...

I have fond memories of Sea-Monkeys as a kid. I had them, but I don't remember any success with them. Maybe it was a bad batch, maybe I over fed them, who freakin' knows at this point. Fast forward to last year, I decided that I wanted to try my hand...

After switching from WordPress to Eleventy (11ty) earlier this year, I'm still playing catch up on a few things. One such thing, is getting category and tag pages setup again. With Jekyll, I had setup a series of individual pages, one for each catego...

I remember it like it was yesterday. My daughter and I, on our usual Saturday grocery store run. We're at HEB Plus! on the eve of the end of the world. We were fully aware of COVID-19, but trying to not freak out about things. I bet everybody thought...

I talk to robots... a lot. Because of this, I don't take the stock "personality" at face value. I try to dial things in, sometimes fun and flirty, other times cold and direct. I treat it like a visual novel. While I am coaxing information out, I want...

It feels like every week, there's either a new LLM version or new AI coding tool or both. It's freakin' exhausting, so I try to be selective about which tools I dabble with. When I do venture from my usual stack, I try to commit to at least a solid w...

Part of the fun of self-hosting is making sure you follow best practices and don't shoot yourself in the foot. One of those tasks is making sure things are backed up, ideally to an off-site location (I use S3), and are encrypted. I try to keep things...

Becoming an insufferable self-hosting zealot has its ups and downs. Dealing with all of the bad actors in the world is a complete downer. That is, until you deploy a solution and get that hit of dopamine as you watch your server's CPU usage take a no...

AI code completion. It's great right? You sit down, open up some file, navigate to a line of code. BOOM! Like magic, a dozen or more lines of code show up. You give them a quick glance, maybe try running the code. Amazing! How'd it even know that I w...

I like Eleventy (11ty), but... there's always a "but", right? There have been a few things that I've struggled with. While 11ty has a ton of documentation, it's not always clear and concise. Answers on StackOverflow have been somewhat lacking. LLMs h...