Home of Chris Adams

Home of Chris Adams

Sydney based, AI-focused software entrepreneur who lived in San Francisco & Silicon Valley for 7 years.

Motivated by the power of technology to improve lives.

20+ years of software engineering experience across full-stack, backend, infrastructure, Site Reliability Enigneering, and AI engineering. Past work includes Uber, Airbnb, Canva, and a wide variety of startups - several of which I co-founded.

My hobbies include software engineering, ocean swimming, surf lifesaving, and triathlon - sometimes all at once!

Launching AI Trix Consulting

I always aspired to be an entrepreneur. Have a successful business and make money myself, no paychecks in sight.

LLMs are like pizza, and that's OK

LLMs are like pizza, and that's OK

Let’s get pizza. Cheese? Meat lovers? Vegetarian? Want pineapple? Deep dish, giant slice, or fully loaded with the lot? There’s enough takes on pizza to please every taste; and the existence of one type of pizza doesn’t devalue any other. Pizza is a food genre.

Counting Bondi Salties swimmers with a little help from AI

Counting Bondi Salties swimmers with a little help from AI

This is a story about a new way of building software: in dialogue with an LLM. In this case, Claude 3.5 Sonnet from Anthropic.

Ideas to level up daily standups

Today while reading The Daily Scrum over at Rethinking Software I realized that what is framed as a complaint could be reframed as a question:

Creating VeggieBrain

Creating VeggieBrain

Building with AI is rewarding: neat things can be done very quickly. VeggieBrain is a chat app I built wherein you chat with a chatbot that exists in a magical world where everything relates to vegetables. It was born as a response to a friend’s project - my mate built beefbrain.com, similar but beef-related instead. BeefBrain uses vanilla CSS and JS and OpenAI’s gpt-3.5-turbo model. Kudos to Ben, the bot does really well with that model - one may even say despite it!

Switch Homebrew Setup in June 2022

Switch Homebrew Setup in June 2022

If you have a Nintendo Switch which can be patched to run homebrew software, the possibilities are endless. Fortunately for me, my Switch falls into this category. More people should try it!

Doubletruths

You don’t have to be wrong if someone else is right. Two contradictory things can be true at the same time.

20-year high school reunion: a report.

20-year high school reunion: a report.

In late May, 2022, I headed to Melbourne for the 20 year reunion of my final year high school class. Our final year was composed of around 200 students, all boys of course. What could people have done in 20 years? What could change?

Demanding the right to

Technology • Philosophy

Demanding the right to "bear servers"

In the Wild West of the modern Internet, the people must be able to wield (ie. run) their own infrastructure. The Second Amendment to the US Constitution allows the populace to control their own destiny in self-defense against both the wilderness and authoritarianism; in a similar vein, controlling our own infrastructure (email, social networking etc.) allows us a form of self-defense against monopolization and monetization of the Internet by big players.

What's your unit of (software) reuse?

Technology • Philosophy

What's your unit of (software) reuse?

Keeping concerns separate in software is a key step on the path to reusability, as a company I was at before 2013 learned, when a desktop web app suddenly needed to become mobile-ready. The desktop web app had significant business logic in UI components, which was not feasible to duplicate 3 more times to support mobile web, iOS, and Android.