Home of Chris Adams

Home of Chris Adams

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

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. I'm a software engineer who loves to swim. It began with curiosity. Look at that photo up top: how many people are there?

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: Why do daily standups cause so much consternation and anxiety? A couple reasons were given: * It's hard to remember what I was doing

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

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! Over the years of owning this console I've enjoyed tons of great homebrew software, first via

Doubletruths

You don't have to be wrong if someone else is right. Two contradictory things can be true at the same time. Walking along a beach, I spied a ferris wheel. A lone security guard stood in the moonlight, guarding the closed ride. Curious, I walked closer. Our paths

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? As I lifted my suitcase and

Demanding the right to "bear servers"

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

What's your unit of (software) reuse?

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