Korny's Blog
The personal blog of Korny Sietsma| Korny's Blog
I’ve had the song “Stuck in the Middle with You” in my head for a few weeks. (R.I.P. Michael Madsen!) 1 But not because of Reservoir Dogs - but because of the public discussion about AI coding tools. (Yes, I know… feel free to walk away if you are sick of the whole thing). I feel like there’s this strange culture war, or something like it, playing out - with wild statements on both extremes - and I’m stuck in the middle. Hype To the left of me There is just so much AI Hype. I’m ...| Korny’s Blog
I thought it’d be worth posting an example of a bigger task I did the other day - just to show what can be done, without crazy vibe-coding, on a non-greenfields app, using ASP.Net Core not some simplistic front-end tooling. This was originally part of a longer post but I thought it was worth splitting - this example is used in my post Clowns to the left of me … The task - Sending a message when data changes We have an ASP.Net core application which includes a relationship between Business...| Korny’s Blog
I was demonstrating Claude Code to a colleague the other day - I was working on an ASP.Net Core C# service, using Claude within the JetBrains Rider IDE. And my colleague said “it uses a lot of bash commands like find - why doesn’t it hook into the IDE to understand the structure?” I was a bit surprised by this - I quite like the way it uses small simple commands. Musing about it afterwards, I realised that this is actually an example of the Unix philosophy - “write programs that do on...| Korny’s Blog
I had a shower thought the other day - “I’m an ebook hoarder, I have a bunch of technical ebooks as mobi/epub files, but also pdfs. It’d be nice to be able to slurp them up into LLM tools - for summarizing, for categorising and the rest”. I’d already done epubs (see my recent Stonemouth analysis) so PDFs should be not too hard? It turns out PDFs are surprisingly complex - they often aren’t linear documents at all, they are very display/print oriented - and things that appear simpl...| Korny's Blog
There’s a lot of positive and negative discussion happening about AIs at the moment. I have thoughts - lots of them - and I want to blog more, mostly about coding tools. But I don’t have the time! But some small experiments still blow me away - and are worthy of a quick post. So, I finished reading the Iain M Banks book Stonemouth last night - it’s a complex story with a lot of characters, and I mostly kept track, but to be honest I got lost in a few minor characters - it doesn’t help...| Korny's Blog
Why Mermaid? I’ve always loved diagrams as code - you can easily express graphical information in a text file, with easy searching, renaming, git tooling, and it encourages you to keep things simple rather than getting caught up in presentation. I was a long-time user of PlantUML - it has a lot of diagram types and options, a lot of tweakability, and is open and can run anywhere. But - anywhere means “anywhere with a Java VM”, and about ten years ago, Mermaid.js came along as a javascri...| Korny's Blog
(aside - I have some much bigger blog ideas but haven’t had the time to write them properly - so here’s just a small thing I find handy) Lately I wanted some toolbar widgets - mostly for looking at CI/CD build statuses - and I stumbled across XBar. What is XBar? XBar is a nifty tool for Mac OSX machines which puts little UI widgets on your toolbar. (It started as an older project called Bitbar, which was abandoned for a while - there is a similar alternative called SwiftBar for those who ...| Korny's Blog
My youngest child started school this week, so I have a bit of time for blogging! This is another “a neat hack that I’m sharing partly so I remember how I did it in the future”… The problem Basically, I have a big ripped mp3 music collection I play using the venerable MPD Music Player Daemon system. I can play tracks and playlists fine with MPD-compatible applications, but I quite often want to listen to and browse music based on albums not tracks. I want “these are my favourite alb...| Korny’s Blog
File under “blogging so I remember how I did this”… I often have the situation where I have a directory full of related git repositories related to one area of work. So I have for example ~/work/team-a/platitude-generator and ~/work/team-a/memes and so on. And I just want everything up to date - especially if I come back after my non-working day or a holiday. I used to use a tool called gws to manage this, but it has a few bugs and quirks - it caches too much and I had to manually edit ...| Korny’s Blog
My grandfather, Dr Kornelis Sietsma was a Dutch Reformed Church minister in wartime Amsterdam. He preached in ways that offended the Nazi occupiers, and they deported him to the Dachau concentration camp, where he died. This was a fascinating family history to me growing up - I was named after my grandfather, and his heroic attitude and tragic death informed my view of the world. Now I have kids of my own, and I started thinking about how I could explain their great-grandfather to them. I kne...| Korny's Blog
