Building a Go Link Toy with Deno • George Mandis
Sunday afternoon programming creating a go link tool.| George Mandis
Sunday afternoon programming creating a go link tool.| George Mandis
Hire George Mandis, a seasoned full-stack engineer and consultant with 20 years of experience working with organizations like Axios, the NBA, and WWF. Offering Fractional CTO services, technical leadership, and AI integration.| george.mand.is
The episode in which I make new Elmo Fire memes.| George Mandis
Link to: Svalbard: Land of reindeer, unique visa policies and, inexplicably, pineapples| George Mandis
There is no shortage of opinions on this topic. The most honest answer is probably “it depends” but that’s also the least helpful. After 4.5 years leading multiple engineering teams, here’s my single-sentence answer to what makes a great manager: A good manager balances high empathy with high expectations and knows when to pull which lever. High expectations without empathy might “succeed” but at the cost of toxicity. It’s not my definition of success or something I want to be p...| George Mandis
As a child of the 80s and 90s, I have the vaguest memory of Hooked on Phonics commercials on television. More specifically their catchphrase "hooked on phonics worked for me!" Reconciling this message in the D.A.R.E era felt like mixed-messaging. Do you or don't you want me hooked on things? Today I was reminded of this musical sign-off—for Hooked on Phonics, not D.A.R.E—after an introductory conversation with an ed-tech organization for an engineering leadership position. They described ...| George Mandis
There is nothing more meta than blogging about your blog, but I had to start somewhere after a six-month hiatus. Let's cut to the chase. I've been thinking a lot about LLMs and llmstxt.org in particular. Although LLMs are pretty darn good at reading HTML and parsing meaning between the brackets, it still seems to do best when the source is as close to plain-text as possible. So I made a few changes to facilitate this and make the plain-text versions more discoverable: Every blog post has a pl...| George Mandis
Note: I accidentally published this before it was ready! I decided to tweak the typos, remove a couple terrible fragments and otherwise leave it as-is. Ideas have always been cheap; it's the execution that's the multiplier. In the AI world we're hurtling toward, which is driving down the cost of execution, I guess that means ideas are more devalued than ever? Cheaper still than an idea is an observation. It's the Xerox of an idea run through a filter—artifacts and fidelity sometimes lost, b...| George Mandis
The last week of the year is a time for rest and reflection. During that downtime, I decided to try Kagi and Orion and spent more time than I should have setting up a Gopher site, just for kicks. Kagi & Orion Kagi is a paid search engine and Orion is a privacy-minded browser they built on Webkit—not Blink!—exclusively for macOS, at least for now. Everything about those choices sounds like someone actively whittling down their market share to something so small and specific most VCs would ...| George Mandis
I've been having fun with Raspberry Pis lately. Besides my solar-powered website project, I've been playing with making tiny servers and hiding them around my apartment. To what end, I'm uncertain. Already I can see myself falling into some kind of digital "Ideal Palace" obsession like Ferdinand Cheval—little computers in my garden, my books, and other hidden nooks-and-crannies, connected to my network with playful names and curious peripherals, tasked with curious purpose... But this isn't...| George Mandis
This weekend I cobbled together all the pieces to debut a truly MVP version of what I'm dubbing Solar Pi: https://solar.mandis.dev It's a solar-powered website! Please give it a spin. There's not a lot there at the moment. It's quite meta, mostly reporting on how it's doing, the current weather and speculating about how well it's going to fare over the coming week. You might be wondering where I'm hosting this. Some forward-thinking, renewable-energy focused colocation startup in Brooklyn per...| George Mandis
Lately I've been playing around with Val Town. Their pitch is something like "If AWS Lambdas were fun" and—despite being unable to articulate what that even means—I have to chuckle and nod. It's a great product that I've really enjoyed using the past few weeks. Two things in particular have been great about it: Free OpenAI access. It's already pretty cheap to play around with LLMs on most platforms right now, but you can't beat free. Email-driven workflows. I think I find this more compel...| George Mandis
Dates are hard and JavaScript is odd. Two universal truths. In belated honor of 2024 being a leap year, here's a story about how I learned 2011 was not a leap year, ISO 8601, proleptic Gregorian calendars and forking Node. To belatedly commemorate the leap year of 2024, here is a story about how I discovered of 2011 wasn't a leap year, dove into the intricacies of ISO 8601, the concept of proleptic Gregorian calendars, and decided to fork Node on a whim. Understanding the Proleptic Gregorian ...| George Mandis
A few months ago I bought a ZimaBoard to tinker around with. I'd down-sized greatly moving to New York last year and pretty much none of my tiny computers made the cut. I was in the market for a headless little something or another to stick under my bed, shell into once in a while, host tiny projects on and run some opinionated backup scripts. My internal jury is still out on CasaOS, but I don't think it's bad for someone that isn't particularly hard-core about his homelab setup. It's basical...| George Mandis
I remember my colorful, recently departed uncle starting a conversation like this: "I recently read something about... doorways. Like when you walk through them, it does something to your brain. Something when you enter a new room... Hm. I don't remember." He proceeded to take a sip of his homemade hooch and we carried on making memories at that family reunion, as we did for so many good years. This was many years ago, and that anecdote always stuck in my brain. It piqued my curiousity, but I...| George Mandis
In the same way cicadas and other uncomfortably-large bugs have an odd lifecycle that sees them emerge every few years or more, such is my relationship with updating the look and feel for this blog. With every good blog "revamp" there must come the obligatory "Here's what's new!" post. In that spirit, here's what's new and/or not now (followed by a subtle twist): I'm still using 11ty to power the blog and write the static files which are hosted on Netlify. I still mostly like it.1 I've visual...| George Mandis
I recently discovered Bear Blog via one of the million newsletters I subscribed to. I'm a big fan of hyper-minimal products that do one thing thoughtfully and efficiently. Kudos to them! I've claimed my own little Bear Blog here, though I'm not quite sure what to do with it: https://georgemandis.bearblog.dev/ I'm not quite sure what to do with it, but there it is. I also like that they have this "discover" page that seemed to be an aggregation of all the people hosting their own blogs and con...| George Mandis
Wouldn't it be nice if you had a little device you could click to mute and unmute yourself on a Zoom call? In this remote-work world many of us have plunged into post COVID, I don't think it's that uncommon to find yourself on an occasional Zoom meeting, camera-off, milling about your kitchen while you listen. If you find yourself needing to chime-in though, what do you do? Run back over to your computer like a goofball Wrestle with the mouse or keyboard to unmute yourself and say "Yup, that ...| George Mandis
Let's write better Star Wars stories using AI! An obvious application for LLMs if ever there was one. My apologies to the Writers Guild of America. Writing sequels to a major piece of Hollywood intellectual property while they're on strike isn't exactly the best manifestation of solidarity. A passing, idle thought: This feels like some inevitable future of entertainment. I don't need new Star Wars or Marvel movies. Just give me a Disney LLM trained on their hoard of nonsense so I can generate...| George Mandis
I wrote this blog post from iA Writer and published it directly to my 11ty-powered blog using the Micropub protocol and this nice tutorial from Robert Beekman showing me how to stitch this all together with Netlify Functions. If everything went well, this should show up on my site. I guess we'll see? I'm excited to see if this works as smoothly as I hope. I like the minimal writing environment iA Writer brings and have wanted to bring my blog-writing process into it for a while now, in the ho...| George Mandis
I'll cut to the chase—because a man who took the time to make a computer fart clearly cares and respects, above all, other people's time. I recently noticed a project called AudioGPT on HuggingFace: https://huggingface.co/spaces/AIGC-Audio/AudioGPT It is a transformer capable of performing a variety of impressive audio tasks, including generation! You can make dog barks, guitar riffs, drum solos... The guitar riff and drum solo were interesting, if a bit disjointed and uncanny. I can imagin...| George Mandis
Imposter syndrome has many forms. For me, one of its forms comes in feeling like I should have a more custom and clever library of dotfiles at this point in my career. A better "bag of tricks" as it were. In particular, I have almost no git aliases. Not even a classic like git co. I guess I've never felt like saving keystrokes here and there—particularly in a world with autocompletion—is my biggest barrier to efficiency? I actually have exactly one alias: cb = "!git branch --show-current ...| George Mandis
I asked ChatGPT to draw some pictures of animals. It was delightfully awful.| George Mandis
Traveler, web developer, mentor, writer and other hats as needed.| George Mandis
I discovered a fun and strangely obvious trick for summarizing videos faster and reducing costs: just speed them up. Cheaper, faster OpenAI transcriptions with a little ffmpeg trick.| George Mandis
