I’m old enough to remember the 80s. The Miner’s Strike. The shoulder-pads. The casual racism. And the hair metal bands. There was always a rumour going around that van Halen used to have champagne, cocaine and hookers on their rider. Plus a clause that specified that they wanted| The Art && Science of Ruby
Egune AI, is part of a growing movement to build LLMs in low-resource languages to expand AI access for underserved populations. Despite a shortage of training data, compute power, talent, and funding, these small models are attracting government clients and individual users keen to safeguard their language, cultural| The Art && Science of Ruby
But what makes me absolutely furious is that the greediest, most do-nothing cohort of the money-movers have spent decades creating the myth that now they are the builders. They think they are the creative ones, the inventors, the ones who see the future. They’ve| The Art && Science of Ruby
I was at a leadership group and people were telling me "We think that with AI we can replace all of our junior people in our company." I was like, "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. They're probably the least| The Art && Science of Ruby
(Or, "My big revelation about LLMs and software development") A few months ago, I did a demo of Claude Code at the Northwest Ruby User Group. I had just started using Claude Code and it had impressed me. I wanted to show off some of its capabilities and| The Art && Science of Ruby
(or "Software will never be the same again") A few weeks back I watched the latest series (seven) of Black Mirror. I'm never fully convinced by Charlie Brooker - I loved Nathan Barley (but mainly because I also love Chris Morris) but hated Screen Wipe; I| The Art && Science of Ruby
I've been trying out Vibe Coding. There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists It's not been easy for me, as someone who| The Art && Science of Ruby
This is a vastly oversimplifed and technically inaccurate description of how to use devcontainers to make software development easier. I'm writing it for someone who's never used them before. Virtual Machines When you run a virtual machine, you have a host OS (whether that's| The Art && Science of Ruby
First of all - a quick question: am I stupid? The idea behind Operations seems so simple and so natural to me, I'm really surprised that no-one seems to have done it before. So either I'm a total genius who has just invented something amazing, or| The Art && Science of Ruby
Years ago, I worked at a hosting company called Brightbox. Being a hosting company and being responsible for their customer's data meant that security was a high priority for them. One day, we were discussing some new feature and the CTO, John, pointed out a security flaw in| The Art && Science of Ruby
(It might not be fun. And there won't be any profit) In Collabor8Online we have "automations". These are sort of like pipelines but very specific to how C8O works. The current implementation is used when a task moves through a (user-defined) workflow and changes state. And| The Art && Science of Ruby
(or, in some cases, things I already knew but never really cared about) Microsoft Word's .docx format is officially called the "Office Open XML Format" and has been managed by ECMA since 2006. The specification consists of four documents. The first one, "Fundamentals and Markup| The Art && Science of Ruby
Or why Ben Brereton-Diaz changed his name. I've never really been in to data and statistics. I'm not great at maths and it gets tiring figuring things out from first principles every time I need to do some calculation. And while I'm pretty impressed| The Art && Science of Ruby
An exercise in Test Driven Development: Kata No. 9 You Aren't Going to Need it - until you do Last night, at the North West Ruby Group, we did an exercise in Kata No. 9. This meant using Test-Driven Development to design a Checkout class that could deal| The Art && Science of Ruby
I was just involved in a discussion on Reddit, where someone was asking for advice about getting hired on Upwork. That prompted another response from someone asking about the best way to hire from Upwork. It's been a few years, but I used to have a team built from people| The Art && Science of Ruby
Ruby and Rails and Software Development and AI and Tech and things| The Art && Science of Ruby
I recently gave a talk at the North West Ruby User Group about how I use LLMs for software development. This was an update on a previous demo I had given on Claude Code. We didn't record the talk, but here are my (adapted) notes. LLMs for Software Developers This| The Art && Science of Ruby