Posts on Greg Herlein

Why Not Use Shelly Cloud (And Why That's the Highest Compliment I Can Pay It)

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 00:00:01 -0800

I disable the cloud on every Shelly plug in my house. And that is exactly why I love Shelly.

Stay with me, because that sounds backwards. A friend called me on a different version of it: “You’re the local-LAN guy, but you use Ubiquiti’s UniFi cloud API to run your networks. Pick a lane.” Fair hit. It looks inconsistent. It isn’t — I was just naming the principle wrong.

The NPU Works. The Compiler Doesn't.

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:01 -0800

I wanted a cheap, low-power, always-on person detector. Of course, I’m building this on a BrightSign XT5 player (more on that later). But since a friend said he was using a Beelink SER9 with a AMD Ryzen AI NPU (~50 TOPS) I thought I’d check it out. Can it actually run the detector? Short answer, as of today: no — and the reason is not the part you’d expect.

It Was the Harness, Not the Model — 90% of It

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:00:01 -0800

I ran five different coding agents at the same local model, on the same task, with the same frozen test suite — and then I counted why they failed. The answer wasn’t subtle. About 90% of the failures were harness problems. Only about 10% were the model. And here’s the part that should change how you spend your next dollar: throwing a bigger, less-quantized model at it fixed none of them.

Senior Engineers Are the Next DRAM Shortage

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:01 -0800

There’s a shortage coming that nobody’s put on a slide yet: senior engineers. Every company on earth is about to want one who can drive a fleet of agents with judgment — and almost nobody is making new ones anymore, because AI ate the entry-level work juniors used to learn on. You cannot conjure a senior in a quarter. We just watched this exact movie with memory: DRAM prices went vertical because demand exploded and you can’t build a fab overnight. Senior engineers are next, and the only hedge is to build your own, starting now. The best thing you can build in the agentic era isn’t your product — it’s another Engineer. I have juniors on my team. This is my problem, right now. Here’s how I’m thinking about it.

Buy the Metal: Local Inference Is a Hedge, Not a Hobby

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:01 -0800

Here’s a question worth more than most of the AI hype takes clogging your feed: what happens to your velocity the day your frontier provider changes the deal? Raises the price. Deprecates the model you tuned your whole workflow around. Throttles you at the worst possible moment. Or just decides your use case, your industry, or your country isn’t one they want to serve anymore. If your honest answer is “I’d be dead in the water,” then you don’t have a strategy — you have a dependency. And it’s time to look hard at running some inference on your own metal.

My Office Has an On-Air Light (And Yes, It's a Robot)

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:01 -0800

The lamp on my office shelf glows solid red the instant my camera goes live, and turns off the second the meeting ends. Nobody has to knock and wonder. My wife, a kid, the dog-walker — anyone who glances in knows I’m on camera without me saying a word. And by my own stubborn definition, that little bulb is a robot.

Right, But It Wouldn't Stop: Turning Thinking Off in the Agent Loop

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:01 -0800

Here’s a result that surprised me: the reasoning model wrote more correct code than the plain one — and still lost. It nailed all 32 test cases, then sat there and refused to declare itself done. Burned the whole time budget re-checking work that was already right. “Correct, but won’t stop” turns out to be a real failure mode, and it’s exactly the wrong one for an autonomous agent loop.

Harness Engineering Has a Name Now

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:01 -0800

A room full of CTOs and architects met in a Swiss village this summer and, without quite meaning to, gave a name to the thing I’ve been quietly building for months. They call it harness engineering. I’ve been calling it “the tooling is the new model.” Same animal. And the part they flagged as unsolved, I think I’ve got a first, opinionated stab at.

Radio - Not Satellite - for Whales!

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 00:00:01 -0800

Two and a half years into my whale song project I’ve killed one platform, walked away from a $13K dev kit, gotten my ham license, and pivoted to (water-borne) drones. I can do that link myself across the Bay of Banderas with a radio I’m now legally allowed to key up. Read on.

AI Agents are a Context Management Strategy in a Trenchcoat

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 09:00:00 -0700

My experience is that Claude Code is great with Foundation Models, but way too heavy for local inference. I’ve been enjoying oh-my-pi (omp) but was surprised that hax (a simpler agent in written in C) was TWICE as fast and used HALF the tokens! It’s all about PREFILL¹. Read on!

Argus, BrightSign machine vision - it's not difficult!

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:00:01 -0800

I’ve written before about what a BrightSign extension actually is and about why edge AI has to run locally on signage. This post is the “show, don’t tell” follow-up. If you want to see what all that theory looks like as a running, watchable thing, there’s exactly one place to start: Argus.

A 27B Model That Reverse-Engineered a License Check (And How to Run It)

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 00:00:02 -0800

XDA ran a piece that stopped me mid-scroll: a 27B open-weights model reverse-engineered a commercial application’s license check — recovered a deliberately obscured crypto key out of ARM64 assembly, caught and corrected its own mistake without being told, and produced a working bypass PoC. In about thirty minutes. On a desktop box. I have (a version of) that box. So I went and set it up.

Re-use your skills across all your coding agents

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 00:00:01 -0800

I use more than one coding agent. Not because I’m indecisive — because I’m testing different agents - and learning how they work - and the field is moving fast. Seems like a new one every week! But every single one of them wants skills in its own directory, and I got tired of cp -r and stale copies. So I wrote a tool.

Engineering Middle-Management to become extinct?

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:01 -0800

You can’t lead From hehind anymore. For twenty years the path to Engineering leadership had a well-worn groove: write code for a few years, get “promoted out of” writing code, spend the rest of your career managing budgets, headcount, and status reports. The further up you went the less technical you were expected to be, and nobody blinked. That era is over. Not ending. Over.

A Quieter Place: Why textlog Reminds Me of the Twitter I Actually Miss

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 00:00:01 -0800

I left Twitter before it became X. Not in some grand, principled exit — no manifesto post, no “see you on Mastodon” farewell thread. I just quietly stopped opening the app one day, and never really went back. By the time Elon Musk’s name was on the masthead, I was already gone. So when people ask if I miss “old Twitter,” I have to clarify: I don’t miss what it became right before the sale. I miss what it was years before that — a smaller, weirder, more sincere place.

I Wanted the Laptop to Win (an Inference Challenge)

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 00:00:01 -0800

I have two 128 GB unified-memory machines on my desk. Day job gear, not mine. One is an ASUS Ascent GX10 — an NVIDIA GB10 Grace Blackwell appliance half the size of a hardback book. The other is an HP ZBook Ultra G1a, a 14" mobile workstation running AMD’s Ryzen AI MAX+ PRO 395 (“Strix Halo”). Both hold an 80B coding model entirely in memory. How do they compare for agentic coding?

Tokens Should be NRE, Not COGS

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:00:01 -0800

Right now, as an industry, we are running almost entirely on COGS and calling it innovation. Kelsey Hightower gave a talk at PlatformCon called Zero Token Architecture, and the whole thing compresses down to one sentence: infer once, export, run without inference. He’s right. I want to give you the vocabulary that makes it land in a budget meeting, because I work at a company that ships hardware, and we already have words for this.

Stop Putting Your UniFi Admin Password in an Env Var

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 00:00:01 -0800

There’s a command line in the gofi post I wrote ten days ago that has been quietly bugging me ever since I hit publish:

gofips -H 10.20.30.1 -k --get > hosts.conf

Look at that -k. That’s me telling the tool “don’t bother checking the TLS certificate.” And the part you can’t see is worse: my UniFi admin username and password, sitting in environment variables. Both of those were compromises I made to get the thing working. Neither of them sat well.

Hey Claude, Set the IP address and name for the new BrightSign Player?

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 00:00:01 -0800

Here’s a tiny, stupid problem that has stolen an embarrassing amount of my life: I plug a BrightSign player into my network, it grabs whatever dynamic IP the UniFi controller feels like handing out, and now I have to go find that IP before I can SSH in and do actual work. Claude skills and a new tool to the rescue!

The Bosses Are Coding Again

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 00:00:01 -0800

Somewhere in the last year, a bunch of us who hadn’t shipped real code in years quietly started shipping again. Not reviewing it. Not architecting it in a doc and handing it off. Actually building it. And loving it.

gofi - a Go library for Ubiquity Unifi control (written by AI)

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:01 -0800

Here’s a thing I’ve quietly hated for years: managing static IP assignments and DNS names for the little fleet of gear on my network. Every homelab has it — the Pi in the garage, the shop printer, the sensor node in the attic, the pool controller. You want them at known addresses with known names. And the “old-school” way to get that is to stand up a DHCP server and a DNS server and keep them in sync. Since my network has tens of BrightSign devices in addition to my hobby robotics devices, this becomes actual work.

Announcing Gorai! A Modern Robotics Framework

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:01 -0800

I’ve been teasing this for a while. Time to stop teasing. Meet Gorai — a modern, open-source robotics framework written in Go.

Developing a BrightSign Extension

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:01 -0800

Most people think of a BrightSign player as the little box behind a screen that loops a video. That’s true right up until you realize the thing is a full ARM64 Linux computer with an NPU sitting idle most of the day. And you can run your own code on it. Natively. That’s what an extension is, and once you grok it, a whole world opens up.

Agentic Python Considered Harmful

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:00:01 -0800

Python won because it was easy. That was the whole trick. And now, in the age of agentic coding, that trick has stopped being an advantage — and quietly became a liability.

The Chainsaw I Built Was for Learning. Superpowers Is for Scaling.

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:00:01 -0800

Last post I showed off the chainsaw I built myself — my build-autonomous loop, the padded room, the whole rig — and cut down a little tree with it: a Go CLI to boss around a smart plug. It was well worth building! I also think you should probably stop building your own. Yes, including me. Especially me.

A Chainsaw at an Axe-Chopping Contest: My Current Agentic Loop

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:01 -0800

People keep asking me how I actually work with Claude Code now. Not the “does AI coding work” question — I’ve beaten that horse into glue on this blog already — but the boring, practical, how-does-my-loop-actually-work question. So here it is. The whole rig. And fair warning: what I’m about to describe is a chainsaw, and most of the industry is still lined up at the axe-chopping contest.

We've Stopped Arguing About Whether

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:00:01 -0800

I just spent a few days at a retreat on the future of software development. Small rooms. Unconference format. Some of the sharpest people in our industry - the kind of names that show up on the spines of the books on your shelf. I’m not going to tell you who was there or who said what. We ran the whole thing under Chatham House Rule: use what you learn, attribute none of it. This is my initial take-away.

Taste Is in the Spec (Cooking Is Not the Recipe)

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:01 -0800

Here’s a question I can’t stop chewing on: why is some software so damn good, and most of it so… not? Not buggy. Not slow. Just bad. Bad in a way you feel in your gut the moment you touch it. The answer isn’t tooling, or budget, or headcount. It’s taste. And I’m starting to think taste is the whole ballgame in the age of AI.

Procedures Travel. Knowledge Stays Home.

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:01 -0800

A couple weeks ago I wrote that your organization has to learn as fast as your best AI adopter. Externalize, combine, socialize, internalize. Run Nonaka’s spiral or get left behind. A bunch of you wrote back with the same question: okay, but where does the knowledge actually go?

Your Organization Must Learn As Fast As Your Best AI adopter

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:00:01 -0800

Everyone is asking the wrong question. “How do we adopt AI agents?” “Which tool?” “What’s the right policy?” Wrong questions. The right question is: how does your team turn what one person learned on Tuesday into something everybody on the team uses by Friday?

The Room Is a Robot (and the NEXXT Sprint to Prove It!)

Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:00:01 -0800

Next week I get to watch one of my favorite things: see a room full of smart people handed a hard problem and watch them figure it out in real time. I’m headed to InfoComm to mentor, judge, and sit on a panel for an idea sprint about AI at the edge. And I could not be more excited.

Your Career Isn't Eroding - You're Just Holding the Wrong Moat

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:00:01 -0800

A response to “LLMs are Eroding My Software Engineering Career and I Don’t Know What To Do” - and to everyone I keep hearing this same anguish from. You’re not wrong that the ground is moving. You’re wrong about which ground.

Is Waterfall Coming Back? Sort Of. Not Really. Both — And the Bigger Question Underneath.

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:01 -0800

There’s a thing going around the engineering blogs and Hacker News right now: AI killed Agile, Waterfall is back, write your specs up front, welcome to “Waterfall 2.0.” You may have seen the Medium piece titled Agile Is Dead. AI Killed It. Welcome Back, Waterfall.. Hmmm.

And once I followed the logic far enough, I ran into a second question that nobody seems to want to answer out loud: if the agent writes the code, who actually reads it?

How AI Coding Agents Work: First Principles

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:01 -0800

I’ve been dorking around with local AI coding agents for a while now. At some point curiosity got the better of me and I had to know: what the heck are these things actually doing under the hood?

Digital Signage: From Playback to Perception

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:01 -0800

In recent years, digital signage has become a solved problem: push content to screens reliably, at scale, on schedule. That’s not enough anymore. The market is now demanding screens that perceive — that understand what’s in front of them and respond in real time. Most of the hardware deployed in the field today will fail at that job because the foundational assumptions are wrong. Here’s what’s actually required and why the infrastructure choices you make now will define your deployment for the next decade.

The Future of Software Engineering: What I Know and How I Know It

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:01 -0800

A recent industry retreat of senior engineering practitioners published their findings on where software development is heading. Reading it felt like someone had been reading my mind — and the minds of the people I follow online — and synthesized it all into one document. When a lot of people arrive at the same conclusions independently, that’s signal worth paying attention to. Here’s my take on each major theme.

AI Inference Costs: The Wake-Up Call for 2026 and 2027

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:01 -0800

The era of fixed-fee AI spending just ended. If you’re a CTO or engineering leader and you haven’t noticed yet, you will very soon — probably around September 2026 when some budget alerts start firing.

The End of the Glorified Babysitter

Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:01 -0800

There’s a reckoning coming for a specific type of software engineering manager. Not the good ones. The ones who turned themselves into human Jira routers. The ones whose primary skill is translating documents into tickets and running standups. Those jobs? Gone. Faster than you think.

Get Stuff Done

Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:01 -0100

Look, I’m going to be direct here. If you are not using AI agentic coding methods right now - today - you are going too slow. Not “a little behind.” Not “maybe missing something.” Too damn slow.

How the AMD ISP4 Camera Stack Broke My ZBook Trackpad (and How Claude Helped Me Find It)

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 01:00:00 -0700

One morning I opened my HP ZBook Ultra G1a and the trackpad was dead. Keyboard fine. Touchscreen fine. External mouse fine. Trackpad: nothing. Twelve hours earlier it had worked. I hadn’t changed anything. Welcome to bleeding-edge silicon on Linux.

Agentic Coding is About to Fracture Open Source

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:01 -0800

Open source is about to get a lot messier. Not because the code is getting worse – because AI agents just changed the economics of “fork it and fix it yourself.”

Where I Learned Excellence

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:01 -0800

I’ve been thinking a lot about excellence lately. Not the motivational-poster kind. The real kind – the kind that gets baked into your bones when you’re twenty-two years old and surrounded by people who simply will not accept anything less. For me, that happened on a nuclear submarine.

My Janky Little Git Scripts That Keep Me Sane

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:00:01 -0700

I have a confession. I have a folder full of tiny bash scripts that make my life with GitHub dramatically easier. They’re not fancy. They’re not trying to be a framework. They are blunt instruments that solve real problems I have every single day.

Tooling Is the New Model

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:01 -0800

The AI models are good enough. There, I said it. The bottleneck isn’t the model anymore – it’s how you use it.

What Would Grace Say?

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 00:00:01 -0800

Grace Hopper built the first compiler in 1952. They said “you can’t make them understand English-like instructions.” She had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. Sound familiar? Grace had some thoughts about this kind of thinking. She had a lot of thoughts, actually.

Builders Build

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 00:00:01 -0800

From a certain point of view, there are two kinds of people in the world: builders and not-builders. This isn’t judgment—it’s observation. Some people consume. Others create. Builders can’t help it.

SaaS is Dead, Long Live Platforms

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 00:00:01 -0800

AI has made code cheap and abundant. The scarce resource is now knowing what to build, not how. This is creating a rapid split between companies that sell workflows and companies that sell capabilities. Only one of these will survive.

Guest Post: Robots and Drones Are the Same Thing (And Pretending Otherwise Is Holding Us Back)

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 01:00:00 -0800

Guest Post by Luca Herlein

The artificial divide between robotics and drone ecosystems made sense once. Today, it’s holding back the entire industry.

AI-Boosted Building - It's All About Agency

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:00:01 -0800

A Scottish football manager once said, “Some people think football is more important than life. But they are wrong. It’s much more important than that.” When intelligence becomes a utility, the ability to ACT on it becomes everything. In today’s software world, Agency is more important than anything else!

Don't Miss the Train!

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 00:00:01 -0800

The AI train has left the station. Some of us are on board, generating entire modules from specs. Others are still on the platform debating whether the train is even real. Four smart people wrote about this shift this past week. They all agree on what it means. And I agree with them.

Automation Is Robotics (And You're Already Building Robots)

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:00:01 -0800

If software changes something in the real world, it’s a robot.

The Three Tiers of Software Development (Where will you land?)

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:00:01 -0800

Software development is stratifying into three distinct tiers. Where you land will determine whether you make more money, the same, or far less than today.

The New Whale Chase: Drones, Hydrophones, and a Father-Son Project

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 01:00:01 -0800

After two years of false starts with the Bristlemouth platform and permit headaches, I’m revisiting my whale song project with a completely different approach: semi-autonomous floating drones. The regulatory landscape has forced a rethink, and honestly, it might lead to something better.

2025 In Review: The Year AI Changed Everything

Sun, 28 Dec 2025 00:00:01 -0800

Looking back at 2025, one theme dominates: AI agentic programming went from novelty to necessity. This year transformed how I think about software development, career advice, and even my personal hardware projects. Here’s what I wrote about, what I learned, and what I expect in 2026.

Programming Languages in 2026

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 01:03:00 -0800

Popularity, Jobs, LLM Proficiency, Concurrency Complexity, and Deployment Complexity

Five factors now drive language choice: developer adoption, job market demand, LLM code generation quality, concurrency handling, and deployment complexity. Here’s how they intersect.

Foreign Cinema: My Favorite Restaurant in the World

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 00:00:01 -0800

A friend recently asked me about restaurants in San Francisco and was shocked I’d never written about Foreign Cinema. Honestly? I was shocked too. It’s my favorite restaurant in the world. Yes, the world. And I travel to London, Paris, Mexico City…

Coding is Solved (And That's Fine)

Sun, 14 Dec 2025 00:00:01 -0800

“We are nearly at coder-equivalency for economically useful coding. A sufficiently experienced software engineer can now write >90% of production-ready code purely through prompting.” Yes, exactly.

Putting Claude in Container Jail: My localdev Setup

Sun, 07 Dec 2025 00:00:01 -0800

I let Claude Code do whatever it wants without asking permission.

Before you spit out your coffee: I keep it in a jail. A container jail.

Vibe Coding Book Review

Sun, 07 Dec 2025 00:00:01 -0800

I don’t like the term “vibe coding.” I strongly prefer “AI-assisted software engineering.” But regardless of what you call it, Gene Kim and Steve Yegge have written a book about it - and their journey from skeptics to true believers is the most interesting part.

Why Go for Robotics?

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 00:00:01 -0800

Python dominates robotics today. C++ is the serious choice. But I’m starting to think we’ve been sleeping on Go. Here’s why I’m actively exploring it.

Using Claude Code to Build gocat

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 00:00:01 -0800

In my previous post about Claude Code, I talked about using VS Code devcontainers to safely run Claude in “dangerous mode.” That was great for a typical software project. But what about something harder? What about porting a complex hardware-interfacing library from Python to Go, where you need to deeply understand USB protocols, radio registers, and firmware internals?

That’s exactly what I did with gocat – a Go library for controlling the YardStick One sub-GHz RF transceiver. And Claude Code was instrumental in making it happen.

From Clicking Yes to Letting Claude Run Wild (Safely)

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 00:00:01 -0800

So I’ve been working on this project called client-w-mcp – it’s a leanring project to truly understand how an AI agent works with MCP servers. And I’m exploring Agentic development - with Claude Code.

Why Claude Code?

The first time I used it, Claude just… flowed. It seems to do a lot more by itself to figure things out. I especially like the Task() so that it can go do more than one thing at a time. It would be bad to try to modify code that way, but to write tests or update docs and not have to wait doing one thing at a time… is wonderful.

AI Agent Naysayers

Tue, 17 Jun 2025 00:00:01 -0800

There’s a lot of folks who are in outright denial about AI agentic programming. They are wrong. AND… they are right. My thoughts.

Agent Building: Ollama Hosted Models Token per Second

Sun, 15 Jun 2025 00:00:01 -0800

There’s no way to really understand something unless you dive into first principles. This is especially true for AI coding agents. What is the editor doing under the hood? I try to peel the onion a bit.

Creating Blog Posts with AI: My Experience with Zed and Claude 3.5

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 17:45:00 -0700

I’ve been exploring the intersection of AI and content creation lately, and I wanted to share my experience using Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 AI assistant within the Zed editor to streamline my blogging workflow.

Advice to New Developers (or, How to Get Hired)

Sat, 31 May 2025 00:00:01 -0800

Reading time: 10 minutes

It’s brutally hard to find a job as a new college grad today. And AI is changing things even for seasoned Engineers. Here’s my advice.

Agentic Programming: The New Robot Revolution!

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 00:00:01 -0800

The evolution of AI-assisted programming has reached a pivotal moment, transforming from simple code completion to truly collaborative AI agents. This shift represents not just an improvement in tooling, but a fundamental change in how software is developed.

Pulseview on Linux - UPDATED

Sat, 08 Mar 2025 00:00:01 -0800

UPDATED: On Ubuntu 24.10 just installing using apt “just works.” This workaround no longer needed.

MacOS and Ubuntu Keyboard Remaps

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 10:50:08 -0800

How I mapped some basic keys to be the same on MacOS and Ubuntu and saved my sanity. UPDATED! UPDATED AGAIN!

Finally Got my Ham Radio License - and Whales!

Thu, 09 Jan 2025 09:30:29 -0700

I was trained as a US Navy ET. Decades later I finally took my Ham Radio test. I am now also known as K06HAX! It’s a key step towards my whale song project!

Foundations of High-Performance Engineering Teams

Sat, 23 Nov 2024 00:00:01 -0800

The US Navy gave me a solid foundation in leadership and operational excellence. But translating that into the business world requires a few more things.

Long Time No Post! RPi Pico, Zephyr, and Whales (oh my)

Sat, 26 Oct 2024 00:00:01 -0800

A short update on my whale song project: I fell down a few technical rabbit hole!

Changing Chrome Address Bar Suggestions

Sat, 03 Aug 2024 00:00:01 -0800

Leaving this here mostly for me, but short instructions on how to change Chrome’s “typeahead” predictors if it remembers the “wrong” one.

Book Review: Managing Priorities

Fri, 07 Jun 2024 00:00:01 -0800

I’ve been waiting several years for Harry Max to finish his book “Managing Priorities. It’s available, and it’s awesome! Some observations.

Guest Appearance: Women in STEM Podcast

Thu, 06 Jun 2024 00:00:01 -0700

I had a lot of fun being interviewed by Aimee Vincent-Bunn who hosts the fabulous Women in STEM podcast.

Learning gRPC in golang - with some ChatGPT help

Tue, 28 May 2024 00:00:01 -0800

I decided to learn how to write gRPC code in golang - and used ChatGPT as an accelerator! Jump to the writeup.

Book Review: AI at the Edge

Tue, 21 May 2024 00:00:01 -0800

I bought the eBook AI at the Edge. But you can download a free copy from LinkedIn. In short? Don’t waste your money. But for free?

Developing Leaders in the post-COVID Era

Sun, 19 May 2024 00:00:01 -0800

I’ve been a “leader-of-leaders” for a long time. It’s changed post-covid. But when I talk to some Engineers about the difference between “Leader of Others” and “Leader of Leaders” they don’t know what I’m talking about. So I thought I’d blog about it, and maybe even learn more myself.

Lost Boats Ceremony - Tolling of the Boats 2024

Mon, 13 May 2024 00:00:01 -0800

Memorial Day is special to me as a former submariner. Many have sacrificed for our freedoms, but the US Submarine Force more than many. Memorial Day is when I honor that.

Whale Song Delayed - New Technology

Sat, 11 May 2024 00:00:01 -0800

A short update on my whale song project: it’s shifting technology.

Dream Teams

Sat, 27 Apr 2024 00:00:01 -0800

A friend was telling me about “Dream Teams” at Netflix and I realized that is exactly what I have been trying to build/encourage around me. That is what I want!

Whale Song Update

Sun, 14 Apr 2024 00:00:01 -0800

A short update on my whale song project: it’s delayed. Need to sort out some legal stuff.

Hiring is a Two-Way Street

Sat, 13 Apr 2024 00:00:01 -0800

I’ve been thinking a lot about tech hiring and why it’s a crap-show for so many. I’ve posted my thoughts on staffing software engineers but I have some musing on the way hiring is done today.

Guest Appearance: Software Synergy Podcast

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 00:00:01 -0700

I had a lot of fun being interviewed by James Holder for the Software Synergy Podcast. You can listen on Spotify or Apple.

Bristlemouth Dev Kit: SLOW - and Thinking

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 00:00:01 -0800

Work on the SOFAR Spotter with Development Kit is slower than I hoped.

Book Review: Extreme Operational Excellence

Sat, 23 Mar 2024 00:00:01 -0800

I finally have a book that describes my management philosophy. Two retired US Navy Submariners Officers describe how the core principles of the Submarine Service are the perfect model for excellence in the business world too.

Book Review: Operational Excellence

Sat, 23 Mar 2024 00:00:01 -0800

Bristlemouth Dev Kit: YES!

Thu, 07 Mar 2024 00:00:01 -0800

I have possession and unboxed the SOFAR Spotter with Development Kit!

Embrace AI Pairing: The Future is Already Here

Sun, 21 Jan 2024 08:00:00 -0800

Let’s talk about AI pair programming - not the hypothetical future version, but what we have right now in 2024. I’ve spent the last year working extensively with AI coding assistants, and I have some thoughts to share.

Bristlemouth Dev Kit May Not Happen

Wed, 03 Jan 2024 00:00:01 -0800

The SOFAR Spotter with Development Kit may not be able to get to me. There’s some legal paperwork that I don’t have - that may be quite expensive to get. Import/Export laws are a pain.

Whale Song - Some Background

Sun, 31 Dec 2023 00:00:01 -0800

Recent press about an actual conversation with a whale was preceeded by ground-breaking work by Dr. Michelle Fournet and profiled in the fantastic documentary Fathom on AppleTV. This is a MUST WATCH if you love the ocean - or humanity!

Bristlemouth Dev Kit Delayed - Customs Woes

Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:01 -0800

I’ve been accepted into the Bristlemouth Pioneer Program. I’ve been granted a SOFAR Spotter with a Development Kit. Unfortunately it was detained in customs due to it’s high invoiced value. I required a “customs agent” to clear it - which I did not have.

Ocean Technology and Talking to Whales

Mon, 25 Dec 2023 00:00:01 -0800

I’ve been accepted into the Bristlemouth Pioneer Program. I’ve been granted a SOFAR Spotter with a Development Kit. I want to build a system capable of autonomously recording whale song (and other ocean data). Humpback Whale songs is incredibly interesting - and scientists have JUST been able to actually talk to whales.

But really getting all “science fictiony” - can we build an ocean phone system to talk to whales?

Back to the Mac

Wed, 20 Dec 2023 08:00:00 -0800

I undid it. I’m still using my desktop (mostly remotely) and I do love my Lenovo X1 Carbon. But my primary machine is back to the Mac Book Pro.

Facebook again? Maybe? But they still suck

Wed, 20 Dec 2023 00:00:01 -0800

I left Facebook to get away from all the hate. But there’s community information there I find valuable and so I signed up again (after years away). And my account is suspended!

Somehow I didn’t follow their community standards EVEN BEFORE I LOGGED IN! I can tell you that all I ever did was leave Facebook and delete my account there. I certainly never “violated thier community standards” (as if they really have them with the hate they promote).

Luca Graduates!

Sat, 13 May 2023 08:40:43 -0800

My son graduated from CU Boulder with a BS in Aerospace Engineering. I am so proud!

Ubuntu Again!

Fri, 12 May 2023 08:40:43 -0800

I did it. I went total Linux on the Desktop again. Full blown beast of a real machine, and am getting a Lenovo X1 Carbon for travel.

MacOS Ventura - How to set network order

Sun, 26 Mar 2023 00:00:01 -0800

Apple moved things around in the Network tab in System Settings. Here’s how to set network order.

Lessons from Admiral Rickover

Sun, 05 Feb 2023 00:00:00 -0700

Admiral Hyman Rickover (1900-1986), the “Father of the Nuclear Navy,” was controversial. He taught a whole generation of the best Engineers. Some of my thoughts on this.

No More Twitter

Sat, 26 Nov 2022 02:21:00 -0700

I’ve left Twitter. You should too.

Fixing Hugo Scaled Images

Sat, 26 Nov 2022 01:21:00 -0700

Hugo broke image rendering. Well, they made it better, but broke how I used it. Here’s the fix.

Advice to New Developers (or, How to Get Hired)

Sat, 26 Nov 2022 00:00:01 -0800

I get asked a lot by new developers: “how do I find a coding job?” What should I do/learn to get a really good job? Here’s my advice.

Git Clone Workaround

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 01:30:29 -0700

Cloning from GitHub hanging for no apparent reason? A work-around. Anyone know why it works?

Goodbye Twitter

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 00:00:00 -0700

After 13.5 years I’m no longer using Twitter.

September Update

Sat, 24 Sep 2022 00:00:01 -0700

Three months since I posted, so here’s some random thoughts and updates.

BrightSign!

Mon, 20 Jun 2022 00:00:01 -0700

What’s old is new again: I’ve joined BrightSign as their Head of Software Engineering!

How I Locked Myself Out of my Linux System

Sat, 18 Jun 2022 00:00:01 -0800

Imagine my surprise when I could not sudo! Wait, what?

Book Review: AWS Cookbook

Sun, 22 May 2022 00:00:01 -0800

Tl;dr: The AWS Cookbook is a must have addition to your reference library. Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book from the author.

Book Review: Linux for Networking Professionals

Sun, 22 May 2022 00:00:01 -0800

Tl;dr: read the web instead of Linux for Networking Professionals. This book is a broad, shallow coverage that is probably more easily learned from web pages for free.

DevOps: Manage the Cognitive Load

Sat, 21 May 2022 00:00:01 -0700

Speed, cost and quality are considered the vectors that you can control. If you are moving to cloud to get the “ilities” that comprise quality, you need to seriously consider Cognitive Load.

Using Clicky Web Analytics with Hugo

Sun, 15 May 2022 00:00:01 -0800

I added Clicky web analytics to my blog (running hugo)

First Trials: ESP32-POE-EA Board from Olimex

Sun, 15 May 2022 00:00:01 -0700

Tl/Dr: It’s on the network! But in my analysis, I fell victim to my own bias.

Picking up from last weekend, I play with the ESP32-POE-EA board from Olimex using the Espressif FreeRTOS ESP-IDF Framework.

Playing like it was summer (but with an ESP32)

Sat, 07 May 2022 00:00:01 -0700

Been awhile, head spinning, took some time to just play.

Making Prometheus Alert Manager (more) Consistent

Sun, 27 Mar 2022 00:00:01 -0800

Prometheus Alert Manager is an “AP” system, in “CAP” terms. How we made it more Consistent, including a forked repo of the Alert Manager code.

Enable Chatbots on the phone using Amazon Lex and the Amazon Chime SDK

Sat, 26 Mar 2022 00:00:00 -0700

Telephony made a huge leap forward last week. It’s insanely easy to build a voice chatbot for phone calls!

Goodbye Ubuntu, Hello Debian my old friend - AGAIN

Fri, 18 Mar 2022 00:00:01 -0800

Back to the future, debian again. Ubuntu begone!

DevOps - All Things To All People - or Not?

Wed, 16 Mar 2022 00:01:00 -0800

Seems like everyone is clammoring for DevOps folks. Do they really know what they want? That term means all things to all people. Some thoughts.

Thoughts on CI/CD

Tue, 01 Mar 2022 00:00:01 -0800

Yet again I am thinking about the overall software development/deployment life cycle, and am back to thinking about CI/CD again.

Creating an Ephemeral EC2 Instance for Development for Testing

Sun, 13 Feb 2022 00:00:01 -0800

“Cattle, not Pets!” they say. Except that for a lot of development, coders make their own laptop their favorite pet. “It works on my machine!” becomes normal. I got tired of that and automated the creation of my dev environment..

Learnings from patching a bug in a modern project

Thu, 30 Dec 2021 00:00:00 -0700

I’m continuing to dive deep on modern typescript/node development. I fixed a bug in a new tool I am using (projen) and learned a ton along the way. This post is to share some of that.

Spiral Again?

Fri, 24 Dec 2021 00:00:00 -0700

Merry Christmas Eve! Playing with the Beaglebone sends me into another thought spiral.

Thirty Years Ago Today

Tue, 07 Dec 2021 00:00:00 -0700

Thirty years ago today I left the US Navy. A reflection.

My First Amazon Blog... ML/AI Chatbot over the Phone!

Sun, 05 Dec 2021 00:00:00 -0700

A month ago I told you I changed roles at AWS. Now I can show you what I’ve done since then!

Local Data Collection and Command Distribution

Sat, 27 Nov 2021 00:00:00 -0700

I’m revisiting why I don’t like MQTT, and what I am doing about it.

Beaglebone Black - Getting Started

Thu, 25 Nov 2021 00:00:00 -0700

Getting Started with the Beaglebone Black (Again)

Back to the (Phone) Future! Changing roles!

Tue, 05 Oct 2021 00:00:00 -0700

The only constant is change! And… sometimes things come full circle. I’m changing roles at AWS. Back to the Future!

VLC Error

Sun, 03 Oct 2021 00:00:00 -0700

A bug in VLC? Grrrr. Reminds me of the old days.

The Power of xdotool in X11

Sat, 18 Sep 2021 00:00:01 -0800

X11’s xdotool cli is snazzy, and solved an annoying window placement problem.

Goodnight Twitter

Tue, 31 Aug 2021 00:00:01 -0800

Once again, I’m the product, being manipulated. This time it’s Twitter

Thoughts on MQTT

Sun, 27 Jun 2021 00:00:01 -0800

Some Thoughts on MQTT

Summer

Tue, 08 Jun 2021 00:00:01 -0800

Where am I? Summer!

Playing with Tasmota - A Swimming Pool Story

Sun, 18 Apr 2021 00:00:01 -0800

Playing around with Tasmota - as the sensing core of an IoT-based swimming pool temperature control system.

Progress on ESP32 and FreeRTOS

Sun, 04 Apr 2021 00:00:01 -0800

Progress, but not where I want it to be. But it builds and installs the FreeRTOS AWS IoT demo.

Back to Basics: AWS IoT C SDK

Mon, 22 Mar 2021 00:00:01 -0800

A few quick notes on getting the AWS IoT C SDK running on Linux.

Dabbling into ESP32 and FreeRTOS

Sun, 21 Mar 2021 00:00:01 -0800

Dipping a toe into the FreeRTOS ESP32 world.

ESP32-C3 First Playing

Sun, 07 Mar 2021 00:00:00 -0800

Finally got a few minutes to play withe the ESP32-C3 DevKit that Espressif was kind enough to ship. So I made a blinky light using the onboard WS2812 LED.

Kinesis Video Streams - Just Getting Started

Sat, 27 Feb 2021 00:00:00 -0800

Just started playing with Amazon Kinesis Video Streams.

AWS SysOps Administrator Certified!

Sat, 30 Jan 2021 00:00:01 -0800

This week I passed the AWS SysOps Administrator (Associate) Exam. Here’s some notes on what I did to prepare, and observations of the process.

Changes - Ending 2020

Sat, 19 Dec 2020 00:00:01 -0800

As 2020 thankfully winds down, I leave Cisco and join AWS.

Programming Serial in C

Sat, 19 Dec 2020 00:00:01 -0800

It’s back to the future again. Fidding with node.js a lot, but you know, C is still my favorite language. Dug up some old code to read/write from a serial port.

Power Costs

Wed, 11 Nov 2020 00:00:01 -0800

A quick measure of the costs of running on-premise computers.

Using CloudWatch for On-Premise Ubuntu Servers

Wed, 04 Nov 2020 00:00:01 -0800

Can I replace a local Prometheus with AWS CloudWatch? And include syslog monitoring as well? Yes, I can. But it was a PITA to set up. Here’s how.

Disposability - the Missing ility

Sat, 24 Oct 2020 00:00:01 -0800

You will get the most bang for the buck from cloud by destroying it.

GitHub Actions - Copy to S3 on Commit to Master

Fri, 23 Oct 2020 00:00:01 -0800

GitHub Actions can be for more than CI/CD. You can also use them to just simply publish to S3.

Golang Unikernel Is Reality!

Thu, 22 Oct 2020 00:00:01 -0700

Back in January of 2018 I blogged on LinkedIn asking the question if golang would enable development of micro-kernels.

Building Solution Architecture Teams - A Software Approach

Tue, 20 Oct 2020 00:00:01 -0800

What actually is Solution Architecture? How do you build and manage an Architecture team? Can you take a software approach to that?

Mac and Chrome HotKeys

Sat, 17 Oct 2020 00:00:01 -0800

A simple hotkey extension in Chrome that makes my life easier.

iTerm2 Paste Buffers on MacOS/OSX - how to increase size

Mon, 05 Oct 2020 00:00:01 -0800

Quick reminder: how to increase the copy-paste buffers size in iTerm2.

SRE 123

Wed, 30 Sep 2020 14:50:08 -0800

Everyone is all on fire about SRE. But what is it really? It’s as easy as 1-2-3 if you boil it down to the basics.

Fixing Hugo Social Media Icons in Blackburn

Sat, 26 Sep 2020 00:00:04 -0800

The Blackburn theme for Hugo has a bug in how it shows social media icons. Here’s how to fix it.

Hello Ubuntu - Kinda

Sat, 26 Sep 2020 00:00:01 -0800

Debian not good for me on the desktop - back to Ubuntu, lost the snaps.

Raspberry Pi Zero W Fun

Sat, 26 Sep 2020 00:00:01 -0800

The Raspberry Pi Zero W is likely the basis of my next few projects.

Goodbye Ubuntu, Hello Debian my old friend

Fri, 07 Aug 2020 03:10:43 -0800

Ubuntu just went too far with the snap crap. Back to Debian!

Blast from the past - Linux Telephony API

Sat, 27 Jun 2020 03:10:43 -0800

A trip down memory lane: the first linux telephony drivers

Docs as Code

Sat, 20 Jun 2020 03:10:43 -0800

One of the core principles of modern “DevOps” development is to treat your documentation as code, just like code. My team at Cisco open sourced how we do that.

Terraform in AWS: use AMI Names not IDs - and is Terraform the right answer still?

Sat, 06 Jun 2020 07:21:00 -0800

In AWS the AMI ID for a particular VM image is unique to that region. But it’s name is consistent across AWS. When building infra-as-code (such as terraform) use the name, not the ID. And some musings on terraform. Is it still the right answer for infra-as-code?

Black Lives Matter

Sat, 06 Jun 2020 00:00:00 -0800

We all protest and effect change in our own ways. I choose mentorship, education, and work - because that’s what I can do best to make a difference.

[Catchup Post] Speaking at SphereIT in Krakow, October 2019

Tue, 21 Apr 2020 07:16:43 -0800

Link to posted video “CloudSphere: Impedance Matching Legacy Apps to Prometheus Monitoring by Greg Herlein & David Wang”

Make RDP work from OSX

Tue, 21 Apr 2020 03:10:43 -0800

Quick reminder how to enable RDP sessions from OSX to an Ubuntu box.

SSH Tunnels

Sun, 12 Apr 2020 06:40:43 -0800

SSH tunnels are basically indistinguishable from magic.

Baking Sourdough Bread

Sat, 28 Mar 2020 08:21:00 -0700

My first attempt baking sourdough bread led to tasty, but flat loaves. Here’s why.

COVID-19

Sun, 15 Mar 2020 13:21:00 -0700

The impacts of COVID-19 are really not upon us yet. But some of them are hitting, and I thought I’d jot some notes about how it’s hitting us here in SF.

Not Everyone Needs to Go To College

Fri, 19 Jul 2019 07:00:00 -0800

It’s wrong, and possibly dangerous, to just make college free for anyone who wants it.

Ubuntu Lid Control

Thu, 18 Jul 2019 18:40:43 -0800

The default behavior of Ubuntu 18.04 is not friendly for a notebook that swaps back and forth from desk to mobile.

Where Have I Been?

Thu, 18 Jul 2019 11:40:43 -0800

Dang, no blog posts for almost six months? What’s kept me so busy? Japan!

Review: Blowing up the Monolith

Sun, 24 Feb 2019 08:00:01 -0800

Book review - free “Blowing up the Monolith” book from Kong.

Cloudy DevOps - Part 1

Sun, 10 Feb 2019 14:50:08 -0800

What exactly is Cloudy DevOps? How do you go from classic data center Enterprise deployments to the cloud? Here’s some of what I’ve learned across a half-dozen teams who’ve done it.

Self Driving Revolution

Sun, 10 Feb 2019 09:00:29 -0700

Think self-driving technology requires deep pockets to play with? Think again. AWS DeepRacer and Autoware are the leading edges of self-driving automation for the maker.

Updated Management README

Wed, 30 Jan 2019 09:30:29 -0700

I updated my “Management README”. Give it a read if you’d like.

RBOT Robotics Sensor/Acuator Board - Value Proposition

Mon, 21 Jan 2019 13:40:08 -0800

I’m building a board for robotics, but it’s also useful for IoT and home automation. What’s it do? What problem does it solve? It’s basically a WiFi interface to a variety of I2C-driven devices (motors or sensors). The I2C side is Engineered to be highly robust and reliable.

Boards!

Mon, 21 Jan 2019 10:50:08 -0800

I’m building a robotics board that basically is a WiFi REST interface to a variety of I2C sensors - the I2C side uses an I2C switch driven by an ESP32. My first RBOT board arrived, but alas, I got schooled on surface mount part numbering.

Ubuntu Again!

Sat, 05 Jan 2019 08:40:43 -0800

From 1997 to 2010 I believed it was only a matter of time before Linux on the desktop became a reality. I gave up in 2010 and went to OSX. But we may finally be close! Here’s my notes on installing Linux Ubuntu 18.04 on a Dell Inspiron 15 7000. It’s the easiest and happiest linux ever for me.

ESP32-PICO-KIT-V4 Eagle Library

Sun, 30 Dec 2018 10:33:02 -0800

An Eagle part library to support use of the ESP32-PICO-KIT-V4 as a daughterboard.

Uber Driver Teaches me Data Analytics

Mon, 24 Dec 2018 11:33:02 -0800

An Uber Driver this past week schooled me that data analytics does not require coding.

AWS Certified

Tue, 18 Dec 2018 23:50:38 -0800

On Becoming an AWS Certified Solutions Architect (Associate)

Avalanche! re:Invent 2018

Tue, 18 Dec 2018 10:50:01 -0800

Thoughts on AWS re:Invent 2018

Engineering Leadership 321

Mon, 15 Oct 2018 21:30:29 -0700

I’ve come to firmly believe that Engineering Leadership has a 3-2-1 principle to create Engineer happiness, which is a key prerequisite for high performance Engineering teams.

I2c Tools for Project RBOT

Sat, 29 Sep 2018 08:44:43 -0700

I2C Tools I am Using for the RBOT Project

Pcal6416a Getting Started

Sat, 14 Jul 2018 19:32:04 -0700

I2C Port Expander for Robotics Use - Getting Started with the NXP PCAL6416A

Hello World

Sat, 30 Jun 2018 09:30:29 -0700

I’ve been procrastinating setting up a real blog for… well, years. Now it’s here. Read on for the why and the how.

Golang Enabling Unikernels?

Mon, 29 Jan 2018 16:29:39 -0700

Golang Enabling Unikernels?

Technology Rolls On, Better Roll With It

Wed, 21 Dec 2016 16:29:39 -0700

Technology Rolls On, Better Roll With It

How To Do Devops?

Tue, 12 Apr 2016 16:29:39 -0700

How To Do Devops?