Coding in the Trenches

If you like to nerd out about enough money to buy lunch at a counterserve restaurant then this is the post for you. If you don’t care about effectively paying $18 less on a $1200 purchase then this is not the post for you. The short answer to the title’s question is ‘Only in specific circumstances.’ Let’s suppose that we want to make some expensive online purchase and the merchant offers 0% APR financing to pay for the purchase over time, literally buy now, pay later. It could be via themselves, Affirm, or some other company. To make it concrete, let’s suppose that we need a new mattress which costs $1200. How should we pay for it in order to minimize its effective cost? ...

If Part 1’s theme was attempting to ‘vibe’ through golang text templates with codex then Part 2’s theme is attempting to ‘vibe’ through updates to a legacy javascript library with Gemini CLI. As planned this did not go as planned. I recommend skimming Part 1’s narrative, if not reading, as the following builds on it incrementally. Context, again First, a brief refresh on the origin of this work. I was dissatisfied with an existing hugo theme for my image gallery. I also wanted to present images using modern formats like avif which are unsupported by hugo’s builtin processing capabilities. This had impacts on how the templates for my new theme were structured. It also meant client side, in browser client, processing of image tags (e.g. exif or XMP data) for presentation. ...

Originally, I was going to write about using OpenAI Codex versus Google Gemini CLI to help me code my personal photos website. I could and may still do that, however, here we’ll tell a story about building a Hugo theme with codex, where things went right, and where they did not. We might also take digressions into commentary on the reality of software development and the 1986 Fred Brook’s essay ‘No Silver Bullet…’. ...

We all call it docs or gdoc or Google Docs, but the URL path actually says documents. Regardless, I must be in the minority, but I plead for vector graphics support anyway to whatever team within Google Workspaces is responsible for apps. Raster images Raster images are the jpegs, gifs, pngs, webps, tiffs, avifs, and many other formats of the world. They are of fixed resolution. I, and many people within the software development community before and after me, have created diagrams made of boxes, text, and lines connecting those boxes. We’ve used Visio (does anyone still use Visio?), Lucidchart, diagrams.net, and many other tools to create these images. ...

This is the follow up to the prior post on a terrible internet of things experience with the JuiceBox. I got annoyed by Enel Group’s business decisions. Instead of buying a new EVSE, I bought a new control board for my JuiceBox made by the folks at the OpenEVSE project. The OpenEVSE project started work on a replacement control board for the Enel X JuiceBox shortly after Enel Group started making business decisions that would leave customers without recourse. The board is available for sale here and costs less than a quality, complete, new EVSE. ...

I have previously written about charging costs for an EV that we own. Today, we are going to learn a bit about how I charge the car at home. We bought a, at the time, Enel X JuiceBox 40 from Costco. The mobile app was pleasant enough to use at first, but the experience went downhill from there. Let’s talk about why and annoyances with IoT. ...

An update to a prior post about electric car efficiency using my relatively inefficient EV, a 2022 Audi Etron, as an example. We’ll include some up to date numbers and discuss DC fast charging prices as of July, 2025 (spoiler: fast charging is, indeed, expensive). See the prior post here for more context ...

I recently bought a new domain and wanted to host a couple new static pages on it. I decided to do this using some new-to-me tools as a learning exercise. This post is about a couple things I learned along the way to hosting Michael On Random with Cloudflare CDN and Backblaze B2. ...

I want to run some numbers on the energy used by our electric car that we purchased nearly two years ago. We’ll compare that to a roughly equivalent gasoline car. This is an interesting exercise because we bought what is considered a relatively inefficient EV. Let’s do some light arithmetic. ...

This is a continuation from a post in April, 2023 on low-code and AI. ...