I write to learn, and publish to share.

All of my technical tutorials, musings and developer rants

2024-8-20

The Giant List of AI-Assisted Developer Tools Compared and Reviewed

A comprehensive comparison and review of AI-assisted developer tools, including code autocompletion, intelligent terminals/shells, and video editing tools.

2024-7-28

Building a Hand-Drawn Digit Recognizer with PyTorch and MNIST

I trained a neural net to recognize hand-drawn digits, then built a Next.js UI for it

2024-7-13

Why I bought three System76 computers

In the past 4 years, I have bought and used 3 different system76 linux machines. Here's why.

2024-06-05

How are embeddings models trained for RAG?

Embeddings models are the secret sauce that makes RAG work. How are THEY made?

2024-05-15

My morning routine

For several years now I've been getting up early before work to get plenty of me time in...

2024-05-10

Build a RAG pipeline for your blog with LangChain, OpenAI and Pinecone

You can chat with my writing and ask me questions I've already answered even when I'm not around

2024-05-07

Vector Databases in Production for Busy Engineers: RAG Evaluation

I wrote the RAG evaluation chapter for Pinecone's latest book

2024-05-05

Vector Databases in Production for Busy Engineers: CI/CD

I wrote the CI/CD chapter for Pinecone's latest book

2024-05-02

Tech I wish existed: super hearing aids

I want comfortable hearing aids with long battery life that extend my senses and intelligence

2024-4-28

Why I use Neovim's AstroNvim project as my daily driver IDE

Why do I use an open-source IDE-like Neovim experience glued together with Lua?

2024-4-24

Updated Codeium analysis and review

It's been about a year since I last looked at Codeium - what has changed?

2024-4-17

How do you write so fast?

Sometimes someone will ask me how I am able to write new content so quickly. This is my answer.

2024-04-15

The best programmer ever

A brief story about the best programmer I ever worked with

2024-04-15

Building data-driven pages with Next.js

To effectively maintain richer and more complex web experiences, separate data from presentation.

2024-4-13

Warp AI terminal review

The Warp terminal is a serious boon for anyone looking for help on the command line, but it's not yet perfect

2024-4-11

The best thing about being a developer

The best thing about being a developer is being able to build your own tools, to your exact specifications.

2024-4-10

Hop on the pain train

Some junior engineers are so afraid of breaking something, they paradoxically stagnage themselves

2024-4-10

Pinecone vs Chroma

A detailed comparison of the Pinecone and Chroma vector databases

2024-4-10

Pinecone vs FAISS

A detailed comparison of the Pinecone and FAISS vector databases

2024-4-10

Pinecone vs Milvus

A detailed comparison of the Pinecone and Milvus vector databases

2024-4-10

Pinecone vs Weaviate

A detailed comparison of the Pinecone and Weaviate vector databases

2024-4-10

Trace the system in your head

One of the best engineering managers I ever had was at Cloudflare. Here's what he did in his free time...

2024-4-10

Weaviate vs Chroma

A detailed comparison of the Weaviate and Chroma vector databases

2024-4-10

Weaviate vs FAISS

A detailed comparison of the Weaviate and FAISS vector databases

2024-4-10

Weaviate vs Milvus

A detailed comparison of the Weaviate and Milvus vector databases

2024-4-8

aws-vault - the best way to manage AWS credentials for multiple accounts

aws-vault is an excellent open-source tool written in Golang that allows you to manage the credentials for multiple AWS accounts securely.

2024-4-7

How to Run background jobs on Vercel without a queue

I recently needed to figure out how to have my Vercel API route accept a new job and return a response immediately while still performing long running processing in the background. This is what I learned.

2024-4-7

Git operations in JavaScript for pain and profit

You can run git wherever JavaScript is accepted. Should you?

2024-4-04

Introduction to dimensionality in machine learning

Dimensionality refers to the number of features a given embedding model extracts

2024-4-04

Introduction to embeddings (vectors) and how they work

Embeddings are numerical representations of the key features of some data

2024-3-9

Vector Databases Compared: Pinecone, Milvus, Chroma, Weaviate, FAISS, and more

How do the different vector databases compare?

2024-2-12

How to build a dynamic sitemap for your Next.js project

Steal my implementation to save yourself some time and headaches

2024-2-06

My first book credit! My Horrible Career

What started out as an extended conversation with my mentor about career trajectory became a book!

2024-2-02

Codeium vs ChatGPT

What's the difference between Codeium and ChatGPT and which should you use?

2024-1-23

Testing Pinecone Serverless at Scale with the AWS Reference Architecture

A step-by-step walkthrough on how to generate arbitrary system load and flex Pinecone Serverless

2024-01-08

Keep Calm and Ship Like Crazy: My 2023 Wins and Lessons

I had a lot of growth and success to celebrate professionally in 2023

2024-01-01

A Blueprint for Modern API Development: Repositories developers want to work on

Developer delight === project velocity ?

2023-12-31

Evolving web scraping: How Pageripper API handles JavaScript-heavy sites

Pageripper API uses Puppeteer and headless Chrome under the hood to see the same thing your browser does, even for Single Page Applications (SPAs)

2023-12-28

Pageripper API: a commercial data-extraction service

I built an API that extracts data from webpages, even if they're rendered with Javascript. It's defined via Pulumi and deployed on AWS.

2023-12-6

Talk @ a16z: Taking AI applications to Production

I introduced the new Pinecone AWS Reference Architecture with Pulumi and explained infrastructure as code

2023-12-3

Comic: Magic spells

A comic strip about casting magic spells

2023-11-30

Comic strip: long day at the office

A wordless comic strip about a typically brutal day at work, that nevertheless has a positive ending

2023-11-27

Announcing the Pinecone AWS Reference Architecture in Pulumi

Deploy production-ready systems using Pinecone in minutes with the AWS Reference Architecture

2023-11-27

Pinecone AWS Reference Architecture Technical Walkthrough

An examination of the Reference Architecture components and functionality

2023-10-25

Wash three walls with one bucket

Design your side projects, blog posts and even your fun experiments to triangulate multiple learning paths simultaneously. Then, use them to build out your portfolio.

2023-10-18

Run your own tech blog

Control your own destiny, build your personal brand, and master web technologies by running your own tech blog.

2023-10-15

For Zachary

There are only two people I am aware of named Zachary Proser, with that exact spelling. This article is only for Zachary Proser.

2023-10-14

How to generate images with AI

I have used StableDiffusion, AUTOMATIC111, DALLE and Discord bots to generate images in every style for blog posts. You can too.

2023-10-14

You get to keep the neural connections

Going the extra mile only to be unrewarded by your company feels like a personal slight and a waste of your time. It is not.

2023-10-10

ChatGPT4 and Codeium are still my favorite dev assistant stack

As of October 10th, 2023, ChatGPT4 and Codeium are still my favorite AI-assisted dev tool stack. Here is why

2023-10-09

The top bugs all AI developer tools are suffering from

I have evaluated everything from ChatGPT to CoPilot to Codeium to Cursor, to Sourcegraph Cody to CodiumAI. All suffer from the same bugs

2023-10-07

GitHub Copilot review

I got Copilot access for free as an active GitHub open-source maintainer, but would I pay for it?

2023-10-07

Why your AI dev tool startup is failing with developers

These common mistakes are dooming your AI-assisted developer tooling startup to failure. Don't make them

2023-09-30

How I keep my shit together

Practices and protocols that keep me humming along, healthy and productive on a given day

2023-09-20

Making it easier to maintain open-source projects with CodiumAI and Pinecone

CodiumAI's PR-agent integration leverages Pinecone under the hood to perform semantic search for similar GitHub issues

2023-9-11

Programmer emotions

Programmers are people, and this is how I feel when...

2023-9-9

Glossary of tech phrases

If you're coming from Hacker News, I've learned that I need to spell out at the beginning that this post is partly facetious...

2023-09-01

The Pain and Poetry of Python

A history of package management and virtualenvs in Python and why we migrated the Pinecone Python client to Poetry

2023-08-23

How to use Jupyter Notebooks to do Machine Learning and AI tasks

Jupyter Notebooks are surprisingly easy to get started with - especially when using GitHub and Google Colab

2023-08-22

Opengraph dynamic social images

I built a custom opengraph image with '@vercel/og' that includes a fallback image for index pages

2023-08-11

AI-powered and built with...JavaScript?

6 Technology trends position JavaScript developers to reap the rewards of the GenAI boom

2023-08-04

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)

How to reduce hallucinations in your Generative AI applications

2023-07-23

I'm joining Pinecone.io as a Staff Developer Advocate!

Making the pivot from pure software engineering to developer advocacy

2023-07-18

ggshield can save you from yourself. Never accidentally commit secrets again

Stop yourself from committing a secret to git with ggshield

2023-07-17

First, find out if you've got the programming bug

I get this question a lot: how do I get into coding? This is my best advice.

2023-07-04

Office Oracle - a complete AI Chatbot leveraging langchain, Pinecone.io and OpenAI

I open sourced my next.js AI chatbot and the Jupyter notebooks I used to build it, plus created a video series walking through it all on YouTube

2023-05-29

Codeium with Neovim for A.I. powered code-completion: so far so good

Generally unimpressed with GitHub's Copilot (not Copilot X), I gave the alternative, Codeium a shot.

2023-05-24

Automations - shell scripts leveraging OpenAI to make your developer workflow buttery smooth and way more fun

I have open sourced my automations project, which is a collection of shell scripts that automatically handle git operations, provide local code reviews, pull requests, and more!

2023-05-15

Autogit - never forget to pull the latest changes again

Autogit is an open source shell script that you can wire up to your `cd` command to ensure you always have the latest code, branches, and remotes when you open up a local git repository.

2023-05-07

Passwordless sudo and verified GitHub commit signing with Yubikey - a pair-coder's dream

If you're like me, you can't type your complex password correctly when your entire team is staring at you on a pair call. And now, you no longer have to.

2023-04-27

Maintaining this site no longer fucking sucks

After re-doing my personal website in next.js and deploying to Vercel, I reflect on how much better the developer experience has become.

2023-04-25

The Bubbletea (TUI) State Machine pattern

Combining a lightweight state machine plus the Bubbletea charm library leads to a very powerful pattern for tooling that needs to orchestrate slow or expensive steps.

2023-04-17

Maintaining this site fucking sucks

Join me as I delve into the infuriating, yet enlightening journey of maintaining my own Javascript-heavy website. Learn how battling DNS issues, dependency chaos, niche CSS pre-processors and constant painful upgrades has led to one of the most rewarding projects I've ever created.

2023-04-10

Can ChatGPT-4 and GitHub Copilot help me produce a more complete side project more quickly?

As a Senior Software Engineer, I'm always looking for ways to refine my skills and optimize my workflow. This weekend, I experimented with integrating ChatGPT-4 into my developer toolkit alongside GitHub Copilot, which I've been using for several months. The goal? To see if these AI-powered tools could help me complete a side project more quickly.

2023-03-20

Why I've been successful lately, and what I'm planning to do about it

In the past 3 years, I've been promoted 3 times. I reflect on the habits and activities that helped me improve the most.

2022-10-27

How to securely store secrets in BitWarden CLI and load them into your shell when needed

A tutorial on how to write and use shell functions to fetch your tokens from the BitWarden CLI with one command.

2022-10-21

Teatutor Deep Dive

Teatutor is a Golang CLI leveraging the Bubbletea Terminal User Interface (TUI) library from Charm.sh. It can be served over an SSH connection.

2022-07-14

A powerful and open source content optimizer

A full technical deep-dive on my optimizer app and its features

2022-07-14

How to work with CircleCI more effectively

Pro tips for working with CircleCI configurations

2022-07-05

Writing code on Mac or Linux but testing on Windows with hot-reloading

As a developer, I often want to test my code on Windows, but don't have a Windows box handy. This tutorial demonstrates how to use Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to make provisioning Windows test instances easier. In this post, I also provide a working Packer template and Terraform configuration to deploy your own Windows test instance, as well as instructions for mounting a local folder over RDP.

Terminal velocity - how to get faster as a developer

2022-04-27