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lornajaneon Show HN: Transform Your Codebase into a Single Markdown Doc for Feeding into AI

For extra points, compile your docs into one file and feed it that as well.

(unless the reason you're giving AI the code is that you don't have any docs for either humans or machines)

lornajaneon Be careful of the examples you use. They stick

This is such a great story and an important one. I always optimise examples for people copying and pasting, trying to make it as safe and meaningful by default as possible. It doesn't matter why you're copying and pasting - you may not have a lot of skills in this specific area, or you might be in a hurry. If you know what you're doing, you can probably improve the code, but if you use it as-is, it shouldn't come back to bite you!

lornajaneon Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

https://lornajane.net

Over a thousand posts (I've been doing this a while apparently) on APIs, open source, backend scripting languages, developer experience/relations, other random tech, and the occasional recipe.

lornajaneon My Problem with the Four-Document Model

This article picks up some good points, but it seems like the main criticism is that Diataxis isn't useful for a programming language because that requires a sequence of lessons. But docs aren't a textbook, if you want to create a learning resource that's great - but that's not documentation IMO.

lornajaneon How to advertise to developers: deep dive into paid developer marketing

I have one of those shirts :)

lornajaneon Ask HN: Where are you going to find long-form content online these days?

Happy to see someone beat me to the recommendation of longreads.com, I get their weekly newsletter and have found some really great pieces there that I wouldn't have seen otherwise.

lornajaneon A tour to my Zettelkasten note clusters

I'm a big fan of the evergreen note-taking approach, but my diagram is nothing like as pretty as this one. Apparently I don't link between pages much.

lornajaneon A tour to my Zettelkasten note clusters

This is a really good point, I am using Obsidian but I feel OK about the proprietary-ness of it because at the end of the day, it's a nice tool to read my well-organised folder of markup files with. It's possible I live to regret this ...

lornajaneon Ask HN: What makes a good engineering blog?

I'm a big fan of https://codeascraft.com/ which unashamedly long form writing about interesting technical problem solving. The authors do have their own voices but it's all at a really good standard.

lornajaneon No, we won’t have a video call for that

Do you have some tips on doing good writings? It's something I'd like to improve on but I haven't seen it done really well so far. If you have any recommended resources for learning more, I would be interested to dig in.

lornajaneon Nerds don't respond to marketing; try technical documentation instead

I wish "real" documentation and auto-generated method or endpoint documentation were more clearly different things. The "how do to more than hello world" examples are absolutely the key to getting started with something new.

lornajaneon OpenSearch 1.0

So far, Amazon have been good about accepting PRs from volunteers (I can only vouch for the OpenSearch project) and have committed to moving to a more open source model with active maintainers from other organisations. It's early days but it looks healthy so far.

lornajaneon Confluent S-1

The schema registry is pretty nice, but there are alternatives in that space too, such as Karapace from Aiven, or Apicurio from IBM.

(disclaimer: I work for Aiven, we also provide Apache Kafka as a service)

lornajaneon OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

I'm not sure I agree with that assessment. Now that the fork is publicly available, others can contribute to get it ready, which wasn't possible until now.

lornajaneon Kafka without ZooKeeper

This is great advice IMO, let someone else manage your Kafka at scale. I feel compelled to mention that other Apache Kafka managed services are available, but agree that it makes sense to offload the complexity if possible! Disclosure: work at Aiven, who offer managed Apache Kakfa on whatever cloud you are using.

lornajaneon Kafka without ZooKeeper

You can get managed Kafka on Aiven (disclaimer: I work there) on GCP, either through the marketplace or directly through Aiven.

lornajaneon Importing Kaggle Open Data CSV to Aiven PostgreSQL

I particularly appreciated the https://github.com/catherinedevlin/ddl-generator/ that created the table structure from the CSV. What a neat utility!

lornajaneon What's new in OpenAPI Specification 3.1

The 3.1 release of OpenAPI was just announced, with some nice features such as JSON Schema support and webhook support. Full spec is here: https://spec.openapis.org/oas/v3.1.0.html

lornajaneon Show HN: I wrote an entire book to build a mouseless dev environment

I'm a vimium user and I wasn't aware of this, how useful! I checked the docs and I can't find it, do you know what it's called or how to do it please?

lornajaneon Kafka vs. RabbitMQ – A Comparison

Oh dear. I was trying to capture a conversation I had with a software architect at a user group recently, that they said they'd found helpful, but seems like it didn't translate well in to short-written-form!

lornajaneon Use Streamdeck on Linux

I should definitely do that! I was streaming it on Twitch while I was building it earlier in the year but those episodes have expired now. Thanks for the suggestion