smithclay

Fun fact: NBC does not broadcast from Sutro tower, but San Bruno…

Which means effectively zero over-the-air reception in parts of the Mission. Lesson learned during a Super Bowl party the 2010s.

There’s a hack if you work in Developer Relations for a tech company.

1. You write the book as part of your job during the workday. 2. Your company buys the published book to distribute at events and conferences for free. 3. The book seems successful and you get paid. 4. The book gives you credibility in industry events and may even help you get a special visa if you need one.

Full disclosure: I have never written a technical book, but you should if you work in Developer Relations.

I liked using LangChain and their docs this year to learn basic patterns (RAG, summarization, etc) as someone completely new to the LLM space.

LangChain gets a lot of pushback in production scenarios, but think going through some of their tutorials is a very reasonable way to get learning more about how you could apply gen AI for various use-cases.

If you enjoy Anchor, highly recommend Olfactory in Dogpatch… which is a rare (very new) SF brewery specializing in lagers and pilsners which are excellent.

Congrats on the launch. Like a lot of the people right now, am doing some side project with OpenAI + LangChain and immediately got some value out of this, specifically:

* When your chains get long/complex enough in LangChain, it's really hard to understand from debug output what's final prompt that actually being sent, how much it costs, or catching runaway agents. This pretty much solves that for me.

As a "prompt developer", one thing that'd be incredibly useful is a way to see/export all of my prompts and responses over time to help me tune them (basically a "Prompt" button in the left nav).

Congrats on the launch. So nice to see a tool in the space that lets you get up and running in 4 minutes.

When 1984 was written in the 40s the economics of car ownership were very different.

Great post on this: “Why Agatha Christie could afford a maid and a nanny but not a car”

https://www.fullstackeconomics.com/p/why-agatha-christie-cou...

(Hypothetical) breaking point: Cost of housing for a family in desirable SF neighborhoods and the SF public school system.

I’m a 30-something transplant that happily decided to stay in San Francisco, but I have a lot of empathy and understanding for those who decided to leave.

The thing that had the biggest impact on various quality of life issues (and why I stayed) was moving from the Mission to a quieter and safer SF neighborhood. I bike everywhere, don’t have a car, and can walk to work and several beautiful parks, including one that opened this year.

If I had kids, don’t think it would have been possible at all to stay.

Hacking stuff together using a userspace networking stack is an incredibly fun side project and significantly easier with the gVisor networking libraries written in Go.

Last year I implemented TCP/IP over AWS Cloudwatch. Tons of "can you believe that actually works?" stuff possible with it:

https://medium.com/clog/tcp-ip-over-amazon-cloudwatch-logs-c...

Was at an event where someone asked the industrial designer Hartmut Esslinger (a very colorful dresser) about the color of the early Macs: why beige?

“Because of dust”

These lava lamps were also a key plot point in an NCIS episode (a popular crime procedural on CBS).

[spoiler below]

https://twitter.com/ncis_cbs/status/1044751471927947264?lang...

This adds to some interestsing acquisition activity in this area: Splunk, for example, just acquired Flowmill (also focusing on eBPF + observability).

https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/24/splunk-acquires-network-ob...

[blatantly promoting my substack] Been following this area about a year, first wrote about some of startups using eBPF here in late 2019: https://monitoring2.substack.com/p/ebpf-a-new-bff-for-observ...

Strange thing: I saw the Waymo cars in the press release photo being prepped for the photoshoot on Valencia Street in San Francisco last month.

Now the random sighting ("why is that guy polishing a Waymo Jaguar on a Saturday morning in SF?") makes much more sense.

Congrats on the launch, Chronosphere is joining a fast-growing club of monitoring (and related) spinoffs from large Bay Area tech companies:

Uber -> Chronosphere Google -> Lightstep Facebook -> Honeycomb Twitter -> Buoyant (and Zipkin, OSS)

I've recently seen some compelling and simple internal tools that were built on top of Google Sheets in unexpected industries far away from SF.

An online spreadsheet + UI + optional external API calls seems perfect for fast development of a large number of straightforward internal-facing apps, including lots of things that are currently done on paper.

For those limited and simple use cases Google Sheets is a far more usable "serverless" platform than a lot of stuff in the hype cycle right now.

This reminds me of a favorite twitter bot that adds the same caption to every _New Yorker_ cartoon: https://twitter.com/newuniversalcap

For the small iOS events, think the changing/shrinking conference landscape needs to be considered alongside the changes in the iOS indie dev community the past 2-3 years.

Don't think iOS developers are abandoning the platform, but I do think many indie developers (or those who were considering becoming an iOS indie developer) did leave. It became a lot harder to make a living as a full-time iOS indie dev.

The indie devs brought a lot of the excitement and energy to these events and made for extremely interesting and fun conferences full of people from different design, engineering, and professional backgrounds.

(Context: developer evangelist-type here, once focused on iOS-related developer conferences and attended many of them in North America and Europe.)

Shameless plug: I've been hacking on headless chrome in AWS Lambda but with selenium webdriver support [1], also using the binaries from the serverless-chrome [2] project.

To echo another comment on this thread, headless chrome seems well-positioned to shake up the automated browser testing market. The price—especially with the AWS Lambda free tier—is very, very compelling for a number of projects.

[1] https://github.com/smithclay/lambdium [2] https://github.com/adieuadieu/serverless-chrome

The main reason I switched Docker is there's an nginx image (on alpine) that supports ALPN. No compiling from source required, which simplified things (in my mind, at least).

I struggled with getting HTTP/2 working with ALPN on Ubuntu 14.04 back in February. After building nginx from source [1] I ended up switching to Docker base images that support OpenSSL 1.0.2 [2].

1: https://www.clay.fail/posts/ubuntu-http2-in-mere-hours 2: https://www.clay.fail/posts/hip-http2-using-docker/

For those curious about the performance improvements, https://benchmarking.nodejs.org has you covered.

That's awesome, will be updating the site to use your image this weekend. Like the support for docker-compose and the staging servers, too.

Recently went through a similar setup, but used Docker and some existing h2-friendly images. Think it's a nice way forward for deploying to production environments.

Wrote about the process here: https://clay.fail/posts/hip-http2-using-docker/

I've found the Python wrapper troposphere useful for dealing with the JSON.

https://github.com/cloudtools/troposphere

I took a stab at building from it source on Ubuntu 14.04 + LetsEncrypt for an experimental site (i.e follow the config best practices mentioned elsewhere here).

https://www.clay.fail/posts/ubuntu-http2-in-mere-hours/

If you're interested in IncludeOS, runtime.js is also worth checking out: http://runtimejs.org/

At this point, are there any major tech organizations who haven't jumped on the Backend-as-a-service bandwagon?

Kinto - Mozilla, CloudKit - Apple, Parse - Facebook, Firebase - Google, Azure Mobile Services - Microsoft, Mobile Hub - Amazon, Usergrid - Apache Foundation

... and many, many startups.

Despite minimal browser support, it's still nice to start seeing projects like this that make it very easy to implement SRI (for Wordpress users, in this case):

https://id.wordpress.org/plugins/wp-sri/

Have a feeling JSConf Colombia is going to be a hard ticket to get next year.

Here's the link for their recent (10/16-10/17) conference, some great talks: http://jsconf.co

For many kinds of tiny one-off hobbyist projects, why bother with servers or dynos at all?

Couldn't help but wonder if the (valid) cost and performance problems the author has with heroku will end up pushing devs faster to Backend-as-a-Service platforms like Parse, Firebase, or something like Amazon Mobile Hub (Lambda on Rails?).

(Note: not affiliated with any of these platforms, etc. Just a lazy mobile developer with lots of things that never make it to the app store.)