Tag: blogging

Fine, I’m Vibe Coding

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As you may have noticed, I literally just wrote a post about being a software curmudgeon. And now I’m here to tell you I’ve been vibe coding apps in my spare time, and now the redesign of my site. I think those two ideas are actually compatible, and working through the experience on both fronts has helped me understand why.

A few weeks ago I decided to finally do something about the theme on this site. It was a single-column layout I’d been using for about ten years. It was fine – simple and fast. It was also brutally boring, and every time I thought about replacing it I’d talk myself out of it because sitting down to rebuild a WordPress theme from scratch (or download one off the shelf) sounded like a miserable way to spend a weekend. So I just kept not doing it.

What changed is that the cost of experimentation has gotten so much cheaper. I keep coming back to an analogy that feels right to me: this is what digital photography did to taking pictures. When a shot cost you money to develop, you thought hard before pressing the shutter. When it became free to try, you took ten versions of the same photo and picked the best one. You got less precious about it. The same thing is starting to happen with software. If a layout idea doesn’t work, you haven’t lost a weekend. You’ve lost twenty minutes. That changes how willing you are to take a swing. Now, let’s be clear – a WP theme isn’t exactly enterprise software but the idea still holds. AI can democratize a lot of development work that more novice devs in particular just can’t set aside the time to do.

Being the Director Is Harder Than It Sounds

I made a decision going in to approach this the way someone without real PHP, HTML, CSS, or JavaScript knowledge would. I’d describe what I wanted and let Claude Code figure out the implementation. No diving in and fixing things myself. Just prompting. This is harder than it sounds, and it’s made me a better communicator.

As an engineering manager by day, a big part of my job is translating fuzzy ideas into clear requirements. Turns out that’s exactly the muscle vibe coding exercises. When you can’t just reach in and tweak the thing yourself, you have to actually articulate what you want. What’s pretty cool is how you can develop a shared vocabulary with the agent over time, where certain phrases start getting interpreted exactly the way you mean them, and the back-and-forth starts to feel less like wrestling a computer and more like a real working session. That part genuinely surprised me.

I’ve promised myself I’ll go back and refactor and clean things up properly, and honestly I even plan to do that through prompting, working through best practices and getting better at structuring my feedback as I go. It’s been weirdly fun, which is not a sentence I expected to write.

What Actually Changed

The design is the most obvious thing. There’s a proper home page layout now instead of just a reverse-chronological pile of posts, though the traditional blog view is still there if that’s more your speed.

A few other things I’ve been meaning to do for a while finally got done. The archives and links pages got a real overhaul, with more content on each page. The archives in particular now let you sort by post type, tag popularity, and a few other things.

I also turned on Webmentions, which means that when WordPress auto-publishes a post to Mastodon, any replies to (follow @dandrews@danielandrews.com on Mastodon!) it will show up as comments here. I’m not historically a comments guy, so there’s a non-zero chance I quietly nuke this at some point. But I like the idea of using my own site to better support the open web, so I figured I’d give it a real shot.

Still Going

I don’t have a tidy conclusion here because this isn’t really done. The site is a living thing and I’ve got more ideas than time, which is a good problem to have. And at least for now I feel more motivated to actually do something about these silly little ideas that I’d like to try out both here and more broadly. I’ll try to write about this more as I go, both to stay accountable and because I think there’s genuinely interesting stuff in working through how to prompt well, not just that you can. The more challenging thing has been my attempts to build iOS and Android apps using the same techniques. I’ll share more on that at a later date, but it’s been super interesting as well.

For the fellow skeptics: you don’t have to become a true believer. I’m still not sure I am. But treating your own stuff as a low-stakes sandbox, somewhere to get your hands dirty, seems like a pretty good way to figure out what these tools are actually worth.

My Software Curmudgeon Era

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A funny thing has happened to me in my 40s. I have started to understand how people end up set in their ways. I think it’s often not because they stop paying attention, but because they have seen enough to recognize patterns and make choices based on their values. Reading recent critiques of macOS Tahoe’s direction [1][2] and broader discussions about dark patterns in software development these days [1][2] helped me realize how much of my reaction to this change isn’t just because I’m naturally pulling back, but instead because so much about what is changing is in stark contrast to what I value.

While some tech like AI has really broadened my perspective at home and at work, a lot of other opinions have really started to reveal to me how I’ll likely never come around to the “new way” of doing things. I’d like to think I am still open to new tech when it’s useful to me or aligns with my values, but I do find that it takes a lot more to get me to really change my ways these days.

Through that lens, I present you with a few hot take old guy opinions. These aren’t just gripes, but instead me settling on certain tech that align best with my values.

RSS vs Social Media for News

This is one thing that I’ve stuck to for the longest time. RSS is truly the best way to keep up with the sites and content that you care about. Heck, Michael Cantrell and I built our own short-lived RSS reader when Google Reader shut down. So I’m a true believer.

Modern RSS services like Feedbin even add another layer on top, letting you add newsletters, create filters and even add pages to read later in the same interface. You can use one of many amazing apps (NetNewsWire and Reeder are my favorites but there are a zillion great choices here), and use a service like Feedbin or just bring your own OPML file.

The important news will find you. You don’t need to be refreshing and seeking this stuff out. You also don’t need to be wasting your time on an algorithm-based timeline that is feeding you junk that it knows you’re going to react to. That leads me to my next point…

Blogging vs Social Media for “Thinking Out Loud”

It’s so easy to fire off a hot take on social media without really thinking through your stance on something, essentially yelling into the void.

Now I’m not a great writer but the act of sitting down and yelling into my own void actually does help me crystalize my thinking a bit as well as practice the art of writing. When I do this regularly I find that I am better at fleshing out my thoughts and that’s a good thing both professionally and personally.

Things like Mastodon and Bluesky are great Twitter alternatives that are much better open web citizens, but getting back to a world of writing a bit more and linking to our friends while using the aforementioned RSS more to stitch things together would be so healthy for state of our discourse. Less quote-post-dunkng, more linking to posts you disagree with and explaining why, please.

Computers vs iPad/iPhone as my primary computing device

I covered this last summer, but I just can’t fit an iPad into my life. Believe me, I’ve tried. Every time I get rid of mine I get sucked back in and buy a new Air or Pro, get the keyboard and an Apple Pencil and then proceed to use it to watch videos a few times a month. It’s not as good for writing, the battery life is good but not as good as a Mac, and it’s overall a compromised device.

It’s a little closer when thinking about the iPhone vs the Mac as my primary device just due to the amount of time that it’s by my side on non-work days, but even then I’d much rather be using a nice laptop on a comfortable couch than screwing around on my phone.

Streaming Services are Actually Not Great

I’m still working this one out a bit.

I’ve written about my love of album focused music apps before, but lately I’ve been thinking more about what it would look like to bring back my circa-2016 MP3 collection and start building up anything new I’ve added since then. What would that cost? What would I get in return?

I’ve spent approximately $10/month since around 2011 or so. Some napkin math says that’s about 15 years, or $1,800 to rent my music since then. If I stopped tomorrow, I’d have nothing to show for it. That “sunk cost” only increases over time. Ouch.

Music isn’t like TV or movies, where you consume it once and with a few exceptions, move on. It’s single-serve entertainment for the most part. We develop relationships and memories with our music and come back to favorites time and time again. I use apps like Albums and Longplay to recapture that feeling of when I was younger where I’d plow through the same album for months at a time, but still hate knowing that I’m renting my music.

What makes this hard is not that the options are unclear, but that streaming has hidden all of this labor for so long. Ownership means thinking about formats, storage, and where things live when the subscription ends. It means dusting off a NAS, ripping discs, and making decisions I have been deferring for years. Even Apple seems to acknowledge this gap, given that iTunes Match is somehow still available. None of this is elegant, and that is exactly what streaming has spared us from.

Dark mode is actually bad

This is a quick one. As I’ve gotten older, I just can’t do it anymore. Maybe on the phone, but on a laptop it just makes things impossible to read for me. Even with glasses on, it’s just not happening any more.

Get off my lawn!

The bottom line is that I am losing interest in software that assumes it knows better than I do how I should think, read, write, or listen. It’s similar to this post I put up a while back about algorithms but I think it goes even deeper than that. I know it makes me sound old and out of touch, but I suppose that’s increasingly true.