Blogging Roller

It's crazy that I started working on a project called Roller twenty-five years ago this month, and next year Apache Roller will celebrate its 20th year as a top-level Apache project. Somehow I am still working in this same codebase.[Read More]

I would say that 99% of the code in the Investor Ping's backend and iOS app was written by LLMs, but I did not vibe code it. My definition of vibe coding is when you use an LLM to write code that you do not review or even read. Nope, I ran the project like I always do with design docs, issue tracking, pull requests and CI/CD sandbox and production deploys (in this case to DigitalOcean). I review all code and try to enforce some architectural constraints, mostly about separation of concerns, configuration and secrets management; but maybe less so in the iOS app because I am new to iOS and Swift.[Read More]

Usually I find a couple of contradictory stories every time I read the feeds. Here's a pair from today's session. First via John Gruber.

Bll Gates in Newsweek: Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.

And next, via  John Robb, I found:

Spencer Kelly, BBC: We set up a poor Windows XP machine with no firewall or anti-virus software. Connecting it to the internet would be like throwing it into a lion pen with raw meat strapped to its hard drive. How long would it be before we were hit by something nasty on the net? Hours, minutes? As it turned out - eight seconds!

Of course Bill may have been talking about Vista, even though he did not qualify. Maybe Vista is better, but I wouldn't count on it. Initial reports don't sound so good (Vista users: keep your speakers and microphones turned off).