Subcurrent

Static site generators (SSGs): first run experience for Hexo and Astro.

In search of the perfect pin necklace

<p>Last year, on the <a class="reference external" href="/post/collecting-pins.html">"Collecting pins" post</a>, I mentioned that I usually wear my pins on a beanie, but was still looking for a good alternative for the warmer months.</p> <p>After thinking more about it, I realized a necklace would be the way to go. It doesn't depend on any …</p>

Streaming LLM responses vs blocking LLM responses with Ollama and Node.js

Talking to LLMs locally with Ollama with Node.js

Using EmbedJS for AI RAG systems in Node.js

Making a React based math game with Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet LLM

Zero to Deploy with Claude.ai and Val Town

Today I streamed my first video on Twitch, showing how to use Anthropic's Claude.ai and Val Town to ship a small frontend web app.

CardOS: Now compiling without Arduino!

<p>In the <a class="reference external" href="/post/cardos-writing-an-os-for-the-cardputer.html">"CardOS: Writing an OS for the Cardputer" post</a> I shared about the OS that I'm writing for the Cardputer and that the next step was to move away from the Arduino toolchain. It took me two months but I finally did it. The end product was <a class="reference external" href="https://codeberg.org/nfraprado/cardOS/commit/85553f797cf0877e4c88a8e549052a445d00e7d1">this commit …</a></p>

Batch loading resources in EmbedJS for RAG

A look at dynamically batch loading RAG resources with EmbedJS.

AI-powered fun in p5.js

Using AI in p5.js by wiring up a sketch to a serverless proxy function on Val Town.

You're going to Val Town

Val Town's runnable vals (their word for "gists") can be triggered manually, via email, or as an HTTP endpoint or cron job.

RAG in Node.js with EmbedJS

A look at a Node.js library called EmbedJS for RAG AI applications along with a repo to help you get started.

NYU ITP Camp 2024 sessions

NYU ITP Camp 2024 is underway. Here's Info on sessions I'm leading during the first week—one around vinyl, the other on AI.

The 3 Cs of Developer Advocacy

The 3 Cs of Developer Advocacy state that, all things being equal, when hiring for Developer Advocates, we must look for 3 competencies: coding ability, community stewardship, and content creation.

CardOS: Writing an OS for the Cardputer

<p>I recently got the <a class="reference external" href="https://docs.m5stack.com/en/core/Cardputer">M5Stack's Cardputer</a>. I was motivated to get it because I knew other people personally that had it too, so we would be able to share our progress, but I was worried it might end up being just another board that sits in my closet forever untouched …</p>

vCard + RSS as an alternative to social media

<p>Last year after talking for a while with someone during a conference they asked me for my LinkedIn to be able to connect with me, to which I answered I didn't have one.</p> <p>It was many years ago when I decided to leave social media. I don't miss it. Instant …</p>

DevRel and AI: a department lead’s self-evaluation one year in

Reflecting on the past year's journey of integrating AI into our Developer Relations initiatives at Nylas, I'm taking a moment for self-assessment.

Collecting pins

<p>It started innocently about one year ago as I was looking for a gift for a friend. We played a lot of League of Legends and Ragnarok Online back in the day, so I wanted to give him something to remember that. Eventually I came across these pins:</p> <ul class="simple"> <li><a class="reference external" href="https://www.etsy.com/listing/587004849/poring-poporing-slime-monter-fanart-hard">Poring/Poporing …</a></li></ul>

Using Nylas and OpenAI to triage email

Solving email inbox triage with Nylas APIs and OpenAI GPT APIs.

Experimenting with AI in DevRel

Using AI tools like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot to enhance DevRel work, build inspiring code samples, and enhance developer experience.

Create an entity resource file for OAS Tools with Prisma

Make an entity resource file with Prisma that can be used with OAS Tools to generate an Open API document and a Node.js/Express server.

Meeting the Linux community at my first ELC

<p>This month I attended the Embedded Linux Conference Europe, which was co-located with the Open Source Summit Europe, and took place in Dublin, Ireland. This was my first time attending a Linux conference in-person as a contributor and it was a very special experience.</p> <p>This wasn't my first ever in-person …</p>

Moving the blog to Codeberg

<p>As someone who cares about FOSS, I'm always happy to move to a FOSS alternative when one shows up, provided there aren't any big drawbacks.</p> <p>Back when I was in University and starting to learn the ways of Git, I only knew about two Git hosting options: GitHub, the mainstream …</p>

Using emojis in matplotlib

<p>Last month, as I was writing the blog post with all the statistics for the blog's two year anniversary, the <a class="reference external" href="/post/blog-statistics-after-two-years.html">"Blog statistics after two years" post</a>, I decided that I really wanted to have a plot with emojis. From the moment I thought of this I knew it couldn't simply …</p>

Blog statistics after two years

<p>Wow, it's been two years since I've started this blog! I'm really happy that I've still managed to keep up the one post per month. Hopefully I'll be able to keep it up for the third one!</p> <p>For this post I thought it would be fun to look through some …</p>

Discovering the comfort of loudspeakers

<p>In 2014, while on a school trip to Germany, I bought a Razer Tiamat headset. The sound was great and for the most part it was comfortable. Its only issue was the clamping force, which was a bit too much, and gave me headaches after long hours of use.</p> <p>I …</p>

Learning from SerenityOS

<p>One day I was scrolling through Reddit as usual, when I saw a post linking to this blog post: <a class="reference external" href="https://awesomekling.github.io/I-quit-my-job-to-focus-on-SerenityOS-full-time/">I quit my job to focus on SerenityOS full time</a>. I was intrigued by the backstory, the premise of this OS, and also by the fact that its development was <a class="reference external" href="https://www.youtube.com/c/AndreasKling/videos">being …</a></p>

Running LineageOS on my Nexus 5X

<p>This month marks one year since I bought a Nexus 5X and started using LineageOS, so I thought I'd share my experience.</p> <div class="section" id="setting-up"> <h2>Setting up</h2> <p>About one year ago, <a class="reference external" href="https://andrealmeid.com/">a friend</a> told me he found a really good deal for a Nexus 5X online. The Nexus 5X is an old phone …</p></div>

Learning x86-64 assembly basics

<p>Recently I decided to learn assembly. I already had a reasonable understanding of how it worked due to some classes that touched the subject in university, however I never had the opportunity to really write assembly code.</p> <p>Since my everyday computer is an x86-64 machine, it made most sense to …</p>

Making internal linking in pelican effortless

<p>One interesting feature of <a class="reference external" href="https://github.com/getpelican/pelican">Pelican</a>, the static site generator I use for this blog, is the internal link expansion syntax with <code class="docutils literal">{}</code>. It is documented <a class="reference external" href="https://docs.getpelican.com/en/latest/content.html?highlight=static#linking-to-internal-content">here</a>. Some examples are <code class="docutils literal">{filename}</code>, <code class="docutils literal">{static}</code> and <code class="docutils literal">{author}</code>. The purpose of the syntax is to have shorter and easier aliases to link to internal content in …</p>

The menus in my system

<p>Another post going through stuff I set up for my desktop environment a couple years ago and that have used ever since 🙂. This time I'll show the menus I've created using <a class="reference external" href="https://github.com/davatorium/rofi">rofi</a>.</p> <p>So, what is <a class="reference external" href="https://github.com/davatorium/rofi">rofi</a>? It's basically a program where you feed a list of options to it, and …</p>

The blocks in my status bar

<p>Five years ago when I moved to the i3 window manager, I started using its status bar, the i3bar. It is text based, and it's up to you what gets shown there. However it is not very modular: it's weird to combine different information to be shown since everything has …</p>

Resurrecting a computer on the go

<p>Earlier this month I was spending a few weeks in another country. It was late at night and I was once again looking over my personal files and thinking if there was a better way to organize them in folders.</p> <p>After thinking for a bit I decided on a new …</p>

My journey to a good backup system

<p>I'm a bit of a data hoarder. I still have some of the first programs I've ever written, photos I've taken on trips and drawings I did many years ago, to name a few. And since I don't trust some company to store all of this data for me, it …</p>

Owning my Kindle

<p>Several years ago my mother gave me a Kindle Paperwhite 2. I have read a few books on it since, but it never felt like it was really mine. Locking the screen showed some annoying ad, all books bought from Amazon were protected by DRM, books transferred through USB only …</p>

Blog customizations

<p>I've been using <a class="reference external" href="https://github.com/getpelican/pelican/">pelican</a> as my static blog generator since I started this blog about one year ago. It only took a bit of configuration to get the blog up and running, and a bit of searching through <a class="reference external" href="http://pelicanthemes.com/">pelicanthemes</a> to find <a class="reference external" href="https://github.com/gunchu/nikhil-theme">nikhil-theme</a> which is the theme I'm still using.</p> <p>While …</p>

One year of blog

<p>It's been a full year since I started this blog! So I thought I'd take this chance to talk a bit about the blog itself: How it started and my thoughts on it.</p> <div class="section" id="origins"> <h2>Origins</h2> <p>I had already thought a bit about having my own blog. Having a little corner of …</p></div>

gRPC: The front door for Node.js developers

As I've been learning more about gRPC over the last couple of months, I've worked with a few resources that have been quite helpful. I'd like to share those here.

Keeping track of my packages

<p>As I previously mentioned in the <a class="reference external" href="/post/moving-to-wayland.html">"Moving to Wayland" post</a>, I recently moved to a new computer. Moving can be very annoying if you use a heavily configured system and don't have all the configurations easily available to just move over. Since I do regular backups of my files, which …</p>

Learning music theory by writing melodies

<p>Hey, first non-technical blog post 🙂.</p> <p>Anyway, I haven't talked about this before here, but I'm really interested in playing the piano. When I was younger I took some guitar classes, but I always wanted to play the piano, and a couple years ago I finally got one! I've been playing …</p>

Moving to Wayland

<p>In the middle of January, my computer decided to surprise me, and not in a good way. Differently from all the quirks I've come to expect from it after all these 6 years of use — faulty keyboard, flashing screen, bad audio jack — this time it was worse, and it wasn't …</p>

Ledsticker: My first holistic SW + HW project

<p>It was in the middle of 2019. I was taking classes in Embedded Systems Laboratory and had to make the final project of my choice. I had the idea to do some sort of a Guitar Hero using a keyboard for the input, an 8x8 LED matrix to display the …</p>

Organization beyond Taskwarrior

<p>In the previous article of this series, I went into all my Taskwarrior and VIT customizations, and my workflow with them, that enables me to organize my tasks and get them done. Tasks, however, aren't the whole story when getting organized.</p> <p>Another crucial component of organization is having a calendar …</p>

Managing my tasks using VIT

<p>Two years ago I decided to get more organized about my life. During that time I read the <a class="reference external" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done">Getting Things Done</a> book and discovered <a class="reference external" href="https://taskwarrior.org/">Taskwarrior</a>, a task manager for the terminal which doesn't get in the way.</p> <p>I greatly appreciated Taskwarrior's simplicity and customizability, but after some time, the need …</p>

Astoria Tech Meetup #22: Containerizing a Node.js app... LIVE!

Our next virtual event is this week. We’ll be containerizing the Astoria Digital MuckRock project.

Number sorting gotcha with JavaScript

Problem: Sorted arrays are coming back in an unexpected order... sometimes. Safari is behaving differently than Chrome and Node.js. Let’s look at what to do.

Porting a flash LED driver upstream

<p>Now that I had a working serial cable for my Nexus 5, as described in the <a class="reference external" href="/post/making-an-uart-cable-for-the-nexus-5.html">"Making an UART cable for the Nexus 5" post</a>, I was ready to face some action and help in upstreaming.</p> <p>Looking through <a class="reference external" href="https://masneyb.github.io/nexus-5-upstream/TODO.html">Brian Masney's TODO page</a> there were a couple options, but the one …</p>

I'd Rather Be Scripting, episode 1

Kerri Shotts and I started a little podcast called I'd Rather Be Scripting.

Bulk file editing with ranger

<p>My file manager of choice is <a class="reference external" href="https://ranger.github.io/">ranger</a>. It's terminal-based, provides keybind mapping for everything making me more efficient in navigating my files, and it's incredibly extensible by enabling the creation of custom commands in <strong>python</strong>. If that wasn't enough, it also has a ton of other great features (extensible file …</p>

Playlist generation with MPD

<p>Music is life. I really love listening to music, although not the same kind of music all the time. Most of the time though, anything goes: I like to listen to any of the songs I have at random. But when I'm doing something that needs concentrating (like writing this …</p>

Automatic context detection for Taskwarrior

<p>One of the main ideas of <a class="reference external" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done">GTD</a> is to have a context associated with each task, so that it is very easy to see which tasks can be done in your current context. I organize my tasks with <a class="reference external" href="https://taskwarrior.org/">Taskwarrior</a>, so to make it work with contexts, when adding a new …</p>

Setting up mbsync to work with XOAUTH2

<p>For a long time I used <a class="reference external" href="https://www.offlineimap.org/">offlineimap</a> to synchronize my emails between the email providers and my computer. Having access to all my emails offline on my computer is pretty handy. But after seeing the <a class="reference external" href="https://people.kernel.org/mcgrof/replacing-offlineimap-with-mbsync">brutal efficiency advantage of mbsync over offlineimap</a>, and having had delay issues with offlineimap myself …</p>

Making an UART cable for the Nexus 5

<p>Recently, me and <a class="reference external" href="https://andrealmeid.com/">a friend</a> started digging into making the Nexus 5 run the mainline Linux kernel. The purpose of this is, apart from a great learning experience, to make the Nexus 5 run a Linux distro, like <a class="reference external" href="https://postmarketos.org/">PostmarketOS</a>, instead of Android, while also having lifetime updates delivered from the …</p>

Creating movie and game lists using Taskwarrior

<p>I like watching movies and playing games, but I also like to keep track of which movies I've watched and which games I've beaten. I also got into the habit of rating each movie I watch. For the longest time, though, I have kept track of these collections informally in …</p>