Introduction to AI and Large Language Models (LLMs)

This is a high level intro to LLMs that I’m writing for a few friends that are new to the concept. It is far from complete, definitely contains some errors and is a work in progress. This is a work in progress and a living document. Language models, or LLMs, are a type of artificial intelligence that can generate text based on a given prompt. They work by learning patterns in large amounts of text data and using those patterns to generate new text. LLMs can be used for a variety of tasks, such as generating chatbots, answering questions, and creating art. ...

January 26, 2023 · 13 min · 2741 words · Sam McLeod

Open Budgeting - Subscriptions & Licences

January 5, 2023 · 3 min · 471 words · Sam McLeod

Energy, Sustainability and Deployment Frequency

Deployment / Delivery Frequency I often end up needing to advocate for more frequent delivery/deployments with clients. There’s the usual benefits commonly discussed such as improved feedback, reduced risk, well understood processes, maintainable dependencies etc… however what’s often missed entirely is how it relates to the health and sustainability of the team. ...

December 31, 2022 · 2 min · 373 words · Sam McLeod

Zsh Configuration and Plugins - Part Two

November 18, 2022 · 12 min · 2435 words · Sam McLeod

Github Not-So-Reusable Actions

Github Actions is a “BYOBE” (Bring Your Own Bloody Everything) offering that provides basic CI with surprisingly convoluted configuration to Github. The product as a whole is an exercise in frustration, one of the worst parts is the lack of reusability and the complexity required to achieve it. Github’s concept of reusable workflows on Github Actions is clearly a cobbled together afterthought. ...

November 6, 2022 · 3 min · 615 words · Sam McLeod

YAML Anchors and Aliases

The YAML Spec defined a simple way to reuse values in YAML documents by means of Anchors and Aliases. ...

November 6, 2022 · 2 min · 305 words · Sam McLeod

Zsh Configuration and Plugins - Part One

As of 2022, I’ve been using zsh as my primary shell for 14 years. Over that time I’ve experimented with and accumulated a lot of configuration, scripts, hacks, plugins and themes. I’ve settled on a configuration that I’m mostly happy with, over this series I’m going to share my current setup. ...

November 6, 2022 · 4 min · 730 words · Sam McLeod

Encourage Your Peers To Contribute To Open Source

Contributing to Open Source is important to the quality and maintainability of the software and engineering communities we rely on every day - so why is it that so many developers/engineers never participate? ...

October 30, 2022 · 3 min · 535 words · Sam McLeod

Making Work Visible - Avoid DMs

We create more value by having conversations in public instead of behind closed doors. ...

October 20, 2022 · 6 min · 1071 words · Sam McLeod

The Best Of - 2022 Edition

Near the end of each year I note down a summary of the best apps I’ve enjoyed using throughout the year, here’s 2022. ...

October 19, 2022 · 2 min · 340 words · Sam McLeod