dugmartin

Joined 17 years ago

Karma
4,251
Submissions
1,172
Member since
Feb 12
http://dougmart.in/

I'm a software developer based in the beautiful village of Shelburne Falls, MA, USA with thirty years of professional software design and development experience gained from a range of employers and clients including small startups to Fortune 100 companies.

I am currently a Principal Engineer at the Concord Consortium (https://concord.org), a nonprofit educational research and development organization working to bring the promise of technology into reality for education in science, math, and engineering.

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Recent submissions

Comment · 25 days ago
And with LLMs you can just create your own pretty easily that matches your exact workflow and integrates with all your tools. I've gone through a few iterations, first using the Unix small tools that talk to each other philosophy, then a single TUI app running in a pane next to my agent cli and now a Go server that has a cli and web ui with xterm embedded terminals and has its own chat sidebar in the web ui that can use tools and interact with running sessions in terminals. I'll probably have something new in 6 months.
Comment · 1 month ago
You can also apply a light non-wax shellac on pine before staining to penetrate and close up the deep pores so you get less blotchiness with the darker stain.

I do agree that with pine you should just celebrate the wood and go with a light stain or even better, something like linseed oil.

Comment · 1 month ago
Comment · 2 months ago
Comment · 2 months ago
My solution for that is to use skills and add a omnibus shell script in each particular skill folder that does all the deterministic steps and then write the skill markdown to only use the script, usually passing a command line step parameter to the script. I also usually add a note in the skill markdown that it should monitor how it calls the script and suggest any improvements when the skill is used.

As an example I have a `today` skill that has a today.sh script that can check my email, bug tracker, calendars, custom timesheet system and other systems via the script and then the skill assembles a nice summary of what is happening today along with a suggested schedule.

Comment · 3 months ago
I've been building these same personal apps but on Firebase. They have a generous free tier that includes hosting and you can add real user auth, again all for free.
Comment · 3 months ago
I have my own review skill (I think it predates when Claude added theirs) and one thing I'd add to your description is tell it to examine all the code and then, based on the changes, do a multi-role review of the code again using the most appropriate N of the following roles based on the changes: ... (where ... is a long list I have like Senior Engineer, Security Engineer, WCAG specialist, etc). Claude will spawn those reviews in parallel and then consolidate the feedback. I do spec based development so I just have my skill append the issues to the spec so I have a trail of issues and decisions.
Comment · 5 months ago
I'm curious what it is going to find in my 10 year old Elixir codebase (still in active production use).
Comment · 5 months ago
I've found a mix of peppered in upper case words where you are effectively yelling at the LLM also gives it a strong signal. It is also a bit cathartic.
Comment · 6 months ago
I miss pre-COVID prices. Our local diner is now $20+ for a simple breakfast (eggs, toast, bacon, coffee/tea) for two people. Pre-COVID is was ~$10 with tip.
Comment · 6 months ago
I've heard the rule of thumb in a well run restaurant business is 30/30/30/10:

    1. 30% food costs
    2. 30% labor costs
    3. 30% overhead
    4. 10% profit margin
Comment · 6 months ago
Its hard to express what it was like in the early/mid-80s (before I had my drivers licence) to bike a few miles to the bookstore at the start of every month and see all the new computer magazine covers for that month. It was so exciting.

I didn't have much money so I stuck with Micro Cornucopia as it had the biggest signal to noise ratio (and before that Rainbow Magazine). I did pickup Computer Shopper later when I started building/rebuilding my mini-tower every few months.

While I'm glad I have the world's information one web page away now I feel like something has been lost.

Comment · 6 months ago
Comment · 6 months ago
It is available here:

https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/acli/guides/introducti...

It has a pretty discoverable cli syntax (at least for Claude). I use it in my custom skills to pull Jira story info when creating and reviewing specs.

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