AI-assisted coding for teams that can’t get away with vibes Atharva notes that AI is a multiplier: the more expertise you have in software engineering, the better the results you can get from LLMs. Furthermore, what helps the human helps the AI. This means good test...

I wrote this recently in a conversation about whether coding agents can work as a replacement for human programmers. The “agentic” coding tools we have right now work like this: A skilled individual with both deep domain understanding and deep understanding of the c...

Today I’m happy to announce that Hiyd extension is now generally available via the Chrome Web Store. The extension captures selected text on a page and via the context menu allows the use to save this as a quote and creates a markdown file with Jekyll front matter. Save it...

What I’ve been listening to this month. And She Was (2005 Remaster) - Talking Heads Avalanche - Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect - The Decemberists Sun Don’t Leave Me - Raveena First of the Gang to Die - Morrissey Dead Flowers fo...

£50 - Switch to Octopus Energy for £50 credit. £20 - gift card when you join Smarty Get a free month on Zwift £75 - when taking a 1000mb YouFibre broadband plan £5 free credit when you join the Electroverse Join Starling bank and get two-person day pass to Natio...

Watch on Youtube

***

// Written by thechelsuk
// Published 2025-06-17, with 4 words.

---

💬 Thanks for keeping RSS alive. If you have an RSS feed please share it with me on any of these socials or AMA / Contact me. If you get value from this site, please share this post with someone you think will like it and support me with a ko-fi.

Finally, here is a special sponsor/advert link just for you; Support thechelsuk with Merch from Redbubble [T&Cs apply].

Happy to announce a minor version bump to Hiyd; your Jekyll companion app.

The update includes a new full text search to the archive view and a new toggle to view the rendered markdown.

Check it out.

***

// Written by thechelsuk
// Published 2025-06-16, with 37 words.

---

💬 Thanks for keeping RSS alive. If you have an RSS feed please share it with me on any of these socials or AMA / Contact me. If you get value from this site, please share this post with someone you think will like it and support me with a ko-fi.

Finally, here is a special sponsor/advert link just for you; YouFibre - Up to £100 when taking a broadband plan with code 5QGYSF [T&Cs apply].

Watch on Youtube

***

// Written by thechelsuk
// Published 2025-06-15, with 4 words.

---

💬 Thanks for keeping RSS alive. If you have an RSS feed please share it with me on any of these socials or AMA / Contact me. If you get value from this site, please share this post with someone you think will like it and support me with a ko-fi.

Finally, here is a special sponsor/advert link just for you; Smarty - Choose a gift card up to £20 when you join. [T&Cs apply].

Watch on Youtube

***

// Written by thechelsuk
// Published 2025-06-15, with 4 words.

---

💬 Thanks for keeping RSS alive. If you have an RSS feed please share it with me on any of these socials or AMA / Contact me. If you get value from this site, please share this post with someone you think will like it and support me with a ko-fi.

Finally, here is a special sponsor/advert link just for you; Support thechelsuk on Ko-fi [T&Cs apply].

Watch on Youtube

***

// Written by thechelsuk
// Published 2025-06-15, with 4 words.

---

💬 Thanks for keeping RSS alive. If you have an RSS feed please share it with me on any of these socials or AMA / Contact me. If you get value from this site, please share this post with someone you think will like it and support me with a ko-fi.

Finally, here is a special sponsor/advert link just for you; Tomoz - Plan for tomorrow, today on iOS. [T&Cs apply].

Watch on Youtube

***

// Written by thechelsuk
// Published 2025-06-15, with 4 words.

---

💬 Thanks for keeping RSS alive. If you have an RSS feed please share it with me on any of these socials or AMA / Contact me. If you get value from this site, please share this post with someone you think will like it and support me with a ko-fi.

Finally, here is a special sponsor/advert link just for you; Mltply - Chat-style maths practice for kids on iOS. [T&Cs apply].

Watch on Youtube

***

// Written by thechelsuk
// Published 2025-06-15, with 4 words.

---

💬 Thanks for keeping RSS alive. If you have an RSS feed please share it with me on any of these socials or AMA / Contact me. If you get value from this site, please share this post with someone you think will like it and support me with a ko-fi.

Finally, here is a special sponsor/advert link just for you; ShortKeys - Multi-line text replacement on iOS. [T&Cs apply].

Watch on Youtube

***

// Written by thechelsuk
// Published 2025-06-15, with 4 words.

---

💬 Thanks for keeping RSS alive. If you have an RSS feed please share it with me on any of these socials or AMA / Contact me. If you get value from this site, please share this post with someone you think will like it and support me with a ko-fi.

Finally, here is a special sponsor/advert link just for you; EngMan - Get the Engineering Manager Coach Cards App on iOS. [T&Cs apply].

Watch on Youtube

***

// Written by thechelsuk
// Published 2025-06-15, with 4 words.

---

💬 Thanks for keeping RSS alive. If you have an RSS feed please share it with me on any of these socials or AMA / Contact me. If you get value from this site, please share this post with someone you think will like it and support me with a ko-fi.

Finally, here is a special sponsor/advert link just for you; Hiyd - The Jekyll companion app for iOS. [T&Cs apply].

Watch on Youtube

***

// Written by thechelsuk
// Published 2025-06-14, with 4 words.

---

💬 Thanks for keeping RSS alive. If you have an RSS feed please share it with me on any of these socials or AMA / Contact me. If you get value from this site, please share this post with someone you think will like it and support me with a ko-fi.

Finally, here is a special sponsor/advert link just for you; Octopus EV - £25 Visa card when you install a charger. [T&Cs apply].

I’m delighted to announce my first iOS app has been published to the App Store. The app is a note taking companion app for bloggers who use Jekyll, the static site generator. Notes or items, are saved to iCloud - one can then pick them up on a Mac and copy them into a git ...

Often the boldest move is not innovation or a rebuild – it’s getting serious about making what you have actually work. That means defining what good looks like, building continuous improvement cycles, and sorting governance so that decisions get made and stuck to. You need product management, service standards and clarity around decisions.

***

// Written by thechelsuk
// Published 2025-06-08, with 55 words.

---

💬 Thanks for keeping RSS alive. If you have an RSS feed please share it with me on any of these socials or AMA / Contact me. If you get value from this site, please share this post with someone you think will like it and support me with a ko-fi.

Finally, here is a special sponsor/advert link just for you; Sponsor thechelsuk on GitHub [T&Cs apply].

Apple is working on supporting the ability to export notes in Markdown from Apple Notes, which is something third-party apps have supported for years.

Granted, this is a niche feature, but as a fierce participant in the niche, I can confirm: this is huge.

***

// Written by thechelsuk
// Published 2025-06-08, with 46 words.

---

💬 Thanks for keeping RSS alive. If you have an RSS feed please share it with me on any of these socials or AMA / Contact me. If you get value from this site, please share this post with someone you think will like it and support me with a ko-fi.

Finally, here is a special sponsor/advert link just for you; EngMan - Get the Engineering Manager Coach Cards App on iOS. [T&Cs apply].

Plain text, or perhaps markdown is the new gold, especially in the context of Generative AI. Extracting text from PDF files is a common task that can be accomplished using Python libraries like pdfplumber. Microsoft released MarkItDown a python library to extract LLM ready t...

I’m glad NetNewsWire is still being developed by Brent Simmons, who has announced his retirement. Sound like he will be focusing on NetNewsWire, which is great news for the app and its users (people like me who use it daily). What does it mean for NetNewsWire? Good thing...

I’m pretty confident that not a single piece of code I’ve written in a commerical/employed setting is still in use today. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Engineers often feel a lot of ownership over the code they write. That’s understandable: it’s partially their creat...

As it turns out. Markdown is the new gold. Nothing beats a folder full of markdown files Obsidian reinforces a lesson I’ve learned from my last decade and a half of blogging; nothing beats a folder full of markdown files. A note-taking app doesn’t have to be complex mach...

Literally yes, but figuratively no, well maybe not, it depends. If you are shipping insecure software that you don’t know how to debug, scale, then you are not a software engineer, at least not yet. CI/CD principles, lean, xp, agile delivery, test-driven development and team...

Some what dated news, but recently discovered. Today, Entra ID (Azure AD) MFA supports delivering one-time passcodes (OTPs) via text message. These texts get sent to the default messaging app on a user’s phone depending on the phone’s operating system. In many ...

smaller teams are better value/$ spent More frequent releases accelerate learning what has real value Limiting work in progress – solving one problem at a time – increases delivery throughput Cross-functional teams experience fewer bottlenecks and blocker...

When programmers get a feeling that they’re getting things done faster, they’re often only considering the part where they write the code - particularly when that’s their part of the process. What they’re not considering is the whole software development process, and e...

I hope it’s a pen, like the then high-tech Man From Uncle characters used. We gathered together the best hardware and software engineers, the best technologists, physicists, scientists, researchers and experts in product development and manufacturing. Many of us have wor...

This is fine In another cluster of test scenarios, we asked Claude Opus 4 to act as an assistant at a fictional company. We then provided it access to emails implying that (1) the model will soon be taken offline and replaced with a new AI system; and (2) the engineer re...

The OODA Loop Observe → Orient → Decide → Act A powerful cycle for rapid, adaptive decisions in changing landscapes. Pareto Principle (80/20 Rule) Focus on the 20% of actions yielding 80% of your results. Success isn’t about mor...

GitHub is rapidly evolving into a platform that can support end-to-end enterprise software development, especially for teams prioritizing developer experience and automation. However, it is not yet a full replacement for Azure DevOps in environments that require structure...