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Every day I’m seeing more and more postings about how AI is eating the world of programming and developers, and you really don’t need to know anything anymore. All you have to do is type and point and click.

Well, as a programmer, maybe you’re thinking I’m being defensive when I say that’s not entirely true. But the way we’re doing programming is changing, and it’s becoming more about wisdom and current knowledge. Which… still isn’t easy.

The Laravel skeleton’s .env.example has a few comments in it, and they all do the same job: commenting out a value you might want to switch to or use later. For example, # DB_HOST=127.0.0.1, # CACHE_PREFIX=, and others.

People have asked for examples of code reviews I’ve done in the past. Back in 2022, I did one for an open source project.

It’s really tough being a famous person.

Or that’s what I’ve heard.

Do you need a non-famous friend? Someone to help you escape from this crazy world who doesn’t care about your circumstances?

Maybe I can help…

I love using Docker’s Compose functionality for our local development. But, even though Docker nicely isolates most of the app code and functionality from my host, there are still some things that bridge this gap.

The plan always sounds good until someone who has been there before speaks up.

That’s what I do. You don’t need more agreement, you need someone who challenges the consensus and group-think.

You need… One Last Check.

I thought it would be funny to joke about a nickname I have had before “Angry Aaron” - so I made a website. It was AngryAaron.com. Basically, you tapped the angry emoji and it was my voice saying ‘no’ or ‘grrr’ increasingly louder and more angry, repeatedly.

That’s it.

But, on my phone, the first tap never started the yelling. It was always the second one (even though the web seemed to work fine). I hated this because it felt like the site was broken.

Now, there probably are better ways to fix this - but I went with a unique way that solves the problem and gives me a UX bonus.

I found this when writing tests for a project, sitting right in the routes/web.php file:

I just released an updated, brand new 1.0 release of my Typesetter library. It’s a library with some helpful wrappers for creating PDFs from markdown. It comes with a CLI and is a Laravel app.

I started to question the work, though. Was this still my hobby? A useful project? Did I understand what I was ‘writing’ anymore? Did I need to do this?

In 2022, I was rebelling against the really clever CTO sites and personal branding.

You don’t want your CTO to be so fancy - you just want the facts. So I created a quick landing page “resume” if you will.