Some news I work at Amazon now. And my family and I moved to the Seattle area. But right now I’m in Florida and I’m on military leave for 6 months. Enough about that! Before my move to Florida a couple weeks ago, I had been setting up a “home lab” - in my case, just several containerized servers running on an old laptop. So in my spare time I’ve been working on setting up a remote version of this. You can see the repo here. ...
So I was using ChatGPT in the browser (that’s the only way I use it), and I glanced up and saw a little icon that said “>_ Codex”. Ok, I have a bit of time. Let’s check this out. Within minutes, I had given OpenAI access to my Github, installed the Codex CLI app, and was able to create agents locally. Scary easy. I have been curious (and honestly, a bit horrified as well) about the whole “agentic” thing and I have wanted to try things out, but I hadn’t taken the time because I thought it would require quite a bit of setup and I was also afraid of the agents doing something stupid to my machine (due primarily to mistakes my own permissions or instructions). ...
So I’ve written about my course-manager project on here. I know, it’s a terrible name. I guess I’m not great at marketing. I think I might rename it to “CourseMark” which sounds catchier, right? I already have the domain! Anyway, I digress. This is not an issue with that project per se but rather with my own deployment setup. I’ve been using Digital Ocean Droplets, which is just like Azure VMS or Amazon EC2 instances, they’re cloud virtual machines. ...
I was taking a month-long course where we had to use the school computers instead of our own. I had some down time during breaks and wasn’t able to access my personal laptop, so I decided to try to do things in the cloud. This took me a while because the school’s Microsoft network just happened to block digital ocean and google cloud consoles which I am more familiar with, but fortunately allowed me to access Azure cloud services (weird, right?? Wonder why?). Azure pricing was a bit intimidating but was able to set up the cheapest virtual machine I could find at about $8 a month, more than enough power (1GB RAM) for my purposes. I just wanted to play around in Linux so I could keep learning. I started setting up Vim for Go development and then decided to try out Neovim. Long story short, this led me ultimately to replacing my own setup on my personal machine! I’ve spent the last couple of weeks getting familiar with this IDE and I have to say it’s been a blast. I’m still not as productive as I am with VS Code but maybe I’ll get there soon. ...
Happy Birthday to my Dad, and happy day before birthday to my daughter Yaretzi! We are celebrating her birthday today with a little family party. Music has always been a very big part of my life since I was pretty young. My brother and I took piano lessons (classical music, mainly) from a fantastic lady named Verna Ferrell from the age of 8 to 18, and I also got involved in the school choruses just about every year since middle school. ...
I’ll transferring to Charlotte Engineering Early College for the 2025-2026 school year. I’m excited about the move, but I’m also a little sad because I have really enjoyed working at Phillip O. Berry. The students are awesome, my colleagues are awesome, and the admin is awesome. There is a lot of heart at this school and it will always hold a special place for me. Mr. Johnny Darling and I plan to continue our new podcast, so please watch out for that here Charlotte Tech Talks or on Apple podcasts. ...
Here is the first of what I hope to be many reviews of books, shows and movies. I’m not finished with it yet, but since it’s due back to the library and I can’t renew because of holds, I decided to write my review anyway. This is a serious book about the problems posed by the nascent technologies Artificial Intelligence and Genetic Engineering, and the solutions required. The author lacks nothing in credentials – Mustafa Suleyman is a co-founder of multiple successful Artificial Intelligence companies, including most notably the famous startup DeepMind acquired by Google in 2016. Google’s description suffices here: ...
This is where I log progress on my Course Manager web application