LinkBlog

February 2025

Claude Code Initial Impressions

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Claude Code Announcement

Claude announced a new hybrid reasoning model today. That's a great idea to have a singular model for both reasoning and quick responses.

What I'm more interested in is their new Claude Code tool. It's an interactive CLI that is similar to GitHub Copilot or Cursor, but only runs in your terminal as of now. Here is the link for setting it up: https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/agents-and-tools/claude-code/overview

I was hoping that this tool would just use my existing Claude plan, but no, of course you actually pay for the tokens it uses. I'm sure this was a very conscious decision, as this tool uses A LOT of tokens right now. I mean, it's breathtaking. The first thing I did was load it up on my link blog codebase, and ran the /init command to generate a readme file for the codebase. I immediately ran the /cost command to see how much that operation costed. Thirty cents. That may not sound like much, but for as small as my codebase is, I was expecting that to only be a few cents. I then gave it a very specific task to add validation to my admin post authoring form. I gave it a fair bit of instruction, as the docs recommends treating the tool like a software engineer that you would delegate a task to. So I gave it hints as to how to find validation rules and all that. I then sent it off. It ran for something like 2 minutes making the change. It prompted me for permission to perform tool actions (e.g. run some bash commands, run build, etc). After a total of 10 minutes of use, I was up to $1.50 in spend, the code did not build, and I realized that the tool call to build the code was broken. Edit: It turns out powershell is not officially supported yet. You must use bash or zsh to launch claude.

I'm still excited about this tool and will keep playing around with it. I'll probably have to reload my anthropic wallet with more credits soon as it is expensive, but so far it seems like a really cool concept, and I hope they keep improving it and driving down the cost.
Tags: llms, claude, ai
# / 2025 / 02 / 24

"Vendoring"

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Vendoring

“Vendoring” software is a technique where you copy the source of another project directly into your own project.
I love this idea, so many times you need to debug into your dependencies to figure out an issue or why things aren't working as you expected.

I mainly develop in C# and .NET and am fortunate to work at Microsoft, so I've done this many times in the past where I grab the source for a dependency, copy it into my code, update the references, and start debugging. This is always a temporary step. I don't actually check in the dependent code. I don't do it that often anymore, as you can enable debug options to disable "just my code" and if your dependencies publish symbols (most do in my experience), you can just F11 and step into library code from Nuget packages.

In the future, I may take up the vendoring approach for web frontends, where licenses allow. If nothing else, it gives me peace of mind that the dependency won't just disappear from the CDN.
Tags: programming, dependencies
# / 2025 / 02 / 24

Now on Bluesky @davidjarman.net

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David Jarman (@davidjarman.net) - Bluesky

You can now find me on Bluesky with an updated handle. My interest in social media has been pretty low in the last few months, but I do find it fun linking myself all over the internet. 
Tags: bluesky
# / 2025 / 02 / 23

Mastodon Comments on Blog?

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Mastodon Comments

I don't actually use Mastodon anymore, but am tempted to try this out. It would be cool to have comments on the blog, even if just for the process of going through the motions and gaining a bit deeper understanding of ActivityPub. 

This has the potential to become a rabbit hole for me though, as I'm sure I'll have to set up my own server and all that entails. I've been enjoying Heroku as a hosting platform so I bet it won't be too bad to set up (famous last words).
Tags: mastodon
# / 2025 / 02 / 23

Brown Rice

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Fell in love with brown rice today.. It tastes so good, is much healthier.. Why have I avoided it my whole life? Going forward I think it will become my main driver.

Only con I can think of is it does take a while longer to cook. 
Tags: pontificating, food
# / 2025 / 02 / 22

Adding the Trix editor to my Blazor SSR site

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Trix: Rich Editor

Reinventing a blog website is so fun

I've been raw-dogging these posts thus far, manually typing HTML elements into a raw textarea in my admin page so I get something that looks halfway decent.

I decided it was time to upgrade my post editing experience. I was completely unaware of the term WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get), but figured that embedding a rich-text editor into a website must be a very solved problem at this point. So I asked ChatGPT (first 4o, then o3-mini, then o1-pro) for advice on what I should do for this blog. I looked at a few options first, but so many projects are licensed under GPL2 or have weird pricing models. I needed the most bare-bones simple text editor that's totally free to use. That's when I found Trix.

I'm really liking is so far. I was able to integrate it into my Blazor admin page in about 5 minutes, including time figuring out how to make sure the binding of the content gets set up correctly. Here is the commit that shows the integration.

In my testing, it's covered 90% of my use cases for styling in my writing. I think my only grip so far is that you can only insert an h1 heading. Probably not a huge deal, and I may be able to play around with Trix a bit more and figure out how to add a custom toolbar action to insert an h2 heading instead. Or maybe I can just style the h1 in the posts class to be a bit smaller. We'll see.

I have lots of other fun things I want to do with this blog, so it may fall by the way side. I also added an Atom feed to the site today, served at https://davidjarman.net/atom/all.
Tags: colophon, trix
# / 2025 / 02 / 22

My week in music

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Moanin’ The Blues

I reached a major life milestone this week: I fell in love with Hank Williams. This is how I know I’m getting old. The music is timeless though.

Other notable artists this week: Ethel Cain and Kendrick Lamar. I need to find some new music asap.

Tags: music
# / 2025 / 02 / 21

Show me the source

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Website source code

I made the repo for this website public. I’ll share more details about the build process once the site is further along, but dropping the link here as I didn’t have anything else to post for the day 🤦‍♂️
Tags: webdev, meta
# / 2025 / 02 / 20

Short-circuiting to get back on track

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Problem: Sometimes I start out my day at work not feeling it. Sometimes that feeling lasts all day and my productivity suffers.

Solution:Find ways to short-circuit those feelings. This requires introspection, which can be very difficult to do when you aren't feeling it. But sometimes, something happens in your day that you didn't expect, and it helps you short-circuit and get back on track.

The number one thing for me that helps me get back on track is talking to people. Find someone to have a conversation with, ideally someone who gives you energy and can make you laugh. Laughter and lively discussion can turn almost any bad day around for me. Find the people that give you joy, and give them a call. It's a better use of time than just sitting there, and when you are done, you may just have a good day.

Be that person that gives others joy and energy on the days you are feeling it. Call your friends and family on good days, not just the bad ones.

Tags: dopamine, advice-to-myself
# / 2025 / 02 / 19

A Place to Call Home

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Hey, my name is David Jarman.

// Intent

I'm starting this blog to create a space of my own on the web. I have a wide array of interests and do not plan to focus this blog on any one particular topic. We'll see where this leads. The goal is not to build a following, be an "influencer" or "thought leader". I'd almost prefer if nobody reads this to be honest. The goal is only to practice and improve my writing skills. I will not use AI to write these posts, as that would go against the goal. I have no qualms with using AI and in fact use it all the time, but I will not improve my writing by having an LLM produce these posts for me.

// Interests

I have a wide variety of interests, and have been known to say that hobbies are my hobby. I love to try new things. There is nothing better than trying something new and seeing huge personal improvements. This blog is a good example, I've had a lot of fun writing the code for this website. The problem is that I also can lose interest quickly, but the following have been lifelong hobbies of mine:

Riding bikes (all types of bikes), coding (wrote my first program in BASIC on a TI-89 in 2005), and music (playing and listening).

Some hobbies have come and gone, such as beer brewing, running, cooking, and game dev, but each one has brought me valuable knowledge that I'm grateful for. If you ask anyone in my family, the apple doesn't fall from the tree. We once counted how many hobbies my dad has had over the years, I forget the exact number but it was over 20. Hobbies are my hobbies.

// Where you can find me

I don't post much anywhere else, but maybe that will change with this blog.

GitHub
Threads
LinkedIn
Tags: intro, hobbies
# / 2025 / 02 / 18
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