David Jarman's Blog

Removing Postgres and storing posts as Markdown files

2026-04-07T05:17:21.5690337+00:00

Now that Heroku is on the deprecation path, I've been looking to move this blog to another provider. One thing I quickly realized is that managed SQL servers are usually not this cheap. I'm currently paying $5 a month for the cheapest tier but I haven't seen another provider with that good of a price point. This got me thinking, why use SQL at all for this simple site? Why not just store posts as markdown with YAML frontmatter?

I've been wanting to try out the acclaimed superpowers plugin for claude code, and this was just the right feature to use it on. Did a long brainstorm session with the agent to flesh out the idea, then using the subagent-driven development method, had Claude implement it. A bunch of subagents got to work and had the whole thing working end-to-end pretty quickly. One thing I forgot to flesh out was the replacement of my custom image-upload JS from my old WYSIWYG editor, trix. We replaced it with EasyMDE and all I had to do was point it at my image upload endpoint and change a bit of formatting on the server side.

I'm very impressed with superpowers. I paired it with Simon Willison's Rodney CLI so the agents could test out their changes and "see" the actual impact of their code in a headless browser. I now have much less code running on the blog and no Postgres dependency, so I should be free to switch to another provider, such as fly.io and hopefully halve my hosting cost.

Claude Code PowerShell tool

2026-03-26T17:52:44.9635990+00:00

You can now opt-in to a new built-in PowerShell tool in Claude Code as of v2.1.84 by setting the CLAUDE_CODE_USE_POWERSHELL_TOOL environment variable.

Until this release, Claude Code on Windows would use Git Bash to run commands, which has caused some weird issues for me in the past, such as running the roslyn-language-server dotnet tool, because the entrypoint is a .cmd file which can't be run in a git bash shell.

Now, Claude Code will see an additional tool called "PowerShell"

  Built-in Tools

  - Read — Read files from the filesystem
  - Write — Write/create files
  - Edit — Make exact string replacements in files
  - Bash — Execute shell commands
  - Glob — Find files by pattern
  - Grep — Search file contents with regex
  - Agent — Launch specialized subagents
  - Skill — Invoke user-defined skills
  - ToolSearch — Fetch schemas for deferred tools
  - PowerShell — Execute PowerShell commands

It doesn't replace the Bash tool, it just adds PowerShell, so you may find that the agent defaults to using Bash for most things unless you ask it to use PowerShell explicitly.

You can also add { "defaultShell": "powershell" } to your settings.json file to make !commands run in PowerShell. This means you can now run cmdlets directly. For example: ! Write-Host "Hello" now works.

We are the art by Brandon Sanderson

2026-02-03T04:44:20.0876350+00:00

Brandon Sanderson offers his view on why AI art is not art. I highly recommend watching the whole video, it’s very entertaining and he makes a lot of good points from the perspective of those who make art.

I’m more of a consumer than a creator (although I do play guitar which scratches the itch), and my view on art and AI is that what makes art valuable to me is the context in which the art is made. It’s why I can hear the same song played by two different musicians and one version moves you more than another.

My example of this is listening to Townes Van Zandt play covers of songs, and they hit different. Knowing who he was as a person and the struggles he had throughout life really change how you experience a song. The pain is something you can hear in a raspy voice that is the result of years of smoking and hard living.

To echo, but slightly modify, Brandon’s point here, no matter how good AI gets at making art, it won’t have the same impact on me as a consumer because it’s completely void of any context that would give it meaning.

New blog feature: paging

2026-02-01T04:20:55.4425830+00:00

When scrolling to the bottom of the home page, you now should see an "older posts" button which will take you to the next page of posts. This feature has been on my TODO list since day 1 and am happy it's finally implemented. It's much easier now that all posts are cached in memory in the blog, so I can just use LINQ statements to "Skip" and "Take" over the full post collection to emulate paging.

Get notifications from Claude Code on Windows with WSL

2026-01-09T23:36:56.4094330+00:00

I've been looking for a way to get notified when Claude Code needs my input or is finished. Big shout out to u/Ok-Engineering2612 on Reddit for this post: WSL Toast Notifications with Hooks in Claude Code : r/ClaudeAI. I had been trying to do the same thing with BurntToast but I forget the way WSL interops with Windows.

The settings from the Reddit thread did need a little tweaking ($PAYLOAD is no longer supported and now Claude Code sends the JSON structure via stdin). Here's my change to the command:

 "command": "input=$(cat) && powershell.exe -NoProfile -Command \"Import-Module BurntToast; New-BurntToastNotification -Text 'Claude Code Notification', '$(echo \"$input\" | jq -r '.message')'\""

Here is the full documentation for hooks: Hooks reference

File Pilot - Fast file explorer for Windows

2026-01-08T15:06:20.7990520+00:00

It’s 2026 and you can buy a lightweight, super fast file explorer for windows for $250. I kind of love it.

The price obviously seems really high for a file explorer, but apparently it’s taken the developer 3 years to get to this point. You can also pay $50 but that only gets you a years worth of updates.

This project has got me thinking about an alternate reality where you have to pay for basic features of the OS. What if each program like notepad, paint, or task manager were priced this way? Or worse you had to pay a subscription! I’m actually shocked we didn’t end up in this world. Thankfully nerds write software for the love of the game and give it away. This puts downward pressure on the bugs corps to not nickel and dime software. All that said, I’m happy the file pilot dev values their own work and has priced this tool accordingly. If nothing else, I think it shows the windows team how software should run (fast) with few dependencies.

Setting up a dotnet dev environment with WSL and Ubuntu 24.04

2026-01-06T17:32:13.2976590+00:00

I just knew 2026 was going to start off this way... A complicated setup to do something that should be simple.

Ok, so you want to do some .NET dev work with WSL? Better not choose Ubuntu 24.04 as your distro. I guess this version doesn't ship with some important packages that are needed to make some interop work between Windows and Linux. Anyways, let's get to the steps!

Configure Git for authentication with Azure DevOps

Make sure you have installed Git For Windows on your host machine. Your git installed in Linux will need to use the credential manager in Windows.
Configure the credential helper: git config --global credential.helper "/mnt/c/Program\ Files/Git/mingw64/bin/git-credential-manager.exe"
Configure using HTTP: git config --global credential.https://dev.azure.com.useHttpPath true
Clone a repo hosted in Azure DevOps

Install Dotnet

Install dotnet: wget https://dot.net/v1/dotnet-install.sh -O dotnet-install.sh && chmod +x ./dotnet-install.sh && ./dotnet-install.sh --jsonfile global.json
Edit ~/.bashrc to add dotnet to the PATH

export DOTNET_ROOT=$HOME/.dotnet
export PATH=$PATH:$DOTNET_ROOT:$DOTNET_ROOT/tools

Configure dotnet for authentication with Azure DevOps

Install Artifacts CredProvider: wget -qO- https://aka.ms/install-artifacts-credprovider.sh | bash
Set environment variable in ~/.bashrc to force a dialog to popup for authentication so you don't end up using Device Flow (which some tenants, like mine, disallow)

export NUGET_CREDENTIALPROVIDER_FORCE_CANSHOWDIALOG_TO=true

Install packages that allow the browser to be opened from MSALThis part is crucial. When you run dotnet restore --interactive, MSAL will want to open your system's browser so you can use OAuth to sign in and provide credentials for your Azure DevOps instance. Install these packages, which no longer ship with Ubuntu:

apt update
apt install xdg-utils
apt install wslu

wslu is a discontinued project that consisted of utilities for WSL and xdg-open is a program that will open the system's browser.

Edit: If WSL interop stops workingYou may need to add a WSL interop config (source)

sudo vim /usr/lib/binfmt.d/WSLInterop.conf
Add this line:
:WSLInterop:M::MZ::/init:PF

Then, restart systemd-binfmt

sudo systemctl restart systemd-binfmt

Final step

dotnet restore --interactive

This should open your browser and you can sign in and restore packages! This only took me a full morning to figure out :(

Microsoft Loves Linux - Microsoft Windows Server Blog

GIFs!

2026-01-05T06:28:54.6433640+00:00

I added GIF support today. And now that I have to go back to work tomorrow, I’ll be using this one multiple times a day again

LLMs - unexpected side effects

2026-01-04T16:25:27.1822590+00:00

+1 to what Simon is saying. I’ve been able to do a lot more on side projects now especially as a busy parent. I will kick off a prompt on Claude code (on my phone sometimes with Claude code web) and then go back to playing with my daughter or cooking or dishes. I can prototype ideas I have and look at the results whenever I have time. It’s really made me fall in love with programming again! I just wish I could find a better workflow for it at work. I’m struggling to get out of the “small toy projects” phase and into using it on larger projects. Probably less of a me problem and more of a tech / organization problem.

Splitting MKV files by chapter using ffmpeg

2025-12-31T04:26:21.6286170+00:00

Created a small PowerShell scripts to split up MKV files by chapters. I wanted to avoid downloading yet another tool (handbrake or MKVToolNix) and I like the idea that I can use ffmpeg to do everything. For context, I have a DVD of Weird Al's ultimate music video collection that I got in middle school that I want available in Plex. I used MakeMKV to rip the DVD but all the music videos are in a single file, separated by chapters.

Yoto Player Image Converter

2025-12-26T17:59:55.7703320+00:00

Santa brought my daughter a Yoto player so she can choose the music she listens to. The music is linked to cards that you insert to the player. The cards don't hold any actual data are instead just an NFC chip that tells the player what music and artwork to download and play. It's a clever little device and I really like it so far. Another great feature is that you can create custom cards from MP3s and your own pixel artwork.

My daughter is obsessed with Marty Robbins "Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs". It's a really great album that we listen to on vinyl all the time. So my first task on Christmas was to load a custom card with the album and make some custom artwork. I won't go into detail on how I did the MP3s, but for the background image, I decided to vibe code a tool to take an image and downscale it to a 16x16 pixel png file. I used Claude Code to create the tool and had to go through quite a few iterations to work the bugs out of the crop selection tool.

Anyways, here is the final result showing good ol' Marty going for his "Big Iron" on the Yoto!

Aspire 13.1

2025-12-18T06:27:46.6208460+00:00

Another minor release from the Aspire team. I've updated the blog to use it, which you can see here: https://github.com/david-jarman/link-blog/pull/8

Here's the main highlight for me:

Automatic instance deletion - I'm always running multiple shell instances and often I'll forget I already had aspire running somewhere else. This new feature will let me run aspire again from anywhere and stop the other instance instead of getting an error!

FYI: Automatically apply EF core migrations in Aspire

2025-12-18T05:58:27.4649320+00:00

If you are using Aspire and EF core to manage the schema of your database, this documentation is a great starting place to make the two work together.

The core concept is that you add a worker service that is dedicated to running migrations, creating the initial database, and seeding data to the database. Essentially any operation that should be performed before the actual web app starts up. I implemented this in the blog this evening with the help of Claude Code while I watched Twin Peaks.

One prerequisite was that I had to move my DbContext and Entity classes to a shared library so that the web app and worker services could both access them. I had actually tried to do this when I first created the blog but ran into issues and decided to simplify the design. I first told Claude to separate out the database entities, migrations, and contexts to a separate project. I was surprised how long this actually took. But in the end, something like 20+ files were touched, but all tests passed and the changes looked good.

Next, I started a new chat with Claude (/new command), and gave it the same link provided in this post.

Follow the instructions at the following url to automatically apply migrations when running locally: https://aspire.dev/integrations/databases/efcore/migrations/

It then proceeded to one-shot the changes and everything just worked. Here are the full changes: https://github.com/david-jarman/link-blog/pull/7

FYI: dotnet-outdated

2025-12-17T04:08:04.2984970+00:00

I hate having to update package dependencies in projects. Fortunately there is a handy dotnet tool that will report and update packages that are out of date. I used this to update all the packages in the link-blog source code this evening and was pleasantly surprised it just worked. Only issue I found was that because I create a msbuild property to store the OpenTelemetry version (there are three OTel packages with the same version), the tool updated the PackageVersions directly instead of just updating the property. Not a big deal, and I would have been shocked if it was able to handle a corner case like that.

Now I need to see if I can get this to run as a daily CI task.

Music theory - Interval trainer

2025-12-14T04:08:55.6939740+00:00

Over the past few months, I have been getting back into playing guitar after a fairly long hiatus. I even started taking guitar lessons. My practice has involved playing a lot of bluegrass fiddle tunes and learning carter-style arrangements of old country and bluegrass songs.

Playing bluegrass with others involves playing solos, or "taking breaks". This just means improvising over the melody of the song. As I've been inching closer toward working on my own improvisational skills, I've realized that I don't have as much intuition about what each interval in the chromatic scale truly sounds like. I want to get to the point where I can listen to a song and recognize when the 4th chord is played vs the 5th or in a break when someone adds in a flat 5.

To help myself train my ear to recognize each interval, I vibe coded a tool using Claude code. The page has two main parts: play each interval at your own pace and a quiz that will play intervals at random and you have to choose the correct one. I also added some descriptions to the intervals to help myself think about what those intervals feel like. There is also a toggle to show the "blue notes".

This is one part of my journey to being able to both improvise better but also transcribe music faster.

Quoting David Fowler

2025-11-12T16:57:28.2645220+00:00

13 is bigger than 10 and less than 14 and is a prime number. The versioning scheme signifies a break away from .NET versioning and a direction change in the product to be evergreen (latest version is what matters) and going polyglot

David Fowler

.NET 10 release

2025-11-12T06:55:54.7400730+00:00

Just upgraded the blog to .NET 10 and wanted to quickly jot down my notes before calling it a night.

First, I was prompted to do this because I saw Heroku had a blog post about supporting .NET 10: https://www.heroku.com/blog/support-for-dotnet-10-lts-what-developers-need-know/. I'm glad they were proactive about supporting it on day 1, but I also don't love that I have to trust that my hosting provider will add the support.

The bulk of the work for upgrading was figuring out where I have references to .NET 9 and replacing them, and then upgrading my Nuget packages. I also upgraded to Aspire 13 (not sure why they went from 9->13 version).

I only ran into one deprecated API (KnownNetworks in my forwarding middleware), but that was an easy fix (just use the new KnownIPNetworks property instead).

Seems like everything is still working. Hoping to dive more into the details of .NET 10 the next couple of weeks and give the blog some more love and updates. Maybe even add a search feature and proper paging for posts.

Dealing with developers block

2025-08-23T17:39:29.3046430+00:00

This post contains stories I can very much relate with. I use a lot of the mentioned strategies like prototyping as a learning mechanism, but still haven’t totally cracked the code on how to get unstuck other than time and random inspiration.

I think getting randomized is a huge source of demotivation for me and that’s not something you can always control. Best thing to do is block off your calendar and mute messages and emails from popping up, and checking those on an hourly basis. But also getting a random task to go learn about something might mean I lose all motivation for the current task and will slow down its completion by 10x or more.

New subdomain for vibe-coded hacks

2025-07-18T16:56:45.0744390+00:00

I've created a subdomain for this blog to host tools that I vibe code so I can access them anywhere and share them with others. It's built using GitHub Pages and Jekyll.

Online text to diagram tools

2025-05-24T03:31:09.8630470+00:00

A comprehensive list of various text to diagram tools

I love a good curated list. Next time I need to create a diagram, I’m going to look here.