Building the things that nobody is asking for
I'm Olaf Alders. I write software for the web. I'm a White Camel Award winner. Currently building My Mind is Racing — every run, swim, ride and race — all in one calendar.
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What's Idiomatic?
I find that Claude will quite happily come up with solutions to whatever problem I’m trying to solve without necessarily going with the obvious choice. I like to ask “what’s idiomatic?” as a way to reframe the problem and prioritize solutions. I’ve found over the past few months that this …
Logging in to GitHub CLI on a Headless VM
I use gh countless times throughout the day, and occasionally I need to log in or re-authenticate from some VM that doesn’t have a GUI. I run gh auth login and, as part of the flow, I inevitably end up with lynx having been fired up. As much as I love lynx, this is kind of annoying. What I really want is …
Publish-Only
I’ve had code reviews from people who thought it was some sort of a flex to go to great lengths to find any kind of an issue in a pull request. The same types are on social media. Depending on where I’m sharing something, I may treat it as a publish-only space. If communication feels like a fool’s …
Did You Mean Deprecated?
Occasionally I see a function or even an entire library marked as “depreciated”. If the code is something finance-related, that may make sense, but if this is not about finance, chances are the author meant to say “deprecated”. No spell checker can help you here.
Haiku 5.5: Cheaper by the Token
In a previous post I talked about using Haiku as a workhorse model to extract sports events out of HTML. Since I saw Haiku 5.5 available today, I decided to have Claude give it a spin on a few event pages and do some before/after analysis. The TL;DR is that 5.5 is faster and cheaper.
Hosting iCal via GitHub Gists
I’ve been using Claude to help organize my swim/bike/run schedule. I want Claude to be able to update the iCal file and I want it hosted somewhere that I don’t need to think too much about. It turns out that GitHub gists are handy for this. If I alter the plan, Claude updates it and the changes sync to my …