Mike Cartmell’s blog

AI is going through a new phase at the moment. The initial wave of hype and fear is starting to settle into a more grounded, honest evaluation of AI: how will it impact the software industry? Does the value justify the cost? How can we bridge the gap between our existing workflows and the alluring promise of flashy demos and vibe coding? It’s been a wild ride for GenAI, but for me personally it’s gone a bit like this: big initial enthusiasm, soured as usual by big-tech involvement and marketing hype. My decision to return to work was driven partly by the risk of not just my skills but my entire profession becoming obsolete - a desire to remain employed while I’m still employable. That’s still a possibility, but I’ve since taken a more optimistic outlook: AI is going to change software development, not make it obsolete, and has the potential to improve our productivity and capability in significant ways. It’s still very early in terms of understanding how to leverage AI to amplify human ability, and software engineers have an excellent opportunity now to build skills that will be lucrative in future. ...

Browsing the web sucks these days. Wait! I’m not about to go on some nostalgia trip. It was pretty bad in the early days too. Take a wrong turn and you’d find your screen filled with infinite JavaScript popups. At least those are gone now. Now there’s a few problems as I see it. First, there’s just so much AI slop that it’s impossible to avoid. Frequently I’ll search for something and find that the first result is completely AI generated. This isn’t an anti-AI rant either, but this low effort, low quality garbage makes me sick. Next there’s the cookie popups, paywalls and ads. OK, ads you can still kind of solve with browser plugins or DNS blacklists, but it’s not the best. Then there’s the fact that so much of the web is centralised and controlled by tech megacorps and their walled gardens, with two main goals: to keep you on their site and to track you, and they’ll employ all kinds of dark patterns to do this. ...

I do quite a lot of coding and general dabbling with computer stuff in my spare time. By spare time, I of course mean when I decide to sacrifice my sleep by staying up later than I should after the kids are asleep. Here’s what I use: Workstation: Macbook Air, Windows desktop PC (with WSL) Server hardware: 3 mini PCs. Prefer Beelink. Server software: Kubernetes (k3s) cluster, using Traefik ingress behind an OpenWRT router IDE: Nvim or VSCode Backend: Go (backend services) or Ruby (web apps) Frontend: Ruby on Rails + Hotwire Mobile: Flutter Gamedev: Defold. Previously Pico-8 / Unity

I recently dumped Spotify in favour of my own music collection sourced from Bandcamp and my CD collection. I don’t miss Spotify at all - it’s a lot more rewarding and fun to discover bands on my own instead. Also, I find myself avoiding AI content where possible now. I’ll often add ‘reddit’ on the end of search queries because it’s more reliable than the default results which are littered with AI slop. ...

I recently upgraded my home internet connection from 1 to 10gbps. The only problem was, I didn’t have any devices that supported it. My router, switches and all but one other device were all 1gbps or lower. Of course, there’s little practical need for 10gbps considering that far exceeds regular hard disk speeds but still, I felt this would a good excuse to upgrade my home network. So I did. ...