Reading List

The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.

Educational Products: Month 4

Highlights

  • I’m having doubts about sitting out the AI revolution.
  • I should prove to myself that customers are willing to buy my book before investing more time into it.
  • I’m probably the last person on the planet to discover that RSS is a great way to read blogs.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

Install NixOS on a Free Oracle Cloud VM

Oracle is not a very popular cloud hosting service, but they have an unusually attractive free tier offering. You can run the following two VMs for free 24/7:

  • 4 CPU / 24 GB RAM Ampere A1 ARM VM
  • 1 CPU / 1 GB RAM AMD CPU

The AMD one is not that exciting, but a 4-CPU / 24 GB system is more powerful than you’ll find in the free tier of any other cloud vendor.

My Seventh Year as a Bootstrapped Founder

Seven years ago, I quit my job as a developer at Google to create my own bootstrapped software company. Every year, I post an update about how that’s going and what my life is like as an indie founder.

I sold my company

My most significant professional development of the last year is that I sold TinyPilot, the company I founded in 2020.

My wife and I wanted to start a family, and I didn’t think I could be the sole manager of a seven-person company and a good father to a newborn. I found a buyer whose vision for the company aligned with mine, and we completed the sale in April 2024.

The Cline AI Assistant is Mesmerizing

I tried out the Cline AI assistant yesterday, and then I went into a trance for five hours where I couldn’t do anything but stare transfixed at Cline fixing bugs for me.

As a professional developer, it was both enchanting and terrifying. It’s enchanting that AI has reached this level of proficiency. It’s terrifying for the same reason, as I’m not sure what role I’ll serve in a world where AI can write code better and faster than I can.

How to Resolve Local Hostnames in OPNSense

My router runs OPNSense Business. I like having an open-source router, but I have a few gripes with it.

My biggest issue is that, by default, OPNsense can’t resolve hostnames on my local network.

Why can’t OPNsense resolve local hostnames?

For every other router I’ve owned in my life, if there’s a computer on my network named foo123 and I run ping foo123 from my main desktop, then everything just works. My desktop successfully pings foo123.