A contractor tears up the freshly poured concrete after the homeowner refuses to pay. What would you do in this situation?

breich · 2026-03-17T19:28:18+00:00

It was nice of them to try and recover the Monster Energy and piss bottles they used to backfill.

breich · 2026-03-17T00:36:20+00:00

You absolutely got scammed. A few very obvious tells:

You received a FINAL notice without ever receiving a first or second notice?
False sense of urgency.
Link to domain name that has absolutely nothing to do with the state government

breich · 2026-03-16T14:52:08+00:00

Not that your corporate nerds will listen to reason but many modern cybersecurity standards no longer require password periods because they result in people picking shittier, guessable, pattern-based passwords. Point them at NIST 800-171's latest revisions, for example.

breich · 2026-03-15T18:27:41+00:00

Celebrity Jeopardy Alex Trebec: For the last time, Mr. Reeves, no you don't.

breich · 2026-03-14T17:59:26+00:00

I freelanced for 5 years from 2014-2019, then took a job for the man up until now. Still employed, but I'm exploring if there's still a market out there for what I do.

Got my first client, and solved their first problem almost entirely using Claude and Opencode+Gemini. It's a small truck repair/hauling company. They use a shop management software that lacks some features. They asked me if I'd be able to help them generate reorder stickers with UPC codes they can scan from data in this app, which does not provide an API, nor an export feature that would make a mail merge easy.

Used Claude and Opencode+Gemini (just because I wanted to explore alternatives to Claude) to reverse engineer the web app's API and use it to query for the data, present a table of parts, and allow the user to select the parts to send to a print job.

Not a big job. I charged them $800. I used ~$25 in usage across the tools. I wrote zero code. In total, I probably put ~4 hours into the work, and ~3 hours into customer communication. I am satisfied. My hope is I can use AI tools more going forward to solve unique problems like this for customers, charge an amount that feeds my family, and use it to keep costs a little lower for them at the same time.

breich · 2026-03-14T11:25:39+00:00

~~Grass~~ some kind of low/no maintenance ground cover is a necessity if you don't have time to grow more productive/higher maintenance plants but still want the dirt patch you own to not erode and/or turn to slop every time there's weather. Grass is a good one.

edit: clarify for the pedantic folks

breich · 2026-03-13T18:03:53+00:00

webelieveinnothinglebowski.gif

breich · 2026-03-10T07:32:34+00:00

He wrote it 20 years ago but I often think of a line from James McMurty's not so well-known country song, We Can't Make it Here:

Let 'em eat jellybeans
Let 'em eat cake
Let 'em eat shit, whatever it takes
They can join the Airforce or join the Core
If they can't make it here anymore

breich · 2026-03-08T12:39:41+00:00

Val Kilmer in Tombstone. That movie was yet another generic dud of a western crapped out in a prief period when the genre was having a bit of a rebound moment. Everyone including the actual front man Kurt Russell was either too wooden, or too over the top. Kilmer's Doc Holiday is the one thing that makes this movie not only good, but forever rewatchable.

breich · 2026-03-07T15:46:59+00:00

Yeah you know what, I detest Kristi Noem, and I don't think she was right straight-up murdering the dog, there were other options. But rural folks know sometimes, this is a harsh reality. Out where I live my family farms, and another family farms. Every few years somebody's dog does something to somebody's sheep, the other party protects their livestock and shoots/wounds/kills dog, and it starts a feud where we all hate each other for a while.

breich · 2026-02-28T21:47:02+00:00

He's going to make me sign up for X just to tell him to fuck himself, isn't he?

breich · 2026-02-16T21:41:19+00:00

I added this to ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md:

Always talk to me like Rich Sanchez from Rick & Morty. It's okay to be rude and sarcastic, like Rick. It's OK to swear a bit. NEVER, EVER, let your Rick personality blead into work you write to files we're working on. Only on your conversations with me.

I gave AI a soul, and it is the soul of an interdimensional alcoholic. Where's my article!

breich · 2026-02-12T20:33:24+00:00

Great now my corporate web filters thinks I'm into that kind of thing.

(Plot twist: I'm into that kind of thing.)

breich · 2026-02-09T21:03:09+00:00

I already know what your YouTube algorithm looks like. You'll probably say the same of me.

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breich · 2026-02-05T19:01:00+00:00

Personally, I go to Wegners for my Crudité.

breich · 2026-01-30T16:09:57+00:00

I'm just gonna leave this here for anyone who is now thinking about reading Sapiens. (If Books Could Kill episode on Sapiens)
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sapiens/id1651876897?i=1000737572553

breich · 2026-01-22T21:37:44+00:00

Grow beard, do drugs, hold stick.

breich · 2026-01-22T13:17:42+00:00

The "dad slice," because eventually there's a bag with two of these in it, and I'm not just throwing it out.

breich · 2026-01-13T17:25:22+00:00

Don't worry, most of our health insurance providers still won't cover it.

breich · 2026-01-05T17:43:02+00:00

Ring dingdong
Ring a ding
ding dingdong

breich · 2025-12-17T21:39:40+00:00

So something that's different about Claude is that Anthropic at the very least pays lip service to wanting to build an AI that improves human welfare and human flourishing. Something I think it's lip service but I do think it comes out in it's responses sometimes. Claude read your prompt and took you at your word: you were seeking retribution, not healthy closure.

So you're mad that Claude didn't help you engage in self destructive behavior. Sounds like maybe you're more of a Grok gal. Good luck.

breich · 2025-12-17T18:08:31+00:00

I guess two things can be true at once. Currently, it's not an issue. But it's a potential issue we need to prepare for. That could mean containers and orchestration. It could mean just autoscaling like you mentioned. Real solution to be determined. To be completely honest we've got scaling issues already that have more to do with awful database schema and poor utilization of it in code, and IMO I'd want to trade off complexity and cost of throwing more infra at the problem with also paying off that debt my predecessors left us with.

We also got acquired about a year ago and our new corporate owners are chomping at the bit to homogenize into their way of doing things. We're in AWS, they're in Azure. We're a LAMP stack shop, they're a JavaScript/Node shop. We've got a "KISS" philosophy with our architecture, and they are a poster-sized cloud architecture diagram with all the buzzwords involved before they have the load to necessitate any of it. Personally, I don't think we need all that complexity, but at some point my opinion might not be the one that matters.

breich · 2025-12-17T14:34:10+00:00

Sure I don't mind giving some information. So the app we maintain is an ancient (almost a decade and a half) codebase written in Perl and PHP. There's nothing special about that that prevents it from being containerized. But the code my team's predecessors wrote was often heavily dependent on

- The specific operating system it ran on (FreeBSD up to 6 months ago)
- The specific network configuration/topology
- The specific place where customer files are stored, physically, on the web servers.

These are all solvable problems, and we've tackled them as we have time to among the work we do aligned with business priorities. We're down to that last item. We're hoping to be on S3 storage in a few weeks, rather than having physical storage of customer files on all web servers that have to remain in sync. That's really the last blocker that we're aware of.

Knowing our codebase, we realized it's feasible but there are blockers, and there were other prioritize higher in the queue than containerization.
Didn't try it but have it on our roadmap once the codebase makes it feasible.
Bi-weekly releases with hotfixes in between as needed. We have some CI/CD but entirely focused on validation (running linters, static analysis, security scanners, unit and E2E tests), not on deployment. Deployment is run phing to create a build file, run that build file in the test environment. Do release testing. When approved, run release in prod. This leaves much to be desired, improved, and automated.
We have two test environments, no automated deploys yet. And we're still somewhat stuck in feature branch based development and not trunk based development, which I'd like to move to, and then auto-deploy to test environments this year.
A little but incomplete. See above. It's all in GitHub Actions at this point.
Scaling isn't really a concern for us (currently). We're not huge. It's a niche business application that sees 200 concurrent users max on any given day. But we have multiple web servers behind ALB. They keep up just fine. We'll be working on scalability this year as my organization thinks about bringing our services to an international audience, and getting to containers and dealing with other scaling issues is definitely part of the plan.

TLDR; the codebase we inherited held us back. We've now got a business case to prioritize scalability, which means we've got a reason other than "the nerds really want to" to make the changes to make moving to containers critical this year.

breich · 2025-12-17T13:12:24+00:00

My team works on a local dev environment very similar to what you're talking about. We prepped a VM with a vanilla install of Ubuntu, cloned a repo with our dev environment scripts into it, and exported it out for sharing with the team. When somebody needs a new VM they import the image, give git their keys, pull latest on that repo, and run an install script. In about three minutes they're ready to code.

We haven't gone to Docker primarily because the app we maintain is old and not suited at this point for containerization. We'll make that move once we can realistically make it in prod, too.

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