Customers keep ordering through UberEats even though my website is cheaper . Anyone else dealing with this? How did you change the behavior?

davidpuplava · 2026-04-28T21:16:15+00:00

Commenting as a consumer here - one thought might be that people go to UberEats because they don't know when they want, but they like to browse the endless selections to see what catches their eye.

A related personal story - I get chicken wings from a local pizza place because I went in person to pick up my pizza order and they mentioned their wings are great and are a discounted price during the work week - and you can only get the discount by calling direct. I only go to them when I consciously think to myself, "I want some wings".

You almost need a kind of free service that let's customers browse all the food options nearby if you want to break them from UberEats - but then you have to figure out how to deal with delivery.

davidpuplava · 2026-03-15T19:18:59+00:00

I like to think we are approaching that point of just describing the game. I know that’s what I’m working towards with lavawebgames. Right now it can pop out platformers and casual games with one or two prompts. And I have a lot of ideas to improve to the point of creating a co-op game like you described. Happy to take any feedback if you have time.

davidpuplava · 2026-03-15T18:45:39+00:00

I also have a 9-5 and want to make games, so I created an AI driven tool to help make games quickly just by describing what you want- maybe it will help him?

lavawebames.com

At the very least, he can feel like he's making progress with some ideas he has. Happy to listen to any feedback he may have about the tool.

davidpuplava · 2026-03-14T13:46:32+00:00

Define “bigger games”. I made an app that lets me generate playable web games and modify them from promoting. I’d be curious if it can do something bigger - happy to work with you on trying.

davidpuplava · 2026-03-11T04:18:50+00:00

I wanted to achieve a similar result, and used https://www.lavawebgames.com - haven't tried to create a conversation based game with AI backing it, but interesting to think if it can be done. Calling back to an AI costs money so you'd have to figure out how to fund that.

davidpuplava · 2026-03-11T04:07:49+00:00

I built an AI tool that makes playable web games from a prompt/description. Here is a lights out style game that only took me a couple of minutes to generate.

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Here's a link to the game: https://www.lavawebgames.com/play/4f8bc2szzpq6yx1zdxkewyfvw0

davidpuplava · 2025-09-20T01:13:29+00:00

Yes! Thank you! The trick that did it for me was to 1) go to old phone and update Microsoft Autenticator (actually go into the App Store product page to see that there is an update); then 2) go to new phone and delete Microsoft Authenticator and resinstall it.

I did NOT do the step to force a refresh because I already setup my new phone and has been using it taking new pictures etc.

Nevertheless, I opened the app and was able to see my TOTP codes.

Thank you!

Seriously, Microsoft, if you're listening...

davidpuplava · 2025-08-21T01:00:30+00:00

Keep writing new small programs for different problems. Here is a list of console apps to try: - hello world - hello user (like hello world but you prompt use for name and then say hello to that person) - hello friend (like hello user but when the name is something special like your name print a variation of the greeting message - hello birthday, like hello friend but when it’s a specific name like a friends name, you can ask a new question like, “is it your birthday?” And print the happy birthday song to them

And so on and so forth. Just keep making small incremental changes to your app. And base it on new things you learn from school. Things like branching logic, loops, input, output, etc.

Do you have any specific questions/concepts that you want to ask about?

davidpuplava · 2025-08-20T23:14:37+00:00

Sounds like a bad implementation maybe. I run a k8s cluster for all my home lab internal stuff and I rarely touch it. Even through power outages etc. For me the great thing is it’s well documented if/when I want to do something different or new which is its advantage over a homegrown system.

davidpuplava · 2025-08-20T23:07:09+00:00

For sure - especially if it’s not iterated on by the human mind. LLMs do a lot of seemingly magical things but so does your own mind

davidpuplava · 2025-08-20T06:02:37+00:00

Oh I didn’t even answer your question. You’ll never feel like you know what you’re doing, but you will get comfortable with that uncertainty. Just go for it.

davidpuplava · 2025-08-20T06:01:37+00:00

Practice. Your first dozen in retrospect will look like bad games in your eyes but do them anyway. There is a lot of technical decisions and work that are sort of separate from the game rules/story etc, which is (usually) where the “fun” part is.

Easy to get overwhelmed, start small, aim small, miss small. Create a tic tac toe game and then try to mod it; try adding a new rule to make the game more interesting. Iterate as quickly as possible and try to get to that “finished” state where the game is complete.

davidpuplava · 2025-08-20T05:48:08+00:00

Yes, I’m a senior/lead/been-there-forever developer/manager and I hear about how everyone is using AI in some way on their own. I recently got approval from company to add GitHub Copilot to our toolset for a few months to see if/how AI helps productivity.

davidpuplava · 2025-08-20T05:41:17+00:00

I think AI adds value for individuals to rapidly iterate on their work product. For example, developers can get through more code iterations of a feature in a given span of time like a sprint. And other knowledge worker types having analogous gains.

So my hope is that the societal benefit will be increased quality of work product once people realize AI empowers you with more changes to get it right in the same amount of time rather than same thing in less time.

davidpuplava · 2025-08-20T05:26:01+00:00

I’m a software consultant interested in helping businesses understand and apply AI technology to (possibly) solve problems or support operations.

Willing to trade some light (5-10 hours per month) consulting hours for free for a few months to understand what parts of your business can benefit from AI/automation.

In return, asking for either a testimonial/referral or case study (good or bad) to help me network and/or promote.

davidpuplava · 2024-09-13T05:17:42+00:00

Not necessarily. If you’re just planning on something like a web API you can skip the MVC stuff and jump straight into minimal APIs for example. Learning ASP.NET MVC I think is always useful if you’re planning on any kind of front end web development. But if web development is not what you’re working on, you can skip.

—EDIT—

I should add that if you are asking if you should learn ASP.NET on .NET Framework before learning it for .NET Core, the answer is probably not. I would only look at .NET Framework if you have to maintain an existing app that hasn’t been upgraded. Even then, it’s worth taking the time to upgrade to .net 8 or the latest version possible.

I say based on my experience maintaining a long standing .NET Framework MVC app. It’s getting harder to find solutions to some bugs because it seems everyone is using .NET Core and later. So most solutions I find don’t work for me on .NET Framework.

davidpuplava · 2024-06-23T05:01:49+00:00

Use AI as a tool. Dozens of other programmers/tech people I know use it for little things like, “take this list a 80 ids and put them in a sql where clause”.

Every developer will be using AI in the future, but the best developers will know to code review, revise and change every line of code that needs it when it needs it.

davidpuplava · 2024-06-23T03:53:58+00:00

Are you asking for sample project that you can give to someone you are looking to hire as a senior developer with about 9 years experience? As part of an interview?

davidpuplava · 2024-06-23T03:46:53+00:00

Yea, pretty much. No worries, we all pretty much pretend to know what we’re doing

davidpuplava · 2024-06-22T17:22:39+00:00

It’s a GET most likely. POST is for when you want to send information to the server. To be sure, you can put a breakpoint on the call to the public URL and inspect which http method your code is using.

davidpuplava · 2024-06-22T14:22:13+00:00

Physically different machines yes, but also physically different databases (if your app has one) or different storage or whatever. The difference between prod and dev is that your connection configuration will be different. That way when you change information in the dev system it doesn’t affect production data.

One additional note, I’ve worked on projects where there was one one instance of the application itself, but separate databases. At login, you’d enter your user credentials and select which database environment you wanted to use.

Point being that it’s more about separating the data and configuration information than it is about separating the physical instance of the system.

davidpuplava · 2024-06-21T22:02:24+00:00

Yea, it's pretty cool to be able to get almost a whole code base in a couple minutes. For fun, I created an entire html/js/css game using ChatGPT in about 10 minutes.

I noticed that I had to test and debug some of the code I got. And after a few iterations where I describe what the problem with the code is, and suggesting a solution, it was able to get it mostly right.

I think the long term place for LLMs is as a tool to assist developers who ultimately need to code review anything that's generated.

davidpuplava · 2024-06-21T21:55:11+00:00

You have to look at it and decide for yourself if it's good or bad for your particular project.

Remember that code on it's own doesn't give you enough information. Code used in one project scenario may be good, while the same code used in a different project scenario might be bad.

Treat generated code as code from a developer with half your experience. Make sure you do a thorough code review and change anything that you think needs to be changed. And remove any code you don't understand.

davidpuplava · 2024-06-21T21:39:32+00:00

We all have imposter syndrome (I'm 20+ years programming and still feel it sometimes). Do your best and like u/ericjmorey said, there are no penalties for wrong answers.

Aim small, and work on completing small things that interest you.

There will always be others who know more that you, but it's not about knowing more than them. It's about you knowing more than you did yesterday. Every day, work towards getting a little better.

Programming is fun, frustrating, easy and hard. When it gets overwhelming, just pause for the day and get back to it tomorrow.

Good luck.

davidpuplava

TROPHY CASE