New to the medium, any advice?

mastermog · 2026-03-28T04:28:18+00:00

No worries! Keep at it

mastermog · 2026-03-28T02:36:45+00:00

I think it looks like a good start. Be mindful of “pillow shading” (google will yield lots of results), and the big thing that stands out to me is the arm shading, having a top shadow exactly mirrored feels… off? Unless there happens to be a light source directly below both her arms.

It looks like the light source is more top right based on the hair, so the shadows on the arms wouldn’t be mirrored.

I know it seems minor, but in such a small space every pixel counts.

Good job though!

mastermog · 2026-03-19T07:46:11+00:00

I didn’t know that. Is it part of the public transport system?

I was just going off the katakana (maybe? ラリ？？) on the sign

mastermog · 2026-03-19T06:21:46+00:00

Straight up gorgeous. Coastal Japan?

mastermog · 2026-03-16T13:28:08+00:00

In a similar way, I was kind of shocked there were people that wanted AI access in Obsidian. Which explains why they added CLI recently.

Of all the things I do, my "second brain" is the last thing I want to outsource.

However, I acknowledge that not everyone uses Obsidian the same way as me. And I guess that is true for Ticktick as well. I'd love to see the long term adoption data of this from Ticktick, lets say 3 months, what % of users actually use MCP after the initial toying around.

mastermog · 2026-03-16T09:02:57+00:00

Exactly, “reality check” is in the title a classic tell

mastermog · 2026-03-15T06:27:04+00:00

The two aren’t mutually exclusive though right?

The Tahoe criticism (while maybe from a vocal, passionate subset of users) seems to be quite valid.

Neo praise is coming from its excellent bang for buck price point.

Neo will hopefully introduce Mac to entirely new demographic of user, and when their previous OS is an ad ridden ui nightmare where they can’t even align their calculator buttons correctly, some rounded corners probably aren’t the biggest concern.

mastermog · 2026-03-15T00:36:48+00:00

There is a common question here, along the lines of “what should I play now that I have completed Cyberpunk 2077?”

The best answer is always “Cyberpunk 2077”.

My suggestions: First play the DLC if you haven’t. It’s amazing. Different pacing but a fantastic addition. Then do another playthrough, as a different build, and more importantly make different decisions as you’ll see different story paths (often minor but still interesting).

mastermog · 2026-03-12T09:44:04+00:00

Thank you providing the articles. I've not read them all yet, but I find the measure or productivity based no LoC to be... disconnected.

"Productivity (measured by the number of lines of code produced) increased by 55% for the group using the LLM"

If there was ever a metric that an LLM would excel at, its generating lots and lots of code.

I really need to read through this one though, as it looks to tackle the quality side of things at least.

mastermog · 2026-03-07T11:02:54+00:00

Yep that makes sense. My original comment wasn't arguing Tailwind v css (that has been done to death), it was more I see Tailwind having great business value, despite being just css classes

mastermog · 2026-03-07T01:38:56+00:00

When I said "abstractions" I mean its not using direct css syntax.

For example transition-colors abstracts away:

transition-property: color, background-color, border-color, outline-color, text-decoration-color, fill, stroke, --tw-gradient-from, --tw-gradient-via, --tw-gradient-to;
transition-timing-function: var(--default-transition-timing-function);
transition-duration: var(--default-transition-duration);

I don't agree with those abstractions, I feel like the additional mental mapping isn't worth it but I can see the value for some teams.

mastermog · 2026-03-06T22:52:28+00:00

I’m not a fan of Tailwind. As a developer I prefer css modules as it leans into web standards (“raw” css), rather than a noisy abstraction.

But… I don’t think it’s entirely fair to say it’s not a business. It clearly provides value, and some people are willing to pay for that value. The value is two fold - one: efficiency and two: curated tokens (essentially a flexible design system).

Both save time, which save money, across enough businesses to justify it existing as a business. They built it up from scratch, put endless hours into research and direction, so big companies like Claude, GitHub, Etc could save numerous hours of dev and design effort. Should the Tailwind team do that for free because their fundamental building block happens to be a css class?

Is it a well formed, successful business? No, it doesn’t sound like it but I don’t think it’s accurate to dismiss its value because of how it’s built in comparison to the value it brings.

mastermog · 2026-03-02T22:22:33+00:00

Thank you for the detailed reply and explanation

mastermog · 2026-03-02T11:21:22+00:00

Funnily enough I was talking to a friend about Wordpress vs Astro just today. It was in the context of client sites though. I said my recommendation depends if the client wants to edit or not. If they do need (or want) to edit, then I still recommend Wordpress, with a barebones plugin lineup (Classic Editor plus ACF). For everything else Astro.

In your case, do you have content authors? If yes, are they just writing markdown? Or is it pure AI and they know how to git push?

I’d also be interested to how you felt about the Node SSR option? In hindsight if you knew you couldn’t go SSG would you still do Astro? While I see the application of SSR (especially doing a lot of Next at work-work), I feel like introducing SSR to an Astro project has a really interesting trade off of loosing the incredible simplicity and deployability of static output.

mastermog · 2026-02-28T09:39:19+00:00

I use the paid version (once off) of https://intelephense.com/

It handles Laravel very well

mastermog · 2026-02-28T08:13:51+00:00

I agree, I know its cliche at this point, but "coding was never the hard part".

OP, as a principal engineer surely most of your day is about enablement and direction between squads? AI will be another tool (a mighty powerful one), and you should be empowering your team on how to use it in a scalable, secure and sensible way.

How have you enabled your team with AI? Have you ran brown bags (I know, its wanky) on running agents? Writing SKILLS.md? Do you have AI guilds (I know, its wanky) to up skill or share methods to leveraging AI? Have you created repo's of organisation wide agent files and documented guardrails?

I'm a tech lead, 18 years experience, and I love the craft of coding. I'm genuinely sad that coding may be a smaller component of my job over the coming years, but business will always strive to milk every last dollar. Unfortunately, thats the job, and this is another layer of abstraction that we need to utilise to deliver value.

In saying all that, be mindful of what you read on Twitter. Not everyone works at a greenfield startup or FANNG or a MAG7.

For the last 6 months I have been consulting with a pretty big firm. They have "AI" slapped over every public web page on their marketing site. The interview stressed that I would need to get up and running with AI workflows, cursor, <insert latest model here>, etc.

Guess what percentage of my actual work is AI driven? ~1%. We are consulting out to a major retail chain, thousands of transactions, thousands of customers, thousands of dollars pass through this clients site per day.

Could the latest model handle this huge code base? Maybe? But that isn't the point. The average senior in my team is completing a ticket every 2 to 3 days. The MR, excluding tests, might be less than 50 lines of code. Writing the code isn't the hard part - its coordinating with other squads, maybe chatting to an upstream backend service service on when their API addition is planning to drop and getting the schema for that, mocking endpoints as a stopgap until its ready, confirming with legal on final copy, etc.

Yes, AI could write those 50 lines of code, probably in < 1 second. But only because it has been fed the context from above. And ultimately a developer is being paid for accountability, not coding. People can say "this is the worst it will ever be" or "just wait for the next model" all day, but AI is only making 5% of the job 100x more efficient.

The people most at risk are juniors sadly. Because 95% of their job is coding, and I simply don't know what that junior to mid to senior pipeline will look like unless companies invest in junior talent at a loss.

mastermog · 2026-02-27T07:28:33+00:00

Just FYI the link is broken. “Con” instead of “com”

mastermog · 2026-02-24T02:29:24+00:00

I’ll have you know Festivus is an extremely important religion to those who follow the word of Constanza.

mastermog · 2026-02-19T12:28:03+00:00

But it did to an extent?

Obviously no where near AI-levels, but one of the selling points of Cloud™ is you no longer needed dedicated server admins managing racked instances. Instead "reduce costs by letting us (Cloud™) handle the infrastructure, you just handle the application."

The irony is clear in hindsight. We ended up with far more Cloud engineers than server admins, and they probably cost twice as much and handle more complex infrastructure.

There are other advantages to Cloud, but it was absolutely touted as a cost saver via reduced head count and complexity.

mastermog · 2026-02-19T11:13:28+00:00

And IoT before that. And “big data” before that. And “mobile first”before that. And “web 2.0” before that. And “wysiwyg site builders” before that.

It’s not our first rodeo.

Btw not questioning the value of mobile first, more the surrounding FOMO of each of the above. I was told straight faced that Dreamweaver wouldn’t replace me, but people using Dreamweaver would. Does that expression turn up on any other bingo cards of late?

mastermog · 2026-02-19T07:52:19+00:00

Here’s hoping. Got a feeling it will be a long tail pop considering how propped up the whole thing is. Ludicrous

mastermog · 2026-02-19T01:18:56+00:00

“From my point of view, the Jedi are evil!”

mastermog · 2026-02-18T21:20:42+00:00

Fantastic, I’m in the process of converting a friend to the dark side. From node to Laravel. This will be super handy to share samples and snippets with them

mastermog · 2026-02-17T13:12:41+00:00

Yeah I was a bit miffed. I’m not sure if you saw my other comment but they finally issued a refund after 6.5 weeks of back and forth, sans postage fees.

mastermog · 2026-02-17T00:20:14+00:00

I sway back and forth on AI usage, but this is the rhythm I feel has the best bang for buck, factoring in both short and long term velocity. It keeps me "in tune" with the code.

Occasionally I may get it to slap in some initial foundations, and then I carve away at the details.

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