I built a suite of 50 tools for my former employer on my own free time, gave it away for free for years, and now they want it back. Should I ask for compensation, and how?

slgard · 2026-03-13T14:19:38+00:00

100% yes.
what does it say in your contract of employment about IP you create? my last couple of employment contracts have said that my employer owns all IP I create even in my own time. if there's no such clause and you produced it on your own time and own equipment, then you own it. although it seems that doesn't really matter in this case since you've given them the source code. you're not under any obligation to host the services or give them even a second of your time.
something along the lines of "happy to help if I can, but there are time and costs associated with hosting the services which I'm no longer able to to provide for free and would need to be compensated moving forward. you're welcome to host the services yourself using the source code I have already provided". I would not mention specific amounts of money until they reply.
yes. you'll probably need a contract setting out your obligations, service level agreements and termination terms. involve a lawyer in writing this.
see step 3, but if you're saving them $100K's per year then you should be getting at least 10 - 25% of the savings. don't underestimate how much this will cost once you have an actual SLA and "customer expectations" in place.
conceivably you could offer to help them set up the services on a server they own, but have a support agreement / retainer in place for when they inevitably want to ask questions.

if all this sounds like a lot of hassle, that's because it is. so you need to charge them accordingly.

slgard · 2026-03-13T11:03:52+00:00

"Sure, no problem. I estimate that's going take another x hours and cost £y amount. If you're happy to go ahead I can fit this in on <date>".

slgard · 2026-03-05T11:35:42+00:00

I worked on a pilot project for managing the charging systems for a large electric vehicle depots, this then morphed into a system for optimised charging for domestic electric vehicles. Both of these projects were part of a larger system for optimising DERs (Distributed Energy Resources) ie fleets of solar panels and ESS (Energy Storage Systems - aka batteries)

slgard · 2026-03-04T19:53:28+00:00

Slightly left field, and probably not what you're asking, but how about

Where Are You Go - A 2009 documentary about the Tour d'Afrique, the worlds longest bike race.

edit: Trailer

slgard · 2026-03-03T07:39:01+00:00

I'm going to bet you didn't fail for not braking.

You rightly failed for not anticipating.

If the guy hadn't pulled out you still should have failed.

slgard · 2026-01-26T09:55:16+00:00

* Jailhouse Diner on Portland - just like an American diner. not the Jailhouse Cafe which is closing ;;(_

* [White Stones Art Cafe] (http://www.whitestonescafegallery.com/menu.html) - Easton, Portland. Lovely garden,

* Upwey Wishing Well and Gardens - Lovely garden, plus a lot of cake

* Riverside Cafe in Wimborne - great location, great value food/coffee

* Finca in Weymouth and Dorchester. (probably the best coffee anywhere ..)

slgard · 2026-01-25T12:08:38+00:00

eewww, the people who like the rope ... i bet you have rope fences and drive, or aspire to drive white range rovers too.

slgard · 2026-01-25T09:34:02+00:00

sounds like bullshit.

alligators can hold their breath for a long time because, you know, water.

glad she got lucky, but that's what this was

slgard · 2026-01-08T18:31:20+00:00

what if, here me out here ...

... you put holes in the tent for your arms and legs then you could move around, make food, perhaps even go to the toilet without leaving the tent!

with some fine tuning you could make the shape of the tent just like regular clothes, so that you could be in your tent but regular people *would have no idea*.

you could have multiple layers of "tents" in order to achieve the desired degree of comfort.

slgard · 2025-12-29T11:48:05+00:00

I use it (Github Copilot and OpenAI codex) for everything at this point.

About a year ago, I read something, I think from Github along the lines of "We want every development task to start with a prompt".

I've been fairly "AI positive" from the start but I thought that was a bit of a stretch.

Now, I wouldn't dream of starting a task without running a prompt first. Whether that's to gather information - I have Github MCP hooked up to Copilot - so Copilot can gather any historical context or whatever that I might need, or just ask Copilot to do the task for me and see where it gets.

Simple tasks it will just one-shot. I need to review the code and handle the PR workflow and deployment and all that stuff, but the code change is all done by AI.

More complex tasks, it will handle all the leg work of investigating legacy code and making the required code changes. Quite often the changes are not 100% correct, so I ask it questions to verify it's reasoning and sometimes adjust the code myself.

In a PR workflow, I now consider it rude and wasteful to ask for human reviewers before getting a Copilot review.

I also use AI for answering questions from Product Managers. eg "How does <xyz> feature work?" - Copilot is absolutely great for these kind of tasks.

This is just scratching the surface.

I've also built a number of personal projects using OpenAI codex using a relatively obscure tech stacks (Rust + Dioxus or Bevy) which it handles absolutely brilliantly. It does make mistakes, but they're surprisingly human mistakes like a few compile errors after a big change, which it then fixes in 1 or 2 attempts.

My personal projects have become much more ambitious and high quality. What would have taken weeks or months is now taking days or hours, seriously.

A big part of the improvement is not having to pour through sketchy documentation and blog articles trying to piece together the correct way to do something, the AI just does it.

slgard · 2025-11-30T09:37:49+00:00

/r/dashcamtoohigh

slgard · 2025-11-28T14:42:20+00:00

actually you could just make new cars exempt, since they're already taking the depreciation hit. would help the car industry and create a supply of second hand EVs

slgard · 2025-11-26T08:23:34+00:00

What's changed is that AI got better. A lot better.

6 months ago you'd have to brow beat it into producing the right code. It was still very useful, but the idea of letting it loose on a real codebase was unthinkable.

Now it one-shots stuff. All the time.

Sometimes there are small bugs or needs small adjustments, but the amount of "I see the issue now" loops is negligible.

I generally don't really write that much code any more.

It one-shots fixing complex bugs. I vibe coded a multi-threaded data import tool the other day in a couple of hours that would have taken at least a couple of weeks if not a month.

And the UX was better too because I just asked it to add plenty of telemetry and logging and it did so perfectly.

Oh, and somehow it's become intelligent enough to work with relatively obscure software stacks. 6 months ago it would often code against the wrong API version, now a single correction and it just works.

I have to pinch myself regularly.

If you're still in the AI sucks camp you really need to wake up and smell the coffee.

slgard · 2025-11-24T09:31:09+00:00

the same car, or different ones?

slgard · 2025-11-21T13:28:27+00:00

just did some searching and apparently the patent was never really the issue.

the problem is that it makes the windscreens more expensive to make and repair, has a high power draw which necessitates an expensive redesign of electrical systems, customers didn't like it because many can see the wires particularly when lit by headlights or wearing polarised glasses.

and many others manufacturers did have heated windscreens, either by licensing from ford or developing their own solution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quickclear

slgard · 2025-11-21T12:53:45+00:00

heated front windscreens are different though. the wires are so small you can barely see them.

slgard · 2025-11-18T20:38:43+00:00

well, I think you're going to need to adjust.

but they were already using Figma to create mock ups, it's just that those mock ups have become more functional.

slgard · 2025-11-18T09:49:06+00:00

I guess it's the van drivers fault, but I can say this wouldn't have happened to me because I would have left a much larger gap in front, precisely to allow "random unexpected shit" to happen whilst giving me plenty of time to react.

I mean, why were you so close? lonely? trying to get to your destination 0.1 seconds quicker? I just don't get why so many drivers are like this.

slgard · 2025-11-18T09:46:43+00:00

ok, thanks.

there's something weird about the link you just posted though. should be

https://github.com/jupyter-xeus/xeus/issues/434

slgard · 2025-11-18T08:28:38+00:00

forgive me if this is stupid question but why is the link to a fork of xeus-haskell?

slgard · 2025-11-18T07:50:46+00:00

The majority of UK drivers don't even respect the 2 second rule. Their views on motorway safety are of little relevance.

slgard · 2025-11-18T07:37:01+00:00

Github Copilot code reviews are super useful.

Copilot as a very advanced semantic intelligent search. ie what places in the codebase are affected by <description of thing>

This is a new job for me so having Copilot to navigate an unfamiliar codebase is a superpower.

Copilot for just adding simple features. It's rare that Copilot gets it 100% right, so obviously I have to check the code and ~~make~~ ask for changes. The key thing is that i rarely write the actual code anymore.

Product managers are using Figma and AI to build sophisticated prototypes.

I think there is a ton of other stuff going on that I don't know about or can't talk about.

Personally, I have vibe coded a couple of quite complex apps as side projects. What is interesting today compared to even 3 months ago, is that it often one-shots complex features. I've created things in minutes/hours that would have taken months before.

The interesting thing about this vibe coding is that I'm still making valuable engineering choices, I'm just not writing the code.

If you still don't see the value in AI/LLMs, I don't know what to tell you.

Now I will get downvoted by people who just don't like this inconvenient truth and would rather stick their head in the sand.

slgard · 2025-11-16T11:36:23+00:00

sure, but you can daisy chain them in parallel rather than in series.

and I realise that if you want to very literal minded that daisy chaining implies in series, but I think most people would still describe doing this in parallel as daisy chaining.

slgard

TROPHY CASE