Jake Levine

Jake Levine

Building without building

I just spent 48 hours building a new site using a new process (detailed a bit below): you-are-here.space.

The motivations:

  1. I’ve always loved the Show HN projects that people built on a whim over a weekend. So it’s been a bucket list item for me, but I had no muse yet…

  2. I was watching NOVA a few nights ago and learned about how Saturn pulled Jupiter away from the inner solar system. The thought has been brewing in me for a while on just how many things conspired to have everything work out for us to be here. So I was thankful to Saturn…and then on a whim, late at night, I typed this in ChatGPT:

ChatGPT as source control

In my normal use of Chat GPT, I’ve started behaving as if it’s source control when I have code generated. It’s a place I can go back to a point in time if something broke.

It’s not robust, doesn’t have a GUI/CLI specifically for that purpose, is lightyears behind git, but regardless, I find myself using it that way.

Of course I still use and depend on git for anything serious, but it’s fun to noodle new world scenarios.

Talking to myself - there's an app for that

So while walking the other day, I noticied the audio in my headphones got quiet all of a sudden. No incoming calls or butt-pressing any buttons. I was talking out loud to myself. My AirPods thought I was talking to someone else, so they turned down the volume, which is a handy feature. It just never dawned on me that it would also clock how frequently I talk out loud to myself. Turns out that it’s quite a bit. Haha.

My first PCB

Just a couple of days ago, I shipped my first PCB order to JCLPCB. This is a MOMENT. Something that needs to be marked.

My dad has been doing electronics since forever and it always intrigued and yet mystified me. I never understood how it worked. Especially as it related to audio devices. How did little resistors and capacitors make sound? It was always so fascinating, but also just as daunting to undertake learning it. Until recently.

Using ChatGPT for creative purposes

I was having ChatGPT do some anagrams for me on a username I use and I also had it do the same on ‘Nikolai Tesla’. At first, it just generated 10 replies, but easy enough to just ask for 50. That was pretty solid…it didn’t break a sweat however I did get a Creating 50 unique and meaningful combinations from those letters is quite challenging warning. So then, on a whim, I asked it to write a story with only the letters in ‘Nikolai Tesla’ (note, it’s not 100% perfect - while the majority of letters are in the name, a few aren’t, but with lower frequency):

K-2SO copying data from another droid

I just re-watched Rogue One the other day…and besides loving K-2SO (and Alan Tudyk), I noticed something new. When K-2SO is acquiring data from another similar model, the data sync is shown by the eyes blinking a pattern in unison to “communicate” to the audience that one is being copied to the other.

Check it out for yourself:

Pretty cool, huh?

Trouble getting `pod install` to work in React Native

Just make sure you have Xcode installed first. That’s it. :) Also: I’m a jackass. #RTFM

Stop Skynet

Start early, start now.

Say please and thank you to ChatGPT and any other conversational AI.

Don’t be a jackass.

Web skills A+ easter egg

If you have a minute or two, open my personal blog in incognito mode in Chrome. Then using the inspector, run Lighthouse for mobile.

That’s right, fireworks when you get 100 in each category. I’ve never seen that before…maybe I’m doing I’ve been doing it wrong!?

Thanks to the great work on the Hugo Contrast theme by Niklas Buschmann, it happened to me.

Thank you, Niklas!

My working setup

Updated June, 2024

Here’s how I currently do my work, both personal and professional.

  • iPad
  • Mac
    • Terminal with Oh-my-zsh for terminal-ly good looks (and shortcuts)
    • Doom Emacs - I wrote about doom emacs for blogging
    • Roon - Can’t work without music!
    • Visual Studio - replaced TextMate and SublimeText and haven’t looked back; strange for me to say that for a Microsoft product (different than say GitHub, which was an acquisition)
    • 1Password - long-time user
    • Trello - Despite the Atlassian acquisition, this is still my go-to for just a general purpose throw it up and track it. Using the Assista bot for time tracking on tickets I drag into the Doing list - it helps a lot with billable work, but also helps me track where my play time goes.
    • yt-dlp - it’s a secret
    • CyberDuck - connect to anything for remote file access/management
    • Homebrew - I see no reason to leave this hardy package manager - it’s just worked under brutal conditions for years and years.
  • Home network
    • Fiber, it’s the only way to fly
    • Unifi network throughout house; wired (by hand, blood, dust, cobwebs, and pink spackle) and wireless
    • Pi-hole - remove all the craptasic stuff out there, network-wide
    • Tailscale - take my networks with me securely (recent addition so lots to learn)
  • SaaS
    • Cloudflare - it’s the only online service that I don’t have a fear of recommending. Yes, there might be some issues from the centralization of the decentralized web, but right now, that’s not a critical path issue.
    • Hugo - The most performant, flexible, and joyous web development platform. This site and my LLC and Synth company are built with it.

A privacy and security pledge

Update - <2022-10-18 Tue> - I just also found out about The Santa Clara Principles - it’s not exactly what I’m thinking about, but it’s interesting as a model and has input from the EFF, ACLU, and The Brennan Center for what it’s worth.

I’m thinking about building a piece of software…more than that actually. Been designing it for a while now and there are certain values I’m trying to bring to the project. Things to do with what I want and feel is right around privacy, data-ownership, security. Values that I want the software I buy and use to hold as well. It got me thinking that I’d like to sign some kind of pledge of user-goodwill on topics like these.

Blogging from the terminal with doom emacs & hugo on a mac

I’ve been looking to make blogging from org-mode on my mac happen ever since I started using org-mode. Reason being is that while I love learning about all the new frameworks, what I really want is a stupid easy way to write then type a few commands and my writing appear on my site. Now that I’ve repeated the process a few times - installing, configuring, breaking, fixing, breaking again, uninstalling, reinstalling - the way I learn best - I’m happy to share the exact steps I took to get here. These are should be repeatable and simple steps using mostly defaults so there’s less stuff to worry about backing up in case you have to nuke the site from orbit.

Yeah. I did it. I bought the longest domain I could.

Well, most of it anyway - I wanted to buy ahugeevergrowingpulsatingbrainthatrulesfromthecentreoftheultraworld.com, but had to settle for ahugeevergrowingpulsatingbrain.thatrulesfromthecentreoftheultraworld.com.

I learned something in the process: there is an upper limit to the number of characters in a domain name. And not just the domain, but each ‘label’ as they are called, being either subdomain, domain, or top level domain (TLD).

63 characters.

I think I broke half of the domain registrars when trying to buy it.

The move to react native

The ENTIRE reason I initially pursued programming later in my career as a product manager was because I was frustrated with the time it took to get from the abstract concepts written in my verbose requirements documents to actual code that was living and breathing. I initially learned Rails because of the approachability of Ruby and the community and also because of some of the tooling that got messy stuff out of my way so I could get the basics done more rapidly. Progress a few years and I’ve launched an iOS app using Swift…then had hired a contract dev to build the android app. This was my first venture as developer or product into the mobile app world and it was enormously frustrating to have feature disparity between platforms. Inevitably, iOS would have the features before Android because I was at the helm and the Android users didn’t appreciate that. So I started looking for options and I had seen a few things about React Native. I immediately started absorbing as much as I could by reading everything, took a Udemy class, and then embarked on rebuilding my Swift/Java app in React Native. I have a week or two of coding left and it will be in both app stores. Efficient, effective, easy to use, intelligent…it’s fair to say I love React Native and would really welcome coding in it full time. I am using Facebook (login and sharing), Parse Server, (entire data system) Redux, OneSignal for notifications, Ad Mob, Google Analytics, and React Native Router Flux.

Let's build an iOS app

Ok. It’s time for Creatabu to launch an iOS app and we’re trying to figure out the best path considering we’re a team of two and only have one developer, yours truly, who is not familiar with Objective-C the language you use to build native iOS apps.

So…we’re in a pickle…and this isn’t the first time:

^ We’re like, really into pickles. Our 2014 Burning Man Camp – What Would You Do For A Pickle – shout out to the pickles!

My first (and only) Pebble watch face

I was looking for that sometimes watch face when you need a break - and need to be reminded.

github - the time is now - I’d really like to be able to make this for the Apple Watch line. It was the reason I bought the first Apple Watch.

A picture is worth 1000 4 words:

My personal way back machine

Here’s the oldest site that I built that I could find online. I did the graphics and HTML in 1996/97 for prout.com