introducing "Puckish" - when it's time to grow up. but just a little.

So, confession time.  (This is one of those things I'm not going to shout from LinkedIn... like, my decades long habit of coding webapp solutions for my own problems and community projects really does make me a much stronger UI/UX engineer, but the gap between Enterprise toolsets and workflow and what I still find most expedient for side projects has gotten enormous.)

There's a through line to my current side project development style that goes all the way back to "throw index.html into your academic account's ~/public_html folder". 

For too long I've been using a "gonzo / cave-man / script-kiddy " deployment style, everything edited in php files right in place. Even when I used sophisticated page flow management and using includes for shared function sets, I kept up that style - 

There were some semi-defensible reasons for this for all my bespoke code. One was, it started in an age before git. It took me a while to realize that people would throw half-started WIP into public git folders as a matter of course - to me shared github projects were a hallmark of "this is forkable open source, potentially useful code" and often my code didn't feel that ready for public inspection.

Also - there was never a case of "it works on my machine!". When everything is live already, everything is known to work. No new file permissions or folder permissions or location issues when deploying to staging or whatever.

Another win was, I wanted to be able to edit quicky from any computer, and in a hurry. In fact I've done way too much work in a browser-based text editor I built from Ace. (I built a frame around it so i could do file upload/deletion, folder creation, etc all from the there) I enjoyed being able to make an emergency change from a work machine or in rare cases even a smartphone. 

And there are serious, ongoing advantages to buildless/evergreen - for a one person shop, it makes code that years later you  can pick up and bang on without worrying about breaking builds... and a tendency towards "build rather than buy" avoids npm hell.

But obviously, it kind of sucks when your main way of banging on a running server is to make a "index2.php" and rollback is from a "foldername.bak". 

A lot of that no longer makes sense in an LLM-companion world. (And probably didn't make as much sense for as long even before LLM)

To incrementally improve, I've come up with a new system/paradigm: "Puckish". The key is having a CODE/ folder on my VPS, and another for DATA/. Each project has its own folder in each, and then a symlink into there from either under one of my main domains, or as the root of a new subdomain.

Code then gets deployed more or less normally via git after being locally developed and run (also I learned that github relaxed its policy that all free repos must be public.) In an emergency I can still hack "on the metal" either on my own or via Claude in a terminal.

As I build my first webapp in this paradigm (I realized it's been a mistake all these years trying to use my regular todo app for packlists - that packlists can have templates of stuff I always want to remember to check to prepolate the list, and there should be different types of packlist templates for different types of trips.

But of course a new paradigm deserves a new name... So I asked Claude to help come up with a name that captures this "manchild" approach - like I want to mature a bit, but keep the youthful speed and simplicity and flexibility. "Manchild" is too self deprecating, "Puer aeternus" is too hard to spell, "Peter Pan" is overused... It suggested "Sophomore" but then I realized the Shakespeare figure of "Puck" captures it, more or less, and has personal resonance - here's my deceased dad in his trademark moose-ears pose beneath a statue of Puck say "Lord What Fools These Mortals Be"

blood... blood... blood...

 [During an argument with an absurdly matriarchal computer personality] Ford slumped against a bulkhead. He started to count to ten. He was desperately worried that one day sentient life forms would forget how to do this. Only by counting could humans demonstrate their independence of computers.

[...]

Ford carried on counting quietly. This is about the most aggressive thing you can do to a computer, the equivalent of going up to a human being and saying Blood... blood... blood... blood...

---Douglas Adams, "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

P to the H to the P

There's a decent chance that the danger around the recent PHP exploit was overstated. I mean, upgrade for sure, but the chances of "was I pwned by this" are pretty small.

I have mixed but generally positive feelings about PHP. I think there's real power in its "buildless" paradigm, and the way its monolith avoids the "package update hell" other platforms face - those hells vastly increase the cost of maintenance for long running projects.

(Its important to note PHP gets some of its mindblowing "on 75% of all servers" numbers specifically in its Wordpress mode... and for a long time I've preferred to roll my own CMS than wrestle with Wordpress) 

ai-yi-yi

So, I think "intense ambivalence" - in the sense of being pulled in two directions - is the most reasonable place to be about this whole AI thing.

That's kind of a disclaimer - I don't think AI is evil enough to be worth not messing around with, and depending on how things shift, adapting to an LLM doing gruntwork may be a survival skill.

My friend JZ (no not Jay-Z) has been messing around with the AI music maker Suno and I decided to give it a shot... I put in one line of prompt, something about New Orleans Street Band / Second Line style, funky, and got Step On Over. The horns are kinda synth-y, but it's a rollicking bassline, and some of the lyrics are sorta brilliant... I especially like the last line of the chorus "We got room for one more in this song" (although the first line of the chorus "let the good feet roll" is a bit iffy.) Also the final verse during the background is a banger: If your week ran long, come walk it off / If your shoes feel tight, loosen up / Take my arm, we'll find the beat / There's a place for every pair of feet.

Also, a personal friend (and fellow bloger) Shaun McGill set Gemini to make a video summary of his e-book "How did we get to the iPhone" and the result was also pretty impressive.

It's (another, unfortunately) interesting moment in AI. With "Character.ai" filing for bankruptcy, it's easy to wonder if this is the start of a bubble pop - these remix machines have been heavily subsidized for years now, and what happens to the supply/demand curve when and if that becomes untenable?

use the platform, luke

 Why Don't More Developer Use the Platform? 

Sometimes I think not having a build system for 90% of my side projects has been great at keeping me grounded. Browsers do so much, they're such a stable platform year after year.

As a UI/UX engineer, I like to think about how people arrange their virtual workspaces.

15 years ago I wrote about how I liked to move the Windows taskbar to the side, vertically. It made better use of landscape mode monitors, and the width could be adjusted to show full-on title bars when needed.

Since then, Windows has followed OSX's lead in having the default be "one taskbar item per app", not "per open window". Also, on every platform, most apps have switched to preferring multiple tabs over multiple windows. 

So I was interested when Chrome started telling me about its new vertical task bars; the visual parallel to how I would set up Windows back in the day was striking.

It's also interesting whether people tend to have fewer browser windows with lots of tabs, or many browser windows with a few tabs each. I fall into the latter camp; I guess I see each window as a fresh context.

(Of course people who depend on keep specific windows available in perpetuity kind of scare me. They're meant to be transient!)

Destroy Any Website - desktop only, sound on. Super clever; looks like they analyze the page into DOM-ish bits then put it all into a big canvas, and have a lot of fun doing it.