Daily-Column

I finally went and subscribed to one of the AI services to be able to use it in earnest, and boy am I using it in earnest. I went for Claude as from all I’ve heard, that seems to be the best all-rounder for coding, and pretty good for regular chat stuff as well - including the key stuff around tool use and the MCP architecture. So initially, I started out looking at getting an MCP up and going, and how I’d go about creating an MCP for a service which didn’t have one, and that was interesting… and then I’ve been entirely driven to distraction building new things to solve problems I had in mind. I completely revamped my dad’s site (Lean Pursuit) in a way that helped me move it to Hugo, and with a custom design to boot - stuff that I used to charge good money for, the AI was able to get done in a session or two. If you’re a kid these days, it’s not enough to be able to code up a site to get a bit of side-hustle income, you’re going to have to be able to keep up with or beat the AI tools, or (more likely) learn how to use and leverage them. ...

What a weekend just gone. Firstly, K got her orange belt at Karate - I continue to be amazed at this little 4 year old’s capabilities; I know they’re probably only doing the belts for the sake of hitting milestones for the kids every 6 months, but looking at how hard she focused, how much she wanted the belt, how she worked at it & practiced for it… I’ve been so happy with her attitude to this sport, and I look forward to seeing her kick butt in future. ...

Happy Diwali 2025! Diwali has always held a special place for me in the calendar, mostly as it was the one festival our family did every year in full force. It was always easy to describe to my non-Hindu friends as being ‘Christmas for Hindus’, but I think I appreciate it more now as being a bit of a punctuation on the year. Diwali is always assoicated with ensuring you have a clean house where everything is put away nicely, and while that has been more successful for me in some years than others, it does give a bit of focus to ensuring I clean up the place. Something which is very easy to get away from you, the bigger your scope gets. ...

And so a week passed and I said… lo… oh crap I promised myself I would write something. And of course my first thought goes to the geekiest of things, “hmm, I made a hugo blog which runs off pretty much flatfiles, I should write a blogging engine. Heck a CMS. Heck I can even think of a great punny name for it. Hmmm I should buy a domain…” I’m going to get myself into trouble with this, I’m sure. But it’s gotten the creative juices flowing a little bit to think of how I could get that ball rolling. Only now I’m not the young whipper-snapper who would just start coding, so I’m trying out some different markdown editors as a way to compare the competitive landscape before I push for my own to be built, so this is coming from inside Obsidian. And one of the things which is coming up is having a look over some old posts and seeing what’s still relevant to stay up, what needs to be dumped, and what has fallen prey to the web of broken links, so there’s some tidying up happening as I mentioned previously. ...

It’s going to take time to flex those writing muscles again. I need to figure out what to do with this space. I’ve not touched it in so long, it’s almost imposing to have to think about where to take it and where I want to go with it. The era of personal blogs is over; there’s no one out there publishing personal pieces without some motivation to be an influencer or an ulterior angle on what a web-exposed ‘diary’ of sorts would be. ...