Welcome to the inaugural monthly roundup! I'll be sending these out once a month with all of the content from the month plus some added thoughts and original stuff.

May has been a good month, I had much of it off work so I spent all that time reconnecting with writing code by hand, and maybe more importantly, just writing code for fun. It resulted in three little Elixir libraries: HRW for rendezvous hashing, the bunny.net client library bunnyx and OGMate for rendering open graph images. On top of that, I spent a ton of time just tinkering with fun tech.

The impact that LLMs are having on absolutely everything was a big factor too, and I both took the time to go back to writing code by hand, and finding other more productive ways of using LLMs, including local models and alternative providers to the big SOTA model companies. Not sure I really figured anything out.

Blog posts

Running local models on an M4 with 24GB memory - Experiments with getting usable outputs out of local models on a standard Macbook.

Building for the joy of building - My path into programming and why I've been obsessed for 20 years.

bunnyx: a bunny.net Elixir client library - A best-practice Elixir library for interacting with the bunny.net API.

Highest Random Weight in Elixir - A description of HRW/rendezvous hashing and the HRW elixir library.

The social contract of writing - About the value of genuine writing in a world being drowned in slop.

See you next month

I've got some great posts planned for next month so I hope you "like and subscribe". Please feel very welcome to find me on Bluesky at @jola.dev and let me know what you think.