Category: Development

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Jon Udell’s 7 Guiding Principles for Working with LLMs has some really solid advice on using Large Language Models. His usage is mostly around software development and writing. Two areas where these LLMs can really shine.

By the way, Jon’s Seven ways to think like the web is still as relevant today as it was in 2011.

I’ve only dipped my toe into the LLM pool thus far. As I embark on a personal project, I’ll follow these principals while I lean on LLMs to make up for my lack of recent knowledge and experience in developing tech. I find them to be especially helpful with the syntax and best practices type questions I would have been scouring in Stackoverflow for in the past.

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Regular expressions seem like a dark art to me. I use very simple ones frequently enough to remember a few things. Anything slightly more advanced probably involves web searching and copy/paste.

Regexer is a tool for learning and experimenting with regular expressions. It does a great job of breaking down the expressions and showing how each element works. There’s also an extensive library of community patterns to choose from.

via Flowingdata

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TL;DR Intuit uses their customers’ customers to drive adoption of their payments solution.

The screenshot below is where one is led after clicking the “view invoice” button. If the customer clicks the giant green button, an email is sent back to business (Intuit’s customer) indicating that “[customer name] wants to pay you and needs your help”. The email sent back to the business is really just a marketing piece prompting the business to sign up for Quickbooks payments.

What about the user trying to view their invoice? What benefit to they get for clicking that giant green button and unknowingly firing a marketing email to their vendor? They get some more copy to read, copy that doesn’t get them any closer to seeing that invoice. They still need to click on the small “view invoice…” link, which they missed on account of the giant green button.

It’s a terrible experience all around.

For those who might not know, Quickbooks is a popular bookkeeping system for small businesses. In my opinion, it makes bookkeeping quite straightforward. There is no freemium tier for Quickbooks (as far as I know), so everyone is paying for the service. Intuit includes a fair amount of marketing in the application for their additional services like payments and banking products. However, that marketing information rarely seems to get in the way of the core functionality.

This invoice email, on the other hand, really gets in the way. It is confusing for customers, and difficult for those using Quickbooks to turn off. A busy bookkeeper or business owner is unlikely to know this is happening until they start seeing those “…wants to pay you and needs your help.” emails. Businesses and especially their customers shouldn’t be punished because Quickbooks payments hasn’t been enabled. The invoice emails sent by Quickbooks to their customers’ customers should not be used to push additional services.

By the way, I called out Inuit almost ten years ago for some other nonsense: Dark Pattern: Turbotax Marketing Email Smells Phishy. Obviously, I caved and have started using their products since then. But this one really grinds my gears. Please stop doing this, Intuit.

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The One a Day project I mentioned before was my second attempt at using ChatGPT to do something useful. I can’t talk about the first attempt, please don’t ask, very hush hush.

I’m happy to report it cranked out code not unlike what I would have if left to my own search + copy + paste devices. So, I understand why software professionals are skeptical. In its defense, it actually suggested using flask in the first iteration, but I asked dumb it down a bit. It gave me something simple, and I modified it a bit. In the end, I’d say ChatGPT cut the time in half on this tiny project. It’s on github if you care to judge.

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Yesterday, I launched One a Day wherein I will post one photo per day for a year. There is only one rule: The photo needs to have been taken that day–no stockpiling. You may think that you’ve seen this done before, but assure you that this is a totally original idea.

Now, launch makes it sound like I spent more than an hour knocking together a rudimentary, barely usable site. Sure, I could go the easy route and post on one of the many social networks on which I already have an account. But, in the words of Tina Turner: We never, ever do nothing nice and easy. Besides, we all know, the hard part isn’t making a site or uploading an image–its taking a picture day after day after day.

Why bother? Well, I was inspired by two things recently. First was a large collection of black & white images a friend showed me. His father had taken them in the 70s and 80s. While the subject matter was mostly day-to-day life in East Berlin, they were fascinating.

Second was A London Inheritance where, in a similar vein, he has a large collection of London photos from 1946-54 taken by his father. In a recent post he said “…the normal, everyday things that we take for granted, and are the things that will disappear and are worth a photo.”

This struck me because I take a lot for granted and tend to move through portions of my day with sort of tunnel vision. My hope is that this little project will help me broaden my field of vision a bit.

Wish me luck…