Jon Udell

Santa Rosa

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Articles

The Configuration Crisis and Developer Dependency on AI

Jan 14, 2025 | startupnews.fyi | Jon Udell

We’ve been saying forever that there are three hard problems in computer science; or maybe two if you like the off-by-one joke. But naming and cache invalidation pale in comparison to the really hard problem nowadays: configuration. As our IT infrastructure grows ever more modular, layered and interconnected, we deal with myriad configurable parts — each one governed by a dense thicket of settings.
The Configuration Crisis and Developer Dependency on AI

Jan 14, 2025 | thenewstack.io | Jon Udell

We’ve been saying forever that there are three hard problems in computer science; or maybe two if you like the off-by-one joke. But naming and cache invalidation pale in comparison to the really hard problem nowadays: configuration. As our IT infrastructure grows ever more modular, layered and interconnected, we deal with myriad configurable parts — each one governed by a dense thicket of settings.
Notes for an annotation SDK

Nov 1, 2024 | blog.jonudell.net | Jon Udell

While helping Hypothesis find its way to ed-tech it was my great privilege to explore ways of adapting annotation to other domains including bioscience, journalism, and scholarly publishing. Working across these domains showed me that annotation isn’t just an app you do or don’t adopt. It’s also a service you’d like to be available in every document workflow that connects people to selections in documents.
How To Create Software Diagrams With ChatGPT and Claude

Oct 31, 2024 | thenewstack.io | Jon Udell

In my previous article, about what ChatGPT and Claude can see on your screen and how developers can make use of it, I mentioned a browser extension that enhances the text-only lite.cnn.com with images fetched from the full CNN site. It worked nicely, but used the deprecated Manifest V2. When I had Claude update it to V3, there were some architectural changes that I wanted to diagram. So, in this post, I’ll review the diagramming adventure.
What ChatGPT and Claude Can See on Your Screen

Oct 25, 2024 | thenewstack.io | Jon Udell

Pasting screenshots into ChatGPT, and now Claude, has become a regular practice for me. As we first saw in my post about an LLM-backed Datasette plugin, the ability of LLMs to read text in images has torn down the barrier that once separated data from pictures of data. That’s a big deal, but their screen-reading power extends far beyond just reading text. In this case, while debugging SQL, I found it easier to provide LLMs with screenshots of Postgres output than to copy text from the terminal.
Mix Human Expertise With LLM Assistance for Easier Coding

Oct 7, 2024 | thenewstack.io | Jon Udell

This box full of ready-to-mail letters was my problem, and the checklist shown at the upper right was the solution. As an enthusiastic Vote Forward volunteer, I was losing track of which bundles were completed by which of my team of helpers. I needed a snippet of JavaScript to make a checklist so I could track our progress. Here’s how my AI assistants helped me write it.
LLM-Assisted Translation From Postgres to SQLite and DuckDB

Sep 16, 2024 | thenewstack.io | Jon Udell

My Hacker News repo provides a set of Powerpipe dashboards that use a Steampipe plugin to acquire data from the Hacker News API and provide interactive visualizations of the data. Originally it worked only with Postgres, but more recently Powerpipe gained the ability to flow data into its dashboards from SQLite and DuckDB. Once I got SQLite and DuckDB ports working, I found that both ran the dashboard’s several dozen queries almost twice as fast as Postgres.
An LLM-Turbocharged Community Calendar Reboot

Sep 5, 2024 | thenewstack.io | Jon Udell

Back in the 2010s I created a system to aggregate public calendars for cities and towns. The Elm City project, as it was called, never gained traction, but the problem it addressed remains unsolved. Calendars of public events are information silos; there’s still no good way to combine them. I wondered how effectively my team of LLM assistants could help me reboot that community-scale calendar aggregator. It turned out to be a shockingly fast speed run; here are the highlights.
How AI-Generated Content Is Challenging SEO and Web Operators

Aug 20, 2024 | thenewstack.io | Jeff James |Richard Gall |Bruce Gain |Jon Udell

The last few years have been tumultuous ones for search engine providers, with Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Yandex, DuckDuckGo, and the rest having to adapt to the impact to AI, machine learning, and large language models. My colleague Richard MacManus has already written about the future of websites in the AI era and how search engines are turning into generative AI chatbots.
Can Grafana Adaptive Metrics Help Slash Observability Costs?

Aug 20, 2024 | thenewstack.io | Bruce Gain |BC Gain |Richard Gall |Jon Udell

It seemed like a good problem to have — at first. The goal was to extend and deepen visibility across Teletracking’s environments as the company accelerated its transition to a cloud native infrastructure. Oren Lion, director of software engineering at healthcare services platform provider Teletracking, was leading the migration of the company’s development teams from an open source stack, including tools like Prometheus, Thanos and Grafana.