Last month I sat down with Cris Roata to record an episode of her podcast, Catching More Green Lights in Life. It went live today! Cris asked me what I tell people who are afraid of AI, and I gave the answer I usually give: treat it like an intern, train it patiently, expect the first attempts to be…
Notes
Quick notes and tips
I’ve been transcribing my YouTube videos locally for a few months now. It took some trial and error to get a setup that actually works reliably, so here’s what I learned. The problem I wanted good subtitles for my videos—for accessibility, but also so I could feed the transcripts to Claude for gener…
At 54 years old, I just started a YouTube channel.
This is an experiment. I recently read Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s book Tiny Experiments and decided to try something I haven’t done before: creating my own videos, not for a company or conference, but for anyone who might find them useful.
Quite literally: this blog is now officially in autumn mode! 🍂
During our summer vacation, while watching over our dog Elvis, I spent some time doing recreational coding on the balcony of our vacation home in Sottomarina, Italy. The result is a seasonal bit of JavaScript/SVG animation for this blog’s header, which you can now enjoy on the main page, constantin.glez.de. But only during the autumn months, of course!
What started as a simple idea to add variety to my header turned into a 903-line journey of learning physics, mastering SVG patterns, and discovering just how much fun coding can be when there are no deadlines or requirements—just curiosity and Claude as my sparring partner. 🎯
Here’s what I learned along the way:
My favorite search (or rather “answer”) engine is Perplexity, and my favorite way to interact with computers is the command-line, so why not combine the two?
Here’s how:
What happened was that last weekend, my family and I played Exploding Kittens: Good vs. Evil, which we were recently gifted. What a fun game! A random idea struck me: why not ask Claude to put together a playlist for us?
Hi Claude, we‘re about to play a few rounds of Exploding Kittens (“Good vs. Ev…
Over the last few days, I’ve been working on putting Elvis, our Dachshund, onto this blog’s banner. The goal was to create a smooth animation where Elvis appears by rising from the bottom of the banner, then leans his paws over the border—adding some personality to the site while exploring modern web animation techniques.
What are office hours? Office hours have their roots in academia, where professors would publish certain hours at specific days of the week where students could simply come in and ask questions. It’s an easy way to meet without the back and forth of finding a date/time that works. Why office hours? …
Refactoring my banner into SVG was only the beginning: the next step was animation. I continued with the “AI as a teacher” model and asked Claude to explain to me concepts like IIFE, how the browser’s DOM processes SVG elements, which SVG properties are GPU-accelerated and other CSS performance conc…
If you’re a returning visitor, you might notice the header image on this blog looks more sharp and crisp—that’s because it is! ✨ After creating my own URL shortener, I wanted to modernize my header image. I built it back then in 2022 using p5.js, but the resolution wasn’t great. Now I wanted a more …
Yesterday, I re-implemented my custom URL shortener glez.me from scratch. I have a Claude Pro plan with Claude.ai, and just a week or so ago, they announced that it includes access to Claude Code as well, which is Anthropic’s agentic AI coding tool, so I decided to let Claude Code do it for me. I wa…
This weekend, I added Webmention support to this blog. What is it? From the Webmention W3C recommendation:
“Webmention is a simple way to notify any URL when you mention it on your site. From the receiver’s perspective, it’s a way to request notifications when other sites mention it.”
Think of it …
As of today, this blog has a “now page”. What is a “now page”? It’s a really good idea by Derek Sivers. From nownownow.com:
“a page that tells you what this person is focused on at this point in their life.”
Back then in the good old days of Unix, we called it a .plan file. Today, it’s not easy to…
It’s been a while since I was up to date on image formats for the web. Back then in the 90s, I actually read the original JPEG paper in order to understand how it worked, because I was preparing a presentation to my study group on the MPEG paper and needed to understand how I-frames were encoded. At…
While refactoring my blog, I discovered the IndieWeb community. From the website:
“We are a community of independent and personal websites based on the principles of: owning your domain and using it as your primary online identity, publishing on your own site first (optionally elsewhere), and ownin…
About two weeks ago, Zed, my favourite code editor, introduced agentic coding, replacing its previous assistant panel on the right of its UI. A blog post walks through the way agents work in Zed now. The documentation now has an Agent Panel section. I’ve used it a bit for tweaking some stuff around …