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May 2026 | 58 posts

poc is not product

A poc is not a product. I started focais, not in a rush, but as something that I already had a POC for and thought it would be easy. I wanted to build tools to make creating blog posts like this one easier. I stared with shots a tool that takes screenshots of websites. POC (proof of concept) # [1] For the poc, I made a single fastapi [2] endpoint that takes a url and returns a screenshot of the page. It converts the url into a key that I can lookup to see if I have the shot, if I don’t I go get it. With the open source libraries out there, this is not too hard of a task. Progress Thus Far # [3] - /shot But this wasn’t enough All it does so far for this first tool is take screenshots of websites, and give you a hosted image. Users # [4] To bring in users, I need to create a signup flow, with a database to store users, login, logout, and email recovery. I’ve never had to use an email service before that wasn’t already mandated by a company or an iternal smtp server. After some...
- I’ve heard prime say just give it the one eyed fighting kirby so many times, and execute it few times, and there is no way to find it online, so this will be the link that I will come to, when I need to remember what @theprimeagen means when he says Give it the one eyed fighting kirby. :s/\(.*\);/console.log(\1) So what is this? # [1] This is a vim substitute comand to replace text in the buffer. the one eyed fighting kirby is a regex capture group to capture everything between matches, and assign it a value to place back in after the match. substitute in a nutshell, :s/<what you want to replace>/<what you want to replace with> More examples # [2] Here is a contrived example of text. here there from here go there here = some_fuction(there) Now for some reason I want to switch all of the words here and there. I can do that with three capture groups, \1 is here, \2 is everything between, \3 is there. :%s/\(here\)\(.*\)\(there\)/\3\2\1 Just give it the one eyed fighting kirby ~Prime still struggling # [3] I thought this explaination from phind was good and more verbose than mine. --- describe this vim substitute regex :%s/(here)(.)(there)/\3\2\1 ANSWER | PHIND V9 M...
Java - ArchWiki wiki.archlinux.org [1] Today I learned that arch has a helper script archlinux-java to set the version of java. archlinux-java status archlinux-java set <JAVA_ENV_NAME> References: [1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/java#Switching_between_JVM
GitHub - charmbracelet/mods: AI on the command line AI on the command line. Contribute to charmbracelet/mods development by creating an account on GitHub. GitHub · github.com [1] This is a pretty sweet interface into llms. I used it a bit with my son tonight while he was asking me for datapack ideas. ❯ mods -f 'I am trying to have fun on my minecraft server and am creating a minecraft datapack send me some load.mcfuncions that will make it fun' You can continue the conversation with a -C ❯ mods -C -f 'I like where you are going with number 4, can you make it so that it runs when a player opens a door' You can pass it some data curl https://waylonwalker.com/thoughts-on-unit-tests/ | mods -f 'summarize this post' References: [1]: https://github.com/charmbracelet/mods
GitHub - charmbracelet/mods: AI on the command line AI on the command line. Contribute to charmbracelet/mods development by creating an account on GitHub. GitHub · github.com [1] This is a pretty sweet interface into llms. I used it a bit with my son tonight while he was asking me for datapack ideas. ❯ mods -f 'I am trying to have fun on my minecraft server and am creating a minecraft datapack send me some load.mcfuncions that will make it fun' You can continue the conversation with a -C ❯ mods -C -f 'I like where you are going with number 4, can you make it so that it runs when a player opens a door' References: [1]: https://github.com/charmbracelet/mods
The work on mods [1] by charmbracelet [2]. AI on the command line References: [1]: https://github.com/charmbracelet/mods [2]: https://github.com/charmbracelet
Read a Range of Data - LIMIT and OFFSET - SQLModel SQLModel, SQL databases in Python, designed for simplicity, compatibility, and robustness. sqlmodel.tiangolo.com [1] Today I was running some sqlmodel queries through the sqlalchemy orm. Admittedly I’ve not done enough orm queries before, and I’ve done quite a bit of raw sql. I was trying to get objects from two separate models that had relationships setup. session.query(User, Images).where(User.id == 3).all() It is incredibly slow, and gives me the following warning. SELECT statement has a cartesian product between FROM element(s) What I learned from the SQLModel docs is that you should give it a join to correct this and go much faster. session.query(User, Images).join(Images).where(User.id == 3).all() References: [1]: https://sqlmodel.tiangolo.com/tutorial/limit-and-offset/

So after months of fighting with gf not going to template files, I finally decided to put in some effort to make it work.

This was the dumbest keybind in my config, that I copied from someone else without understanding it.

What I am trying to do #

I have jinja templates in a directory called templates. I want to bind gf to open a template file, but it is trying to open a new file ./base.html

{% extends "base.html" %}
{% if request.state.user %}
    {% block title %}Fokais - {{ request.state.user.full_name }} {% endblock %}
{% else %}
    {% block title %}Fokais {% endblock %}
{% endif %}
{% block content %}
    {% if request.state.user %}
        <h1 id="title"
            class="inline-block mx-auto text-5xl font-black leading-loose
            text-transparent bg-clip-text bg-gradient-to-r from-red-600
            via-pink-500 to-yellow-400 ring-red-500 text-shadow-xl
            text-shadow-zinc-950 ring-5">
            {{ request.state.user.full_name }}
        </h1>
    {% endif %}
    {% include "me_partial.html" %}
{% endblock %}

What did not work #

I tried all sorts of changes to my path, but it still didn’t work.

vim.api.nvim_command("set path+=templates/**")

What I found #

after digging into my keymap I found that I had remaped gf to edit years ago. This works great if the file is in your current directory, and if it’s not it makes the file. This bind completely breaks vim’s ability to :find files and was a terrible keybind that I added probably from someone else years ago and have literally never used this feature. If gf opens an empty file I always close it and assume that vim failed to :find the file.

-- Allow gf to open non-existent files
set("", "gf", ":edit <cfile><CR>")

Yes, after that fix I still needed to adjust my path #

I ended up with the following in my options.lua.

-- look for jinja templates in the templates directory
vim.opt.path:append("templates/**")
Template Designer Documentation — Jinja Documentation (3.1.x) jinja.palletsprojects.com [1] html [2] code generated by my jinja templates generally look half garbage because of indents and whitespace all over the place. I just learned about these pesky Whitespace Control characters that can get rid of the whitespace added from templating. You can also strip whitespace in templates by hand. If you add a minus sign (-) to the start or end of a block (e.g. a For tag), a comment, or a variable expression, the whitespaces before or after that block will be removed: {% for item in seq -%} {{ item }} {%- endfor %} References: [1]: https://jinja.palletsprojects.com/en/3.0.x/templates/#whitespace-control [2]: /html/
Intro - Minecraft Server on Docker (Java Edition) Documentation for Minecraft Server on Docker docker-minecraft-server.readthedocs.io [1] I just learned that if you can exec into the container running minecraft with the itzg/minecraft container you can run rcon-cli to get command access to the server. You need to set the RCON_PASSWORD if you want to access rcon remotely, but if you have not already done this and have access to the server you can just run rcon-cli when you are in. References: [1]: https://docker-minecraft-server.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
- Theo’s response puts a lot of my feelings about unit testing into words. It’s crazy how cargo culty it becomes that the echo chamber of twitter can bring in beliefs that we think we believe, but have not experienced enough or put enough thought in to form our own opinion. This video made me think so much that it turned into it’s own blog post Thoughts on Unit Testing [1] References: [1]: https://waylonwalker.com/thoughts-on-unit-tests

thoughts on unit tests

[1] Theo’s response puts a lot of my feelings about unit testing into words. Many of us have grown up in this world preaching unit testing. We often hear these statements “Everything must be unit tested, tests make code more maintainable.” In reality when we are not writing complex low level code unit tests are probably the wrong approach. We Finally Agree On Unit Tests - YouTube !https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbU-PKukdMw Dec 22, 2023 [2] Most of us are assemblers # [3] So much of software engineering is assembling existing well tested code. Crud applications, UI, Data Pipelines, building on top of battle tested code. Manufacturing Analogy - Unit Testing # [4] This kind of reminds me of Manufacturing. Individual components are QA tested with tests that look more like unit test. Parts like bearings, pistons, shafts, valves, they are all tested against sophisticated statistics of sample measurements. This is quite similar to unit testing. [5] You see measuring the indivi...
5 min read
Mastodon.py — Mastodon.py 2.2.1 documentation mastodonpy.readthedocs.io [1] Mastadon.py is a python api client for mastadon that makes it easy to cross post to mastadon. from mastodon import Mastodon Mastodon.create_app( 'pytooterapp', api_base_url = 'https://mastodon.social', to_file = 'pytooter_clientcred.secret' ) from mastodon import Mastodon mastodon = Mastodon(client_id = 'pytooter_clientcred.secret',) mastodon.log_in( '[email protected]', 'incrediblygoodpassword', to_file = 'pytooter_usercred.secret' ) mastodon.toot('Tooting from Python using #mastodonpy !') References: [1]: https://mastodonpy.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
I came across nvim-macroni [1] from jesseleite [2], and it’s packed with great features and ideas. 🤌 Save your macros for future use References: [1]: https://github.com/jesseleite/nvim-macroni [2]: https://github.com/jesseleite
jesseleite [1] has done a fantastic job with macroni.nvim [2]. Highly recommend taking a look. Save your macros for future use 🤌 References: [1]: https://github.com/jesseleite [2]: https://github.com/jesseleite/macroni.nvim
ikalnytskyi [1] has done a fantastic job with httpie-auth-store [2]. Highly recommend taking a look. Credential store plugin for HTTPie, attaches auth to ongoing request. References: [1]: https://github.com/ikalnytskyi [2]: https://github.com/ikalnytskyi/httpie-auth-store

Authentication from cli tools can be a bit of a bear, and I have to look it up every time. This is my reference guide for future me to remember how to easily do it.

I set up a fastapi server running on port 8000, it uses a basic auth with waylonwalker as the username and asdf as the password. The server follows along with what comes out of the docs. I have it setup to take basic auth, form username and password, or a bearer token for authentication.

curl #

The og of command line url tools.

# basic auth
curl -u 'waylonwalker:asdf' -X POST localhost:8000/token
# basic auth with password prompt
curl -u 'waylonwalker' -X POST localhost:8000/token
# token
curl -H 'Authorization: bearer eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ3YXlsb253YWxrZXIiLCJleHAiOjE3MDI5NTI2MDJ9.GeYNt7DNal6LTiPoavJnqypaMt4vYeriXdq5lqu1ILg' -X POST localhost:8000/token

wget #

My go to if I want the result to go into a file.

# basic auth
wget -q -O - --auth-no-challenge --http-user=waylonwalker --http-password=asdf --post-data '' localhost:8000/token

# token
wget -q -O - --header="Authorization: bearer eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ3YXlsb253YWxrZXIiLCJleHAiOjE3MDI5NTI2MDJ9.GeYNt7DNal6LTiPoavJnqypaMt4vYeriXdq5lqu1ILg" -O - --post-data '' localhost:8000/token

httpx #

An http client written in python, primarilty used with the python api, but has a nice cli.

# install
python3 -m pip install httpx

# basic auth
httpx -m POST --auth waylonwalker asdf http://localhost:8000/token

# basic auth with password prompt
httpx -m POST --auth waylonwalker - http://localhost:8000/token

# token
httpx -m POST --headers="Authorization" "bearer eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ3YXlsb253YWxrZXIiLCJleHAiOjE3MDI5NTI2MDJ9.GeYNt7DNal6LTiPoavJnqypaMt4vYeriXdq5lqu1ILg" http://localhost:8000/token

httpie #

A modern http client written in python.

# install
python3 -m pip install httpie

# basic auth
http POST localhost:8000/token -a waylonwalker:asdf

# basic auth with password prompt
http POST localhost:8000/token -a waylonwalker

# token
http POST localhost:8000/token -A bearer -a eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ3YXlsb253YWxrZXIiLCJleHAiOjE3MDI5NTI2MDJ9.GeYNt7DNal6LTiPoavJnqypaMt4vYeriXdq5lqu1ILg

httpie with plugin #

# install
python3 -m pip install httpie-credential-store
# usage
http POST localhost:8000/token -A creds

httpie prompt #

http-prompt comes from the httpie org, and has an interactive cli interface into apis. You can even specify a spec file to autocomplete on api methods.

http-prompt localhost:8000 --auth waylonwalker:asdf --spec openapi.json