The Missing Skills of Vibe Coders

AI has democratised writing code. Pretty much anyone can pull up ChatGPT or Claude and build basic apps and websites. What people fail to realise is that writing code is just a small part of being a developer. Indeed, in most software engineer roles, writing code is one of the things you spend the least time on! While AI now means anyone can write code, there is fundamental software development knowledge still missing, and you don’t know what you don’t know. ...

Building Aether: Nginx Reverse Proxy

The skeleton of my VPS setup is Nginx. It takes a collection of websites and applications, each with its own way of deployment and brings them under a single umbrella. This is useful if you have multiple projects you wish to host, but do not want the headache of remembering where each one is hosted and managing them individually. Not only does using Nginx save a lot of time and energy, but it’s also a very safe solution. Let me walk you through how and why I set this up. ...

Building Aether: Hosting a Personal Corner of the Internet

It is often told that every serious developer should have their own space on the web. A space to express themselves, share their learning and host all their personal projects. I felt that I was lacking a digital form of expression, so I decided to embark on a journey. I built Aether. This is a framework for hosting my personal website, this blog, an email service and my own API. In order to have maximum control, I decided to build this infrastructure myself. I learned a lot along the way, and this post details the philosophy and high-level implementation details. ...

The Anatomy of AI Agents

Although the availability of LLMs has made our lives easier, they are still very limited. They only have the ability to take some input text and spit out something that resembles human intelligence. They live in a void and have no power outside of the current and immediate interaction you have with them. But this is changing. AI agents are the next step forward. An agent can be thought of as more alive than a mere LLM. They can remember, create and follow better plans, and act on the world around them. ...