Matthew Lang avatar

Matthew Lang

Family guy and web developer

The Packers are looking good after the draft

I finally caught up on the NFL Draft this week. I’ve been trying to catch up with the selections early in the morning, but with a busy Friday and Saturday, I missed most of the news from these nights. The downside of living on this side of the pond, I guess.

I’ve been an NFL fan for years, but the draft always seems to be more of a thing that can only be determined on the night. I’ve been reading a few articles a week leading up to the draft, but other than maybe the first round, I can’t see how anyone can foresee who is going where until the start of each round. Still, it’s fun to read the predictions.

Being a Packers fan, I am in no position to criticise the picks Brian Gutekunst has made; he’s a general manager for a reason. Saying that, though, I am happy with the draft picks for the Packers. We have addressed the areas of the Packers squad that needed the most attention. I’m really glad to see we took two cornerbacks. Time will tell if these picks pay off.

The trade-up for the sixth-round pick of Florida kicker, Trey Smack, is the most interesting. A highly rated kicker at the college level, and hopefully a pick that can turn into a very reliable kicker in the long term. I believe Mason Crosby was also a sixth-round pick, so Trey is already in good company.

Hopefully, the Packers can pick up a couple of undrafted free agents as well and develop these guys over the next season or two into good additions to the squad.

I don’t want to wish the summer’s good weather away, but I am looking forward to the NFL season starting up again.

A good night for Drew, winning his game 5&3 for the Fereneze team against Cowglen. He has lots of team matches coming up over the next few weeks. Going to be busy!

A golfer standing on a green hillside at sunset, holding a club and watching their shot, with a golf bag nearby.

Breaking in these new golf shoes tonight by watching my youngest play his first team match of the season. He’s playing well so far.

A person looking down at their white and black golf shoes while standing on green grass, wearing dark navy trousers.

Today I cancelled my Bear and Instapaper subscriptions. I’ve had both for what seems like years, but for very different reasons, I have cancelled both. My Instapaper had been unused for months. Bear, on the other hand, was still being used daily, but I have moved in another direction for my notes.

James Somers asks if we can achieve more time offline with AI.

Could we get the best of both worlds? In other words, shouldn’t one goal of rapid technical advancement be some melding of the physical and virtual worlds such that I can sit quietly in an easy chair with pen and pad; or lay cards out on a table to organize my thoughts; or turn a room into the embodiment of a project; and yet have the same flexibility, portability, persistence, and remixability as in the digital versions of these things?

I love the idea of advances in AI that let us spend less time looking at screens.

Rather than using Sourcehut’s builds to deploy my changes to Dailymuse, I’ve replaced it with a bash script that I run locally. It triggers the release to Hatchbox and monitors it from my terminal. I’ve written bash scripts before, but nothing like this. Really happy with the way it turned out.

I have another opportunity to use Kamal to deploy and manage a Rails application. Definitely going to run with it this time. I struggled a bit the first time, but I am coming around to its benefits and the reduced cost.

Ben Child’s Top 10 Superhero movies of all time certainly gets you thinking about what constitutes a superhero movie. I agree with some of the choices and disagree with others, but I love that he included Dredd in his top 10. I never considered it to be a superhero movie myself, but it clearly is.

I’m not on board with a fully automated agent-driven programming process. It might have its uses in certain scenarios, but as a solo developer, I have my own process. Research and write a detailed prompt, review and refine the results, and ship the final code when I am good and ready.