Henry Needs Coffee - Terminal Blog

How I've Been Driving LLMs - Part 2

Mon, 07 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Author Note: This post is Part 2 of a "How I Drive LLMs" series, so consider reading Part 1 before continuing.

So, you might be thinking:

Great, Henry. Using spec and stdlib docs sound great, but if I'm generating those docs with Claude Desktop and you want me to generate code with Claude Code, that's a lot of copy/paste-ing I need to do for every new project.

Excellent instincts! I see you're thinking ahead, and yeah: it is a lot of copying and pasting individual docs over from Claude Desktop artifacts to a new project dir in your IDE. After doing that for exactly one project, I realized I needed to automate that toil away.

These new agentic tools could already do a lot, but in the last couple of months they've been updated to support remote Model Context Protocol servers (which are basically like plug-ins or LLM flavored wrappers for different APIs). It's kind of like taking Claude Code and strapping a jetpack to it.

Instead of relying on outdated training data, you can configure your LLM client to use the Context7 MCP server so that you can always pull up to date docs for the languages/frameworks you're using. Instead of relying on string searches in your codebase, you can set up a Serena MCP server so that you have access to an abstract syntax tree, giving your LLM better deep understanding of your code base.

So, in that vein, let me introduce you to my first MCP server: Jane.

🔗 Quinncuatro/jane-mcp-server Jane is a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that provides a knowledge management system for stdlib and specs documents.

Jane is, essentially, a handful of CRUD tools sitting on top of a pile of flat markdown files. Jane can create & update documents, search & list those documents, and get specific documents to pull them into an LLM's context window. Those documents live under two predictable subdirectories: ./Jane/specs/ and ./Jane/stdlib/. Jane is self-hostable, and can connect to both Claude Desktop and Claude Code.

So when I'm working on a new project, I can chat with Claude Desktop to develop a list of languages, frameworks, features, and expected outputs for defined inputs. That process usually starts with something like:

Hey there! Time for a new project! Please read these two blog posts: https://ghuntley.com/stdlib/ & https://ghuntley.com/specs/ to get an idea of our workflow and then come back to help me plan out spec docs for $project. Please ask me any manner of follow up or assumption check questions you might have before actually generating any documentation. $More-context-about-project...

After a few back and forths, and we come to a good understanding of what we're going to build, Claude can create a new subdir on Jane (./Jane/specs/$project-name) and populate it with everything we discussed in documents like:

api-reference.md
deployment.md
document-management.md
technical-decisions.md
testing-strategy.md
...

I often accomplish that with a prompt like:

Great! Now that we've come up with what we want to build, please create a new subdir under specs on Jane for this project and populate it with project specification documents. Use as many different categories as you think you need, but keep in mind you want to be thorough in your explanations, but succinct enough to not blow up context windows.

So, after having a short conversation with my AI intern, they can generate documents that can be loaded into any LLM's context window to steer the session.

Similarly, you can spin up a different conversation with Claude Desktop (with similar prompts as the spec docs thread) to generate language/framework specific stdlib documents to tell an agentic coder not just what to build, but how. The subdir ./Jane/stdlib/python/ might look like:

dependencies-management.md
error-handling.md
mcp-protocol-standards.md
performance-standards.md
security-rules.md
...

Here's what a typical Jane directory structure looks like after working on a few projects:

Jane/
├── specs/
│   ├── bluetooth-fix-tool/
│   │   ├── requirements.md
│   │   └── testing-strategy.md
│   ├── my-web-app/
│   │   ├── api-reference.md
│   │   ├── deployment.md
│   │   ├── development-workflow.md
│   │   └── technical-decisions.md
├── stdlib/
│   ├── golang/
│   │   └── cli-tool-patterns.md
│   ├── javascript/
│   │   ├── architecture-standards.md
│   │   ├── error-handling.md
│   │   └── testing-patterns.md
│   ├── python/
│   │   ├── dependencies-management.md
│   │   └── mcp-protocol-standards.md

And since I'm creating all those documents with a self-hosted Jane MCP server, they're being stored in a central location: on the file system of one of my home servers. So when I'm ready to build, I launch claude in a new project directory, and I can similarly use Jane to pull those freshly created documents into the context window with:

Please pull and study all the documents under Jane's specs for $project to understand functional specifications and under Jane's stdlib for $language to understand technical requirements. Implement what is not implemented. Create tests. Build the project, run it, fix on errors.

Claude Code is then able to look at the configuration for using remote MCP servers, see that Jane has tools for list_stdlibs/ list_specs/get_stdlib/get_spec, and intelligently use those tools to track down the documents I'm asking about in order to pull them into the context window.

Presto-change-o, no more copying and pasting artifacts over!

Then you can get really fancy, by telling Claude Code:

If you need any additional context ($language, $framework, $problem-domain, $whatever), please reach out to Context7 (another configured and self-hostable MCP server) to get whatever docs you need.

If you're a couple steps ahead of me, you might be thinking:

If you're generating those stdlib docs in a persistent volume, you can reuse the language and framework specific ones on other projects, right?

And you'd be right! My mountain of stdlib docs keeps building up over time, giving whatever MCP-compatible agent I plug Jane into an ever clearer view of how I like my code written, formatted, and linted. It can keep track of things like naming conventions, idiom usage, testing opinions... all sorts of stuff.

Author Note: I'm also working on getting a new Claude feature called Hooks to handle automatically updating those stdlib docs when Context7 comes into play, just to make sure everything stays trued up.

In fact, every project I've built with this method (since creating Jane) has been seeing less and less roadblocks:

HenryNeeds.Coffee (JavaScript/Astro) - I rebuilt my personal site from the Gatsby framework to Astro. This first project benefited from stdlib docs about modern JS patterns and architecture preferences for static sites.
Home Assistant CLI (Golang) - I wanted a CLI tool for managing my smart home from a terminal for years now. A combination of good project specification and Go specific stdlib docs brought this project to a working v1 in just a few hours, and convinced me that the specs/stdlib approach actually works.
Bluetooth Fix Tool (Shell/JS) - Another tool I've needed for years: a quick utility script to reset my bluetooth headphones so that audio quality doesn't stay awful after leaving a Google Meet call. Even small tools benefit from having consistent patterns and error handling approaches. This particular project went from "idea" to "working solution" in under an hour.

Every project teaches you something new about your coding preferences, and with Jane, those learnings get captured and reused immediately. My JavaScript stdlib docs got better after the website rebuild. Figuring out the Home Assistant tool improved my CLI tool patterns documentation. Each project built with this method and MCP server makes the next one at least a little bit faster.

Anecdotally, I've even seen a decrease in the amount of "tries" and corrections it takes to spit out something more useful than the often lambasted "AI slop" we hear so much about online. For instance, Claude Code was able to get most of the Bluetooth Fix Tool right on the first try. It only took three follow up prompts (mostly passing it error messages), to shore up basic functionality. All of the pre-work of generating the spec and stdlib docs made for an easy implementation.

But like I alluded to earlier, you really start cooking with gas when you combine Jane with other MCP servers. Jane is great for planning then transitioning to building, but Context7 can grab up to date documentation to fill in context gaps, and Serena makes file operations more efficient. Just those three MCP servers tied together have made me worlds more productive - at least with these "starting at 0" projects.

Now that we've covered how Jane has helped me solve real world problems, let's zoom out a little bit. With reliable context engineering tools and agents that can actually implement code based on my preferences, I find myself thinking about problems differently.

I'm spending less of my free time working on traditional "side projects" and more time figuring out how to architect systems that can build projects automatically (and with less user input from me).

Context engineering definitely scales. I'm curious what will happen when I combine Jane with custom agent workflows. I have some experiments going with LangGraph at the moment, and can't wait to tell you more about what I can build.

Until then, stay frosty and keep building rad things.

Tool Links:

How I've Been Driving LLMs - Part 1

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT

It's been a while since I've written one of these, and I low-key hate how often I've done the "this blog is so back!" dance, so let's jump right into it. To paraphrase Geoffrey Huntley:

You are using LLMs incorrectly.

Listen, I get it. New tools are exciting! They're exciting to me, too. LLMs have been around for a while, but I'm also a little new to using them for coding. I've had a ChatGPT subscription for about a year now. I've used it for troubleshooting some GitHub Action errors, scaffolding out some ECS JSON boilerplate, and for building tools on top of Atuin. It was (and is) a very helpful tool, even in the pre-MCP era.

But what we've been seeing come out in the last couple of months (mainly off-the-shelf agentic tools and the seeming advent of Model Context Protocol servers) have really changed the game. These new tools are incredibly powerful. They now have the ability to reach beyond the walls of their apps and take action on filesystems. Instead of generating a code snippet you need to copy and paste somewhere useful, they can just add a file to your codebase and write the script for you.

But there are still limits. Context windows. Message lengths. Token rate limiting.

How do you drive a top of the line Ferrari with limits like an automatic transmission to it's full potential? I can't put it any better than Philipp Schmid (previously of Hugging Face & now Google DeepMind):

The conversation is shifting from "prompt engineering" to a broader, more powerful concept: Context Engineering. With the rise of Agents it becomes more important what information we load into the “limited working memory”.

A little over a month ago, my boss shared a blog post from Huntley about how he got Claude Code to decompile itself. After reading it, I poked through some of his other posts and got mentally stuck on these two:

You should definitely read them yourself, and Geoffrey says a lot specifically about Cursor (though I'd argue his points apply more broadly in the whole LLM space), but I'll do my best to summarize:

The agentic cat is out of the metaphorical bag, so you may as well lean into it. Agents can actually do work instead of just talking about it and, like the chat apps of the world, can be steered by providing them context about what you want them to do.
Instead of using one-off prompts, build up a "stdlib" (standard library) of re-usable rules that can be composed together like Unix pipes. You might have stdlib docs about how you like to write JavaScript (architecture choices, error handling, naming schemes), particular frameworks you like to use for different problem domains, how you like to build Docker images. Any number of things really. This tells your LLM "how" to build software to your taste.
In addition to your ever growing document store of stdlibs, start each new project (feature, bugfix, etc..) by having a conversation with your LLM of choice about what you want to build. Have your LLM ask you follow up questions as assumption checks. Once you iron out what exactly needs to get built, have it generate a set of project specification docs. Things like technical decisions, testing strategies, api references, and deployment methods. This tells your LLM "what" to build.
When those stdlib and specs docs are ready and loaded in your project repo, spin up an agent (like Claude Code), and get it into a loopback pattern. You can tell it something like:

Please go and study all the documents under @specs/ for functional specifications. Study all the documents under @stdlib/ for technical requirements. Implement what is not implemented. Create tests. Build the project, run it, fix on errors.
And if you ever run out of tokens or hit a context window: spin up a new agent, give it the same prompt, and Implement what is not implemented tells it to pick up and start running again. This lets the LLM run wild in it's sandbox.

There's more nuance than that, and this method works a lot better with strongly typed languages that provide good error messages. Like I said, please go and read those posts yourself. They're very helpful. The main idea, though, is that these new tools allow us to build autonomous development systems where we can compose high level requirements and let the agent do the heavy lifting by leveraging all of the stdlib and spec docs we're writing to keep it aimed in the right direction.

Say it with me now:

Context Engineering!

I used that method to build a Home Assistant CLI/TUI app over the course of a couple of days. That project had been in my backlog for years and I was able to generate a functioning CLI tool to handle my lights from the command line in about 2-3 hours of active time steering Claude Code.

Geoffrey's stdlib and spec blog posts lit a fire in me. They're stuck in my brain. And those of you who know me, know that I live by the phrase "work smarter, not harder". All I can think about lately is how to scale this up.

If I could build a tool I've always wanted in the matter of a few hours of generating some off the cuff Golang stdlib docs and defining my project specifications, what could I do with a mountain of stdlibs built up over many projects?

Turns out, the mountain already exists and we can use it for free.

Part 2 to come soon. I can't wait to introduce y'all to Jane!

Tool Links:

https://www.anthropic.com/claude-code

Website Update - Signal Boost Page

Sat, 13 Feb 2021 00:00:00 GMT

I just finished giving HenryNeeds.Coffee its annual-ish refresh. I updated the menu bar, split up a lot of the homepage into separate content-specific pages, but my favorite addition is the new Signal Boost page.

When I was looking around for refresh inspiration, I came across Christine Dodrill's website. It has a similar terminal-ish design as mine but with way better colors for everything - which honestly is what I wanted to address with the refresh.

But in looking through Christine's site, I found the Signal Boost page - designed to put a spotlight on other tech folks looking for work. After a year where a lot of people lost their jobs, I felt it was a better use of my time to set up a signal boost page of my own rather than making some colors look better.

There are so many developers, engineers, ops folks, and all kinds of other tech workers trying to land a new gig right now. I'm lucky enough to still be working, so providing visibility to those who aren't is the least I can do with the small platform I have.

I only got to where I am with the help of my friends and colleagues. This is something small I can do to pay that forward, and I encourage y'all to set up something similar.

In that vein, I wanted to share how I threw this together so that you can, too.

First off, this site's code is available in this GitHub repo, but I'll go into specifics about how this particular feature works.

HenryNeeds.Coffee was built using GatsbyJS, and it all sits on top of a hello-world base.

In Gatsby sites, data has to come from somewhere, and I already had certain plugins (like gatsby-source-filesystem and gatsby-transformer-yaml) installed and my ./gatsby-config.js file configured to ingest yaml so that it can be queried with GraphQL.

I had that part of Gatsby's content mesh set up to turn ./src/resume/resume.yaml into content for my Resume and Talks // Pods pages. I expanded that out to power my Blog page with markdown files, and expanded it again to handle Signal Boost.

First off, though, I needed to make a new page so that https://henryneeds.coffee/signal-boost would resolve to something:

// Whole of ./src/pages/signal-boost.js
import React from "react"
import Layout from "../components/Layout"
import SignalBoostLogin from "../components/SignalBoostLogin"

export default () => (
  <Layout>
    <SignalBoostLogin />
  </Layout>
);

All this file does is import and render a component named SignalBoostLogin. That component handles things like important the menu bar, doing some date math for the "Current login" header. But its main job is querying data provided by ./src/signalboost/signalboost.yaml (more on that later) and then iterating over those results to set up individual SignalBoost components.

// Selection from ./src/components/SignalBoostLogin/index.js
<StaticQuery
    query={graphql`
      query signalBoostQuery {
        allSignalboostYaml {
          edges {
            node {
              people {
                name
                tech
                github
                twitter
              }
            }
          }
        }
      }
    `}
    render={SignalBoostPage}
  />

This is the GraphQL query that pulls information defined in that /.src/signalboost/signalboost.yaml file then renders the SignalBoostPage component (in the same file) which ingests the GraphQL results as data.

// Selection from ./src/components/SignalBoostLogin/index.js
{data.allSignalboostYaml.edges[0].node.people.map((person) => (
  <SignalBoost
    name={person.name}
    tech={person.tech}
    github={person.github}
    twitter={person.twitter}
  />
))}

Like I said earlier, this page is just meant to grab the data provided by the yaml file, iterate over it, and generate individual SignalBoost components for each entry via that .map() method. The whole name={person.name} bit passes all the individual data points from the GraphQL results as props that can be picked up and used by the child component (SignalBoost).

// Whole of ./src/components/SignalBoost/index.js
import React from "react"

export default (props) => (
  <div>
    <h3>{ props.name }</h3>
    <p>{ props.tech }</p>
    <p><a href={ props.github } target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">[ GitHub ]</a>&nbsp;<a href={ props.twitter } target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">[ Twitter ]</a></p>
    <hr />
  </div>
)

And this (finally) is the template that takes those props, throws the values into the HTML, and renders out individual divs of name/tech/links on the final Signal Boost page.

So to recap:

The actual data gets updated in the ./src/signalboost/signalboost.yaml file.
The page served by the https://henryneeds.coffee/signal-boost URL calls the ./src/components/SignalBoostLogin/ component.
That component queries the data provided by the ./src/signalboost/signalboost.yaml file, iterates over it, and calls multiple ./src/components/SignalBoost/ components.
Each of those components takes the data passed to it as props and renders out HTML for each person being signal boosted.

So yaml like this:

# ./src/signalboost/signalboost.yaml
people:
  - name: "John Doe"
    tech: "bash docker devops gatsby javascript kubernetes linux sql web"
    github: "https://github.com/username"
    twitter: "https://twitter.com/username"
  - name: "John Doe 2"
    tech: "aws python pandas golang"
    github: "https://github.com/username2"
    twitter: "https://twitter.com/username2"

Will render this:

If anyone wants to add themself, all they need to do is follow the instructions here, edit the YAML file, and submit a pull request.

Once I get the notification, check the formatting, and roll the change into my main branch: builds will automatically kick off on Netlify and Fleek to deploy the updated version.

It took me a couple of days' worth of free cycles to figure this all out and get it working the way I like it, but the current version works great!

So far I've had two folks submit PR's and it went off without a hitch. They submitted their PR, I hit the "Merge" button, and the builds kicked off all on their own.

Building the feature was pretty painless given that I already had my site built on Gatsby's engine. However, adding something like this to a different static site generator or build process should be fairly easy once you understand the data flow.

Lots of folks lost their jobs over the past year, and really what's the point of having a voice, site, blog, or whatever if we don't help others climb up behind us on the same ladders?

Just something to chew on.

Stay frosty.

https://henryneeds.coffee (IPFS Version)
Blog (IPFS Version)
LinkedIn
Twitter

OptiProx - The Prep

Thu, 04 Feb 2021 00:00:00 GMT

After having some discussions with folks on the /r/sleeperbattlestations and /r/sleepingoptiplex subreddits, I wanted to toss up a quick post on what I'm doing with my server build.

The more I hear bad stories coming out of Silicon Valley regarding user privacy the more I want to de-Google-ify my life. Having calendars and email services and data stores available to me for free is super convenient but it's not worth the hassle of having to rely on a small handful of companies to do the right thing (regarding both security and ethics).

But I have been running some servers (mostly through Digital Ocean) for the last several years, so I am fairly comfortable running my own services.

And running a server in my apartment to have better stewardship of my data is right up my alley.

Honestly, I've been wanting to do this for a while. It'll be fairly easy for me to use something like Proxmox to stand up some services like NextCloud, Home Assistant, Gogs, a Minecraft server, and a handful of other things.

Just need to build the thing first, you know? I definitely want to build a sleeper. I always love seeing cool builds of great modern hardware in a retro-ish chassis, so picking out a case is obviously where I needed to start.

Whatever I chose needed to hold a motherboard with an AM4 socket and remind me of my childhood.

Something like the old beige tower from our guest room with a Pentium II in it or the charcoal Dell Dimension 4500-ish machine I used for my homework in middle school.

After a few failed Craigslist attempts to pick up a Dimension I ultimately settled on an OptiPlex 390.

Awww yeah, that's the stuff. Just like what my grade school computer labs used to run.

I managed to snag it for $20 from ReSource in Williston, VT while I was up north for a couple of weeks in December (after following all relevant VT state-mandated COVID-19 travel protocols).

Huge thank you to the fellow Champlain grad who helped me find and strip the computer from their warehouse!

Once I got home I worked on finalizing my parts list:

<a href="https://pcpartpicker.com/list/cgskmk">PCPartPicker Part List</a> <table class="pcpp-part-list"> <thead> <tr> <th>Type</th> <th>Item</th> <th>Price</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td class="pcpp-part-list-type">CPU</td> <td class="pcpp-part-list-item"><a href="https://pcpartpicker.com/product/tLCD4D/amd-ryzen-9-3900x-36-ghz-12-core-processor-100-100000023box">AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 3.8 GHz 12-Core Processor</a></td> <td class="pcpp-part-list-price"> Purchased For $380.00 </td> </tr> <tr> <td class="pcpp-part-list-type">CPU Cooler</td> <td class="pcpp-part-list-item"><a href="https://pcpartpicker.com/product/gqxbt6/id-cooling-se-914-xt-basic-458-cfm-cpu-cooler-se-914-xt-basic">ID-COOLING SE-914-XT Basic 45.8 CFM CPU Cooler</a></td> <td class="pcpp-part-list-price"> Purchased For $28.99 </td> </tr> <tr> <td class="pcpp-part-list-type">Thermal Compound</td> <td class="pcpp-part-list-item"><a href="https://pcpartpicker.com/product/JmYLrH/arctic-mx-4-2019-edition-4-g-thermal-paste-actcp00002b">ARCTIC MX-4 2019 Edition 4 g Thermal Paste</a></td> <td class="pcpp-part-list-price"> Purchased For $8.59 </td> </tr> <tr> <td class="pcpp-part-list-type">Motherboard</td> <td class="pcpp-part-list-item"><a href="https://pcpartpicker.com/product/VyBhP6/gigabyte-b550m-ds3h-micro-atx-am4-motherboard-b550m-ds3h">Gigabyte B550M DS3H Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard</a></td> <td class="pcpp-part-list-price"> Purchased For $101.02 </td> </tr> <tr> <td class="pcpp-part-list-type">Memory</td> <td class="pcpp-part-list-item"><a href="https://pcpartpicker.com/product/gCCFf7/crucial-ballistix-32-gb-2-x-16-gb-ddr4-3200-memory-bl2k16g32c16u4b">Crucial Ballistix 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory</a></td> <td class="pcpp-part-list-price"> <a href="https://pcpartpicker.com/product/gCCFf7/crucial-ballistix-32-gb-2-x-16-gb-ddr4-3200-memory-bl2k16g32c16u4b">$148.99 @ Newegg</a> </td> </tr> <tr> <td class="pcpp-part-list-type">Storage</td> <td class="pcpp-part-list-item"><a href="https://pcpartpicker.com/product/P4ZFf7/samsung-970-evo-500gb-m2-2280-solid-state-drive-mz-v7e500bw">Samsung 970 Evo 500 GB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive</a></td> <td class="pcpp-part-list-price"> Purchased For $69.12 </td> </tr> <tr> <td class="pcpp-part-list-type">Storage</td> <td class="pcpp-part-list-item"><a href="https://pcpartpicker.com/product/rkV48d/western-digital-internal-hard-drive-wd40efrx">Western Digital Red 4 TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive</a></td> <td class="pcpp-part-list-price"> <a href="https://pcpartpicker.com/product/rkV48d/western-digital-internal-hard-drive-wd40efrx">$104.99 @ Newegg</a> </td> </tr> <tr> <td class="pcpp-part-list-type">Storage</td> <td class="pcpp-part-list-item"><a href="https://pcpartpicker.com/product/rkV48d/western-digital-internal-hard-drive-wd40efrx">Western Digital Red 4 TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive</a></td> <td class="pcpp-part-list-price"> <a href="https://pcpartpicker.com/product/rkV48d/western-digital-internal-hard-drive-wd40efrx">$104.99 @ Newegg</a> </td> </tr> <tr> <td class="pcpp-part-list-type">Storage</td> <td class="pcpp-part-list-item"><a href="https://pcpartpicker.com/product/rkV48d/western-digital-internal-hard-drive-wd40efrx">Western Digital Red 4 TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive</a></td> <td class="pcpp-part-list-price"> <a href="https://pcpartpicker.com/product/rkV48d/western-digital-internal-hard-drive-wd40efrx">$104.99 @ Newegg</a> </td> </tr> <tr> <td class="pcpp-part-list-type">Storage</td> <td class="pcpp-part-list-item"><a href="https://pcpartpicker.com/product/rkV48d/western-digital-internal-hard-drive-wd40efrx">Western Digital Red 4 TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive</a></td> <td class="pcpp-part-list-price"> <a href="https://pcpartpicker.com/product/rkV48d/western-digital-internal-hard-drive-wd40efrx">$104.99 @ Newegg</a> </td> </tr> <tr> <td class="pcpp-part-list-type">Video Card</td> <td class="pcpp-part-list-item"><a href="https://pcpartpicker.com/product/x7s8TW/msi-geforce-gtx-1050-ti-4gb-video-card-gtx-1050-ti-4gt-oc">MSI GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 4 GB Video Card</a></td> <td class="pcpp-part-list-price"> Purchased For $212.69 </td> </tr> <tr> <td class="pcpp-part-list-type">Power Supply</td> <td class="pcpp-part-list-item"><a href="https://pcpartpicker.com/product/mPdxFT/seasonic-focus-sgx-650w-80-gold-certified-fully-modular-sfx-power-supply-ssr-650sgx">SeaSonic FOCUS SGX 650 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular SFX Power Supply</a></td> <td class="pcpp-part-list-price"> Purchased For $139.30 </td> </tr> <tr> <td class="pcpp-part-list-type">Case Fan</td> <td class="pcpp-part-list-item"><a href="https://pcpartpicker.com/product/jZn2FT/noctua-case-fan-nfb9redux1600pwm">Noctua B9 redux-1600 PWM 37.85 CFM 92 mm Fan</a></td> <td class="pcpp-part-list-price"> Purchased For $10.95 </td> </tr> <tr> <td class="pcpp-part-list-type">Case Fan</td> <td class="pcpp-part-list-item"><a href="https://pcpartpicker.com/product/jZn2FT/noctua-case-fan-nfb9redux1600pwm">Noctua B9 redux-1600 PWM 37.85 CFM 92 mm Fan</a></td> <td class="pcpp-part-list-price"> Purchased For $10.95 </td> </tr> <tr> <td class="pcpp-part-list-type">Custom</td> <td class="pcpp-part-list-item"><a href="https://pcpartpicker.com/product/QVFXsY/orico-aluminum-525-inch-to-25-or-35-inch-internal-hard-disk-drive-mounting-kit-with-screws-and-shock-absorption-rubber-washer-black">ORICO Aluminum 5.25 inch to 2.5 or 3.5 Inch Internal Hard Disk Drive Mounting Kit with Screws and SHOCK Absorption Rubber Washer- Black</a></td> <td class="pcpp-part-list-price"> Purchased For $8.79 </td> </tr> <tr> <td class="pcpp-part-list-type">Custom</td> <td class="pcpp-part-list-item"><a href="https://pcpartpicker.com/product/QVFXsY/orico-aluminum-525-inch-to-25-or-35-inch-internal-hard-disk-drive-mounting-kit-with-screws-and-shock-absorption-rubber-washer-black">ORICO Aluminum 5.25 inch to 2.5 or 3.5 Inch Internal Hard Disk Drive Mounting Kit with Screws and SHOCK Absorption Rubber Washer- Black</a></td> <td class="pcpp-part-list-price"> Purchased For $8.79 </td> </tr> <tr> <td class="pcpp-part-list-type">Custom</td> <td class="pcpp-part-list-item">Dell Optiplex 390</td> <td class="pcpp-part-list-price">Purchased For $20.00</td> </tr> <tr> <td></td> <td class="pcpp-part-list-price-note">Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts</td> <td></td> </tr> <tr> <td></td> <td class="pcpp-part-list-total">Total</td> <td class="pcpp-part-list-total-price">$1568.14</td> </tr> <tr> <td></td> <td class="pcpp-part-list-price-note">Generated by <a href="https://pcpartpicker.com">PCPartPicker</a> 2021-02-03 22:13 EST-0500</td> <td></td> </tr> </tbody> </table>

I'm overbuilding the hell out of this thing, but it should last me a long, long time. Once my new power supply comes in (more on that later), I'll just need to order the RAM and hard drives before I can start building.

Once I got the parts figured out, I needed to tackle modding the case a bit to fix the obvious airflow problem.

The back looks fine. Plenty of slots for the 1050 Ti (potential hardware transcoding), a regular size cutout for rear IO, room for a full-sized PSU, and even a spot for a fan!

Inside is super clean once you strip it down. Screw layout for a standard Micro-ATX motherboard, two dedicated slots for drives, two 5.5" slots (surprise, more hard drives), and plenty of room in the front I can take advantage of for a fan intake.

The only issue here is that while there's plenty of room for a full-sized ATX power supply in here, I missed that black hook for the side panel latch even after measuring twice. The ATX unit I ordered didn't quite fit so I hard to return it for the SGX form factor one, which SHOULD fit. That'll be coming in the mail by the end of this week - fingers crossed.

The one real bit of modding I had to do was cutting a hole in the front of this thing. One fan wasn't going to cut it, so I wanted to throw an intake in there too.

I forgot to take a picture before I taped it up, but the whole front is the same type of metal grille that you can see right below the tape line.

Either way: I taped it up, marked out the hole so that there was still room for mounting hardware, and cut the thing out with a rotary tool.

Not the prettiest cut, but not bad for my first job with a new tool.

The fan mounted nice enough after I gave the mounting holes a second pass to make sure everything lines up. Plenty of room for airflow.

And honestly, once I got the front panel back on, you can't even tell the case has been modded.

After using some canned air to get all the dust and stuff out, I tossed the exhaust fan and all the odds & ends that came with the shell back in.

Like I said, there are still a few parts to order before I can start the build in earnest.

Might even take a day off work for all the fun. ;)

That adventure will be worthy of a whole other post.

Once that's up, it should be followed by another one on setting up Proxmox.

Can't wait to share more with y'all!

Stay frosty.

IPFS - The Decentralized Web Is Finally Here

Wed, 27 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMT

It's the spring of 2011. I've already been accepted to college. Senioritis is setting in and 3OH!3 is blaring on my headphones as I sit at my desk at 2 AM on a school night...

Homework long since done, I'm staring at the screen of the heavily used 17" Gateway laptop I managed to get off my boss at The Computer Shack in place of actual payment.

I'm trying to test a tool on a Windows XP partition so that I could confidently install it on my high school's network.

I had already hidden a handful of games on a shared drive meant for our teachers' math and science tools.

My friends and I had plenty there to keep us occupied at the end of long lab periods, but we wanted to be able to chat with each other while we fragged each other in Blood Gulch.

And of course, phones weren't allowed.

This tool would let us piggyback on (the since sunsetted) net send command to effectively let us private message each other over the local network.

Being the "nerd" of the group, it was my responsibility to get this set up. The IT guys may not have loved what I was getting up to, but we had an understanding. I could bend the rules a bit as long as I let them know what parts of their security they needed to shore up.

But this tool, though.

Someone wrote an entire chat application written on top of a network command, put it online for free, and I had the ability (and unintended privileges) to do something rad with it and make the tail end of high school more exciting.

I remember explicitly taking a moment to sit back to think about how god damned cool that was.

Now, about 10 years later, I'm living that moment all over again.

Work was done at 5:00 today. My girlfriend, tired from nursing school, is in bed. Dishes are... well, sitting in the sink dirty.

I'm sitting at my computer: late at night, working on a project, and thinking about how lucky I am to be alive and a few years into my development career right now.

Last week, I stumbled onto a Verge article about a new (well, 5 years old) technology that's just starting to pick up steam, called InterPlanetary File System (IPFS).

Folks who came to this post from a Tweet or something probably know what I'm talking about. But for those who don't:

Wikipedia defines IPFS as

...a protocol and peer-to-peer network for storing and sharing data in a distributed file system. IPFS uses content-addressing to uniquely identify each file in a global namespace connecting all computing devices.

IPFS allows users to not only receive but host content, in a similar manner to BitTorrent. As opposed to a centrally located server, IPFS is built around a decentralized system of user-operators who hold a portion of the overall data, creating a resilient system of file storage and sharing. Any user in the network can serve a file by its content address, and other peers in the network can find and request that content from any node who has it using a distributed hash table (DHT).

Long story short, the future of the internet is here.

A group of people worked for years to actually make the decentralized internet that Pied Piper was trying to make on the later seasons of Silicon Valley.

They built an entirely new protocol for accessing the web. It's meant to work alongside (not replace) HTTPS and operates similarly to BitTorrent in that data (for websites, videos, games, apps, anything) is shared amongst peers and not fetched from central servers owned by Amazon or some other Evil Corp™.

The ramifications here are HUGE.

1. Have you ever had a resource on the web disappear on you?

That's a dumb question because so have I.

There's this mashup called "Ketchup V1" from an artist named The Deaf DJ that I'd love to be able to find again.

I'm sure you all have your own white whales.

Content that we care about on Web 2.0 (the HTTPS based one we're on now) only sticks around if the people creating and hosting that content want to keep it available.

If some publisher or individual decides they want to take a site down or stop paying for a monthly web server bill, then whatever information they were hosting effectively disappears.

The internet is supposed to be the culmination of all human knowledge, but small and easy to host files (like sheet music or a set of woodworking instructions) could disappear because someone needs to reign in their budget.

IPFS allows anyone to go "Hey, that blog post on how to code this feature was really helpful to me, I'd like to re-host it so that other people will always be able to find it later."

The Brave browser, mentioned in that Verge article, implemented IPFS features that let me do that with two mouse clicks.

That's a beautiful thing.

2. Speaking of resources disappearing, did you know that for a few years Turkey blocked their citizens from accessing Wikipedia?

Again, the culmination of all human knowledge, but sequestered from citizens.

Kind of fucked up, right? Especially when you know the importance of tools like social media sites during times like the Arab Spring. Being able to block entire portions of the web, like China's Great Firewall, is a dangerous precedent.

Turkey was able to block Wikipedia because web addresses are currently based on file locations.

You tell your browser to go all the way to the group of servers that the Wikimedia Foundation set up to host Wikipedia and then, once there, pull up the page on water filtration.

Since Turkey could see where those web requests were pointing (the addresses assigned to Wikipedia servers), they were able to stop them from completing.

Since everything on IPFS is content-addressed (via a hash), whenever you request a page, your browser pulls it from whoever happens to be closest to you and is also hosting that file.

With this new model of web browsing, we're not dependent on corporations renting servers from even bigger corporations to keep the information we care about, and they currently control, on the internet.

Instead of relying on publishers like the New York Times keeping articles hosted on their servers, or platforms like Stack Exchange seeing the value in keeping answers to years old questions online, we can just click a button to rehost web content so that it's always accessible on a massive P2P network.

No more going all the way to specific servers that governments, ISPs, or rogue actors may be able to cut off access to in the future.

This gives the people the ability to decide what's worth keeping around in perpetuity. Theoretically, the good stuff will be pinned by enough users that it'll be around forever, while the bad stuff will fall to the wayside.

3. It harkens back to the markedly non-corporate early internet so many of us fell in love with.

I, for one, am tired of the internet being mostly a collection of the same seven sites over and over again.

So many of our favorite old websites and interesting things we bookmarked just don't exist anymore.

All of that effort and content and knowledge is just lost forever, only to be replaced by "community of communities" sites like Facebook and Reddit.

I miss the days where we'd go to AddictingGames to play some games, check out some tech news on whichever blog we liked, get involved in separate niche community forums, and generally exist without having to move all our data through massive corporations.

This move to a decentralized web has been encouraging early builders to make fun little web pages, more niche community apps, and just experimenting with the new format.

It's like the wild west on the web again, and while a lot of the tooling and architecture still needs to be figured out, the possibilities are endless.

The new web is weird and that's a good thing.

That brings me back to my earlier point:

I'm sitting at my computer: late at night, working on a project, and thinking about how lucky I am to be alive and a few years into my development career right now.

This kind of decentralized web that lives on all of our devices and frees us from our dependencies on corporations is something my computer lab buddies and I have wanted to exist for a long time.

Over the years since college, I've headed up tech communities, led nationwide teams of developers, and traveled around the country giving and listening to talks.

All that and I've honestly never been more excited about a new $web_thing crossing my desk.

IPFS is the real deal. From nerd dreams of old to HBO jokes to your ears (well, eyes).

It's finally here, it's being given away for free, and I understand enough modern web development to help build it.

That's something 18-year-old me would be absolutely hype about. I just hope I can make him proud.

I'm working on a project built on IPFS with a buddy of mine from GitLab.

Without giving too much away: it's built with GatsbyJS, hosted on IPFS with Fleek, and should help folks adapt to the early days of this new web protocol.

I should have another blog post with some more information to share soon.

Stay frosty.

IPFS 1 - The Decentralized Web Is Finally Here