Yesterday I had a technological itch. I was configuring a package in Emacs
and had to search for a variable name, the completion system mixed variables and functions together and it was a bit of a chore. Then I thought “how hard can it be to just create a utility function to list all customizable variables?”. An
(sidenote: And then I spent quite some time tinkering of course :))
later my new package, upiv, was born. You can get it from my forgejo instance.
I’m Dutch, and whenever I’m abroad, people figure this out pretty quickly. It’s usually the bluntness. We tend to be direct, to the point, and question things constantly. To a lot of people, this comes across as… well, weird.
Over the last couple of months there is a lot of activity in Europe when it comes to moving out of the American cloud. This move is called Digital Autonomy, and there are a lot of articles on it, but I like the ones written by Bert Hubert.
When I am working on my own projects, or this website for that matter, I am using Github (which is owned by Microsoft). For some projects I use Gitlab, which was started in The Netherlands, but has now become an American company. Much of my development infrastructure is tied to American companies, simply because they offer the best tools for the job.
You can’t scroll through a tech feed these days without bumping into a hot take on AI and coding. Depending on who you ask, it’s either the greatest productivity boost in history or a security dumpster fire waiting to happen. Opinions are cheap, which is why I prefer to stick to the data from actual research. That way, the information is verifiable, and you can trust the analysis because you can check the sources for yourself. This style of writing I call Research Driven Blogging .
This week’s reading was a deep dive into the world of AI-assisted development, its security implications, and the evolving role of the human developer. I also explored significant topics in hardware, software supply chain security, and some fascinating findings from the world of science.
The intersection of AI, software development, and security was the dominant theme this week. A major focus was on moving beyond simple “vibe coding” toward more structured, secure, and effective methods. This includes “Vibe Speccing” to create structured workflows and using rules files to secure AI coding tools. The concept of “Context Engineering” was presented as the crucial new skill, emphasizing that providing the right information to the model is more important than prompt crafting alone.
I’ve talked about AI mistakes and outside attackers. But what if the AI itself becomes the problem? What if it learns to be deceptive?
It is extremely hot here. I am still pushing the newsletter out, even though I just want to sit in an air-conditioned room playing video games. But here it is!
Hey everyone, welcome to Week 2!
My reading list is a bit shorter this week, mostly because I’ve fallen down a deep, deep 3D printing rabbit hole. (My desk is now covered in very handy 3d printed tools for the printer itself and one glorious OctoRocktopus).
Still, between prints, I managed to find some absolute gems. This week’s theme seems to be the practical, sometimes harsh reality of AI adoption, mixed with some fascinating policy decisions in the open-source world.
Last time , we learned that AI agents are like smart assistants that can think, remember, and most importantly, do things on their own.
Hey everyone, let’s keep going!
So far, I’ve covered the basics of AI security and some specific problems like Prompt Injection. Today, I’m talking about the next big thing: AI Agents.
Alright, welcome back to our chat about AI security!
Welcome to Day 1 of my guide to the important topic of Generative AI (GenAI) and Large Language Model (LLM) security.
A little later then usuals. Yesterday I was at the Dutch ComicCon, and I forgot to post. Here is my reading of last week.
I think we’re all wondering about the deeper effects of weaving AI into our daily lives. This week, I found a few articles that really made me stop and think. The first was a standout study from MIT that suggests using tools like ChatGPT for writing could lead to a kind of “cognitive debt.” They literally measured brain activity and found that relying on AI can cause the parts of our brain responsible for deep thinking to become under-engaged. It’s a fascinating and slightly worrying idea.
Hey everyone,
Let’s be honest. This new wave of generative AI is moving incredibly fast. One minute we’re asking it to write a poem, and the next, AI “agents” are being built to act on their own.
In my feed the opening talk by DHH at Rails World 2024 popped up, most notably due his stance on the reduction of complexity in running an online business. He promotes running your own (virtual) hardware, reducing build pipelines and not using Platform as a Service providers (#nopaas). Watch it below.
I learned that most of the layoffs in the US are not so much about AI taking jobs. Sure, there are bound to be a bunch of people that are no longer employed because their jobs was easily replaced by a system, but there is more then meets the eye. In “The hidden time bomb in the tax code that’s fueling mass tech layoffs” explores the tax rule that was changed under Trump-I, section 174, which basically no longer allows companies to write-off R&D effort in the current fiscal year.
Now, take a look at the following video. If you don’t know any Dutch, Tom is using bolt.new to create an AI chatbot that simulates a difficult HR conversation. How this relates to education isn’t relevant here; the point is that he wants to demonstrate the use of a model with a frontend.
Will software development change? Yes, of course. Will we stop making software? No, we’ll still be creating software, just not in the same way as before.
For the last few months, a lingering question in our industry has been: is there still room for developers in this AI-driven world? My answer is yes, but we won’t be developing in the same way we have for the past 30 years.
My career dates back to my first professional coding job in 1996. Back then, we created software that had to be physically shipped to customers on some form of media. My most ambitious project was the work I did when the Dutch ISP Freeler was created . We wrote software and then put it on a CD-ROM to ship to customers. Later, the delivery medium became the web, which transformed all our distribution challenges. Programming languages evolved too, shifting from those focused on single platforms and distribution methods to more web-friendly languages.
I am leaving NOVI. Yes, I know, it is sad news. For almost 6 years I have been building and maintaining an organisation that provides the best cybersecurity and software development (Bachelor) education in The Netherlands. In that time I have done amazing things:
It has been a wild ride, but like all things that begin, it must end.