Ran my first marathon: https://philstephens.com/blog/i-ran-my-first-marathon
Moments
Clean install of macOS on my personal laptop - a lot of chaff built up over the past few years so good to free up some space and try out some new apps.
Spent some time today getting Claude to upgrade an old Laravel 8 project to Laravel 13 - pretty flawless upgrade, ready to dive back into some feature development.
So glad I decided to move away from iCloud sync/collaboration for my side-project app. A day with Claude, Codex, and my experience with building sync architectures (plus a $6 Laravel VPS server) and I have a fully working and 1000x more reliable sync service.
I’ll write all about it once this app launches.
Throwing the towel in on CloudKit sharing for the iOS app I’ve been working on. Too buggy and unreliable. Going back to the drawing board and building out my own cloud sync service - something I am much more familiar with.
Happy with that. First long run of my ‘official’ Gold Coast marathon training. Aiming for zone 2 and 3 in my training - keeping my heart rate down rather than pushing for speed. My target for the main event in July: to finish. #gcm26 #farnotfast
After buying a license well over a year ago, I'm finally getting to use Flux UI in a project.
Taking advantage of those free #Claude extra usage credits to build out some personal software I’ve been thinking about for a while.
Time to get serious(ish) about marathon training. 13 weeks to go until the Gold Coast Marathon. Since I'm not too concerned about speed, my main training protocol is around distance at low-intensity. Three runs a week - parkrun (5km) on Saturdays, an easy/recovery run on Mondays, and then a long run on Wednesday. Got Claude to do the math on optimum distances for each - let's go!
Looks like there has been some bad bots on the loose in the last 24 hours, probing my blog for common exploits and security leaks. My homemade analytics may be basic, but it sees all...
Everyone else is writing about how they use AI for development, so I figured I would too: https://philstephens.com/blog/how-i-actually-use-ai-coding-tools
Cleaned up the lightweight visitor analytics for my website using terminable middleware - deferring it until after the response has been sent back to the user. Wrote about it here: https://philstephens.com/blog/laravels-terminable-middleware-run-code-after-the-response
First feature added using the Laravel AI SDK - automatic alt text generation for images added to this site.
Another day, another rejection due to "lack of experience" - for a job that I could do (and have done) with my eyes closed. I've been about this for a while and finally decided to put it into words: https://philstephens.com/blog/the-title-trap-what-a-decade-of-wrong-job-titles-taught-me-about-career-progression
Riffing on my personal CMS to make it more portable and reusable for other sites, including adding a static site generator because “why not?”.
Moved the codebase for my personal website (custom CMS) into Claude Code ready for some new feature development.
TIL as an Australian developer you need to have an ABN and be registered for GST before you can sell apps on the App Store. Guess it will be a little bit longer before I release my first app…
iOS project is almost ready to release - need a quick single page marketing website so taking Stitch for a spin to see what it can come up with.
Not a lot, it seems.
iOS project is almost ready to release - need a quick single page marketing website so taking Stitch for a spin to see what it can come up with.
Finally got iCloud sharing working for my new app. The experience of managing shares leaves a lot to be desired, but once everything is hooked up it all works flawlessly.
Launching this app just got a whole lot closer.