Does your Ubuntu VPS config contain: APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists "1"; APT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade "1"; ? Mine do, saved me some work💪

I've been working on a website that judges other websites. Somehow it's ended up with an absurdly over-engineered, futuristic interface that looks like it should be controlling a nuclear reactor. All that technology just to tell somebody their website looks like shit😆

There's a special kind of developer maths where paying $8 a month for a useful tool is outrageous, but spending an entire weekend building your own version is perfectly reasonable. I don't think we're always trying to save money. Sometimes we just want an excuse to have fun building something 😂

It's getting harder to buy a bit of technology and actually own all its features. Cars, cameras, printers, household gadgets. You buy the hardware, then discover something useful needs a monthly subscription. Imagine buying a hammer and finding out the claw is $4.99 a month 😂

Funny how you can spend months building something, then sit there wondering whether it's worth $15, $39 or $75. The code's the part I know how to do. Pricing it is mostly guesswork 🤷‍♂️

I'm looking for more people on X who actually make things. AI tools, little SaaS projects, WordPress plugins, PHP, JavaScript, whatever. Doesn't matter if you're learning or you've been at it for 20 years. I'd rather follow someone showing off a scrappy weekend project than another account dispensing startup wisdom. What are you working on?

Went to put an end to the bad bot traffic hitting Beyond the News today and found something I wasn't expecting: we'd been linked in the TLDR email newsletter. 500 visitors later...😮

I was making money from websites back when affiliate networks sent cheques in the post. No Stripe dashboard. No SaaS subscriptions. Just build a site, rank it and wait for the cheque. Making software is vastly easier now. Making money from it? Not so much:)

I've been programming for over 20 years and somehow ended up with more unfinished projects now than ever. AI has made building them ridiculously easy. It hasn't done the same for finding customers, handling support or convincing anyone to care.

Somebody has built a Git hook that can quiz you on the code your AI wrote before it'll let you push it. Good idea, if you can't explain what your code does to real data when something goes wrong, perhaps you shouldn't be deploying it just yet.

I think it's time to try a Mac🤞 Yeah, nah?

GitHub's new AI security scanner now checks PHP pull requests. So we've reached the point where AI writes the PHP, another AI looks for security vulnerabilities, and a human gets to decide whether either of them knows what they're talking about. Progress💪😆

DeepSeek has opened Search and Fetch APIs at $0.75 per 1000 requests. That's seriously cheap. After building research automation tools, I've learnt that fetching pages is the easy bit. Working out which sources to trust is the tricky part.

AI can help write code for almost anything now. But try changing the end-of-cycle tune on a washing machine, or making a smart TV stop nagging you. So much household hardware is programmable in theory and locked down in practice.

There was a time when the youngest person in the house was the family tech expert, programming the VHS, tuning the TV, setting up the new computer. Now the youngest person can operate 37 apps but asks Dad why the printer isn't working😆 The family IT dept got old lol

One of my new sites recently clocked 700+ visitors in 24 hours. Sounds great until you notice a 90% bounce rate and 1 second visit duration. Apache logs told a rather different story from the analytics dashboard. There's traffic, and then there's traffic 😂

Some websites want an email address, a password, a verification code and a welcome email before they'll let you use a feature that takes 15 seconds. I wonder how many people just close the tab halfway through registration.