Me

Author: Sebastian

  • What Does “Being your Own Boss” Really Mean?

    A Rarely Voiced Perspective on Personal and Professional Self-Governance A split image that contrasts a traditional office environment with an entrepreneurial workspace. “I want to be my own boss” is an aspiration that motivates so many people, both young and old — while also selling 1,000,000’s of mediocre books and drop-shipping master classes. Professionals working within hierarchical…

  • Flexible Association Managers in Rails 7 APIs

    Adding association management methods to Rails models Photo by Transly Translation Agency on Unsplash If you’re a Rails developer, you’re probably familiar with updating associated records through the association_name_ids= setter method. That strategy works well, but often leads to cluttered controller methods for managing record associations. In a current project, I found myself wanting a more convenient…

  • Potential Not Monetized is Not Potential Wasted

    Sunrise in Kintamani, Bali It’s tempting to fall into the habit of expressing ones own ideas under the guise of “we”, “they”, and “people.” Doing so introduces the comforting illusion that I am not alone in feeling what I’m trying to express in that moment. Nonetheless, most interesting observations are those I suspect to be…

  • Using ChatGPT in Jupyter Notebooks

    A Simple Implementation to Use OpenAI Chat Completions in Jupyter Notebooks Photo by Emile Perron on Unsplash While working on a research project in JupyterLab, I found myself too frequently jumping back and forth between ChatGPT and the notebook. My research has to do with prompt engineering, so capturing the ongoing dialog is important. This encouraged…

  • How to Turn ChatGPT into a Voice-Enabled Chatbot in 60 Lines of Code

    Turn ChatGPT into a Voice-Enabled Chatbot in 60 Lines of Code I recently found an article about someone who built a Zapier integration between Alexa and ChatGPT. Although it was a cool project, I realized it wasn’t necessary to use a third-party platform or Home Speaker to interact with ChatGPT using voice. All the required functionality…

  • Overriding Service Methods in Strapi V4’s Upload Plugin

    Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash Strapi CMS is a popular, open-source headless CMS that provides a flexible and easy-to-use platform for building web applications. One of its core plugins is the upload provider, but the default implementation ships with some biased configurations that can lead to trouble. In this article, I’ll show you a simple method…

  • Simple Tools Lead to Better Focus

    Photo by airfocus on Unsplash Like many others, I use Google Workspace for my daily operations at walkthrough.ai. Unlike many others, I’m borderline obstinate when signing up for YAS (yet another SaaS). Even the smallest companies today are overflowing with dozens of SaaS subscriptions (paid and free). However, they usually only leverage a small percentage of…

  • Four Pillars of World-Class Product Documentation

    Key Factors to Consider when Creating Product Documentation for Digital Products Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash Product documentation is a critical component of any successful product. It provides users with the information they need to understand how to use and get the most out of the product and can be a key factor in determining whether…

  • A Numbers Driven Approach to Transforming My Body and Health

    How simple math helped me shed fat, build muscle, and get ripped in 4-months. Before and after, Jan 5th to May 1st At the start of 2022, I committed to the Body Fat Challenge (BFC) with 49 other guys. For 26-years, the BFC has been organized and run bi-annually by a close-knit group of friends in…

  • The Triangle of Scalability

    3-dimensions of scalability to consider when curating a tech stack. Like in Seth McFarlane’s movie A Million Ways to Die in the West, there are a million ways to fail when building a tech company. Many of those ways, sadly, are entirely out of our control. Geo-political shifts, financial market volatility, new tech innovations, talent scarcity,…

  • Why should you NOT use a GraphQL API Client

    GraphQL Clients are not necessary for making GraphQL API Calls, and often complete overkill for the job at hand. Imagine that your friend purchases a semi-truck because, “they run a lot of errands.” Any sane person would tell that friend that they’ve gone a little too far. Even the most modest, budget vehicle would likely do…

  • What Actually Makes Demos, MVPs and Full-products Different?

    Definitions for Demos, MVPs and Full-builds to help you determine which one your startup needs Photo by Startup Stock Photos from Pexels Word definitions are really, really important. When I ask the barista for my “large cold-brew, no milk and no sugar” each morning, 2-minutes later I’ll have exactly what I asked for. The reason that works…

  • Even if it’s bad

    Eight years ago I started writing for myself. Before then, every character I typed went towards a professor’s stipulated word-count. Writing was an assignment, not a pleasure. Watching Woody Allen’s biography is what tipped me. Early in his career he wrote acts for a dinner show. Twice a week, every week, the beclub needed 4-hours of new material,…

  • From Soil to Sip: How Purpose Dictates the Coffee Supply Chain

    My first job out of school was in the coffee industry, working on a farm in Panama. It was the beginning of an 18-month journey where I learned what it really takes to make a great cup of coffee. To disperse any unnecessary suspense, I’ll get straight to the answer — which isn’t a fancy brewing contraption,…

  • The Art of Abstraction, in Code

    Many people believe in a separation existing between arts and sciences. Science is bound to rules and knowledge while art is limited only by imagination. Most people agree with this idea. However, an artist’s brush is beholden to the same laws as any scientific invention. Meaning that the only true difference between them is the…