I'm a developer advocate who loves the web platform, APIs, AI, and basically just anything involving code. I love to write about technology and share that with others. I've got fun stuff to show you and I'm so happy you're here!
Welcome to my corner of the internet where I share insights about development, best and sometimes questionable practices, and cat demos.
Back in November of last year I wrote up a blog post talking about a new (at the time) Google Gemini feature, File Stores: "Gemini File Search and File Stores for Easy RAG". In that post I discussed what it was, how it worked, and built up a simple example. You should definitely read that post first, but if you want the TLDR, here ya go:
Happy Saturday folks, and while this is a topic I've covered many times here, I was bored and wanting to write some code, so I whipped up a quick demo. One of my favorite uses of AI is to take abstract data and write a human readable form of it. Now to be clear, this is not something you need AI for. Given that you know the shape of your data, you can create your own summary using hard-coded rules about what values to show, how to present them, and so forth. What I like about the Gen AI use-case for this is the amount of randomness and creativity you get in the responses. In the past I've done this with weather forecasts and chart data, but today I thought I'd try something different - monsters.
Happy 2026, programs! As this is the first Links For You for the year, I figure it may be good to remind folks why I write these. Social media can be a great place to share links with folks, but it's very much hit or miss. Someone may share something incredibly cool that you would love to boost, but if you miss it, you're out of luck. I subscribe to many listservs that share good tech links, but a while ago I thought it would be cool to share and promote links I thought were especially cool. Obviously that's pretty opinionated, but that's why you're here, right? Each of these posts will have three links, typically but not always tech related, and a fourth entry that is 100% just for fun. Enjoy!
It's been far too long since I shared an Eleventy tip, and to be fair what I'm showing today can be used anywhere, but hopefully this will be useful to someone else out there. I enjoy tracking my media consumption, specifically movies and books. For movies I've been real happy with Letterboxd (you can see my profile if you wish). For books, I used Goodreads for a very long time, but have wanted to migrate off the platform and switch to something else. There's alternatives, but none really worked well for me. Earlier this week, an old friend of mine (hi Jason!) suggested Hardcover. This is a Goodreads competitor built, in their own words, out of spite, and I can totally get behind that. I signed up and imported my Goodreads data in about five minutes and while I haven't dug deep into the site at all, it seems totally fine to me so I'll be sticking there. You can find my profile here: https://hardcover.app/@raymondcamden
As I continue to dig into, and learn, Astro, I thought I'd take a look at creating custom content collections. Content collections are pretty much exactly how they sound - collection of content items you can use within your Astro site. If you go through the excellent Astro tutorial you will find this discussed at the end in the final optional step step. Content collections aren't required - you can build dynamic sets of data just using file system operations (and that's how the tutorial has you build the blog) - but they make it easier (imo) to re-use content throughout the site.
As I think I've mentioned a few times already, I'm learning Astro and attempting to build random stuff with it just as an excuse to help practice and learn. With that in mind, during the Christmas break and between marathon sessions of Baldur's Gate 3, I built a little site I thought I'd share here on the blog. To be clear, this is nothing special, and doesn't come close to using all of the possible Astro features of course, but it was a useful coding exercise for myself and fun to build.
Want to read everything? Head over to my giant list of every single freaking post ever!