Raymond Camden

- A simple web component for file previews

2026-08-11T18:00:00+00:00

This was a "I can't fall asleep and my mind is wondering" type of idea and honestly, I'm surprised at how good it came out. For a while now I've shared demos where a user picks an image and ... something. It doesn't matter. But I typically add a preview of the image when it's selected. This works because once the user selects a file on their local system, JavaScript can then access the bits of that file, making it trivial then to render it. The idea I had, late at night, was simple - what if this could be a web component and expanded to cover different file types?

Links For You (8/2/26)

2026-08-02T18:00:00+00:00

Happy August folks. Louisiana is celebrating the approach of Fall by gradually increasing the temperatures to roughly that of the surface of the sun. Last night we saw the new Spider-Man, which was really good, although not as fantastic as "No Way Home". The point of these posts is for me to share content from other folks, but I'll remind folks of my Youtube channel. This past week I shared a few new videos demonstrating some cool stuff with Cursor so if you've not checked them out yet, give me a quick watch and let me know what you think!

Updating my Watch Site for Algolia Support

2026-07-29T18:00:00+00:00

Alright, so I was supposed to share this a bit quicker, but life, work, etc, kept me busy. I've had this particular change up for a few days but I'm just now getting around to blogging about it. What changes?

Building Agentically and Celebrating Watches

2026-07-24T18:00:00+00:00

I've shared past experiences with vibe coding and it's been a fascinating way to experiment and build on a small scale, but while it works well for POCs and other small utilities (I won't say 'toys' as I've built useful, if small, things now multiple times), it isn't really a "process" and not one that would work over a project with a longer time frame. This is where "Agentic Development" comes in. It's not always referred to as such and it's a huge topic, but let me give you my opinion on it and then demonstrate how I used it to build my newest project, I Watch Watches.

Copying HTML Tables as Text, Markdown, and CSV

2026-07-20T18:00:00+00:00

Earlier today and in a non web-related conversation, I saw someone talk about copying tabular data into different formats, like plain text and CSV. It got me thinking - this could be a useful feature for web sites and surely something pretty trivial to do in JavaScript. So I whipped up a quick demo.

Links For You (7/18/26)

2026-07-18T18:00:00+00:00

Good morning, programs. I'm currently at a conference (Day of Data), but thankfully one just down the road. I'll be back tonight, and thought I'd take a break between sessions to share some links. I'll be presenting later today one of my favorite talks, "A Beginner's Guide to Wrangling Asynchronicity in JavaScript". I love the talk, but given I'm up against eight other talks at the same time and I'm not talking AI... well it may be a small personal affair. We shall see.

TIL - Algolia Makes Creating an MCP Server Stupid Easy

2026-07-11T18:00:00+00:00

A few days ago I was chatting with Chuck Meyer (devrel for Algolia) and I casually mentioned, "It sure would be cool if Algolia had an easy way to turn my search index into an MCP server." He promptly responded, "Of course, you complete and utter dufus, which is why we already have that feature." (Not an exact quote.) This is exactly the kind of thing I love to hear. I've been using Algolia for my search here for years and honestly have not paid much attention to the new additions on their platform. That was a mistake. Let me show you how dang easy they made this.

Turning my Cursor Performance Work into a Repeatable Skill

2026-07-08T18:00:00+00:00

Yesterday, I wrote about using Cursor to review my blog for performance. Cursor (and again, for full disclosure I work here now ;) did a dang good job of finding performance issues with my site, handling the huge size and various languages, platforms, and so forth. As I said, it worked well, but I wanted to look into making this more of a repeatable process.

Asking Cursor to Review My Blog for Performance

2026-07-07T18:00:00+00:00

Last week I decided to try something interesting. I opened my blog up in Cursor and asked for a basic performance review. That seems like a no-brainer, but keep in mind, my blog's source code clocks in at near seven thousand files (ignoring node_modules of course), so this wasn't some small request.

My New Role - Helping AI Adoption at Cursor

2026-07-06T18:00:00+00:00

This will be a short and sweet post to announce that today is my first day at Cursor!