tl;dr
Introduction One of the biggest limitations holding me back from fully adopting Gemini 2.5 Pro in Zed is the pricing. The model uses a lot of tokens, and those tokens are pretty expensive. Plus, the pay-as-you-go model means it’s very easy to rack up a huge bill. In one day, I managed to spend like $6 worth of API tokens. Which, by the way, is in addition to the $16 a month I pay to have access to Gemini 2.5 on the web.
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The added DMs to Spotify…
Background Like most bad decisions with the internet, this starts with Facebook. Or more specifically Instagram. In 2011 a pretty novel app called Snapchat launched. You guys already know the story: stories, photos, video, everything ephemeral, only lasting 24 hours. By 2015 the platform hit 10 billion daily views across all content.
Shortly after that Instagram cloned the feature by adding stories to their own platform. At the time it was a risky decision. Directly taking features from other apps wasn’t a popular concept. Previously, Google had tried to build their own take on a Facebook-like platform with Google+ and that failed miserably. But for Instagram, the risk paid off. Within a few years Snapchat saw a steady decline in its number of users leading to their slow demise.
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A follow-up to my first post about Zed and my most recent post about programming with AI.
About a year ago, I first tried the Zed editor. At the time, I really loved it. It was simple, fast, and had great AI integration. The only things I wasn’t a huge fan of were a few UX issues, like the Vim keybindings being a little wonky. But the way it integrated with ChatGPT (which was the only model I had tried at that point) seemed really promising.
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You ever beat a dead horse? Me? Never? Gurt: Yo AI is the buzzword of the decade, and the possibility of it revolutionizing the tech industry is on the forefront of every dude who says, “I’m more of an ideas guy (derogatory) than an engineer”.
The Current State of Things I feel like everyone already knows the limitations of AI-assisted development at this point, especially if you work in the industry. But if for some reason you don’t, then here’s the rundown.
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Sorry for not posting in a minute. I’ve been busy, and I have a few big posts lined up in the queue. But for now, I want to talk about one of my most recent personal projects.
It started with the perfect storm of events. The first was that I finally set up Proxmox on my home server. This allowed me to do much better virtualization of my self-hosted services. Previously, I was using Docker to host multiple containers, but that was messy, and port conflicts were aplenty. The second factor was a request from my girlfriend. She loves having bedtime stories read to her every night, and she asked if I could read a few to her.
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Introduction Call me needy, call me entitled, call me self-centered or vein, but I can’t stand when I follow someone on Instagram and they don’t follow me back. It’s even worse when someone follows me, I follow them back, and then they unfollow me hoping I don’t notice. WELL BEST BELIEVE I SEE YOU WEIRDOS. So today we’re going to do some light investigation into Instagram’s API to figure out who doesn’t follow me back.
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Major code restructure lmao.
Soooo recently I decided to containerize this site with Docker. jadenarceneaux.com, api.jadenarceneaux.com, and my reverse proxy are now all stored in a single repository. This makes it so much easier to deploy new instances of my website. All I have to do is clone the repo, create the .env file based on the .env.example file, and run docker compose up -d to bring it up.
Also, a change worth noting is my switch from Nginx to Caddy for reverse proxy and file hosting. Honestly, I really liked Nginx but trying to get SSL cert generation to work was a huge pain. Certbot has its own Docker Image, and Nginx does too. The issue I’d run into is that Nginx would consume ports 80 and 443. Certbot would try to host some files for their Certificate Authority to verify my website and it couldn’t because those ports were already in use. I’m sure there’s a workaround, but I switched to Caddy because in addition to hosting my static file and acting as a reverse proxy for my web server, it also automatically handles SSL cert generation. It is literally the best thing ever.
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Introduction By far, the worst part of my job is setting up new workstations for new developers. There’s the easy stuff, like installing Linux and getting all their tools and IDEs set up. But then comes the challenge of getting a development web server up and running. It would usually take damn near the entire programming team putting our noggins together to try to get Apache up and running with the PHP-fpm on a new developers machine. I think this was largely caused by the fact that not a single one of us had any functional idea as to what the hell Apache was actually doing. Our main strat was just copying the config files from our existing machines and then spending the entire day figuring out why that didn’t work. Recently, in an effort to change the hosting of my blog, I had to set up reverse proxying through NGINX. Lowkey, I was dreading it the whole time, but it literally took me like 2 minutes to figure out. I think for the first time in my life, I actually know why NGINX and Apache exist, and I hope to share my insights so you guys can understand it too.
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