Software Engineering in Web Development, Backend Services, and More
For the last few releases, I’ve ended these posts the same way: with a promise that a detail-page overhaul was coming. Ratings, runtime, a clearer view of which of your services actually carry a title. With 1.5.0, it’s here, along with one feature I’ve wanted for a while: searching by the people in front of the camera.
Back in February, I wrote about Remove Empty Shortcodes 1.0.0 in which the plugin includes the admin scanner, a real test suite, and automated deployment to WordPress.org.
Then a bug report was submitted on the wp.org forums leading to 1.1.0.
Where Can I Watch? has always answered a simple question: where can I actually watch this show or movie right now? The catch is that “right now” includes more than the subscription services you pay for.
A lot of content lives on free, ad-supported platforms like The Roku Channel, Tubi, Pluto TV, and the like. Those are legitimate, no-cost ways to watch something tonight, and the app was leaving them out.
Continue readingIf you spend any meaningful amount of time working with Claude Code, you’ve likely noticed it doesn’t actually know what time it is beyond when you start the initial session.
It knows the date, more or less. But ask it to reason about “this morning” versus “last night,” or how long a build has been running, or whether it’s even the same day you started, and you’ll watch it guess. So you do what I did for weeks: you open a message with “it’s Thursday at 9am Eastern” just to give it its bearings.
That gets old. And it turns out the fix is small.
Continue readingA few years ago I started building a thing called Backcast. The idea was simple: I listen to a lot of podcasts, and I wanted a way to back them up. I got as far as parsing OPML exports, writing some unit tests, setting up PHPCS, and documenting the whole thing on this blog. Then life happened, I lost the thread, and it sat untouched.
The itch never went away, though. I kept finding myself thinking, “I know someone said something about this on a podcast, but which one? Which episode? When?” Podcasts are full of ideas and I had no way to get back to them.
So I started over. Different project, different approach, same underlying frustration.
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