Mendhak / Code

Automatically hyperlinking the selected text when pasting a URL

A really nice quality of life feature I’ve noticed in some applications is the ability to automatically hyperlink some selected text when pasting a URL over it. To be clear this isn’t about automatically converting URLs in text into hyperlinks, rather when you have some text selected and you paste…

GraphQL’s poor developer experience

GraphQL’s touted advantages are numerous, including data retrieval efficiency, and flexibility that it can enable. The Apollo GraphQL page even calls its developer experience its greatest benefit, but this is only true from the API owner’s perspective, not the API consumer’s. That might explain why it sells so well to…

Hands on introduction to LLM programming for developers

LLM output is malicious user input

The most common programmatic interaction with Large Language Models (LLMs) and LLM APIs (ChatGPT, Claude) is to give it some natural language instructions and get a shaped, specific output back. For example you might ask it to summarize a news article for you, and have it respond only with the…

Using a local LLM to Automate an Android device

?, a simple CLI lookup tool

As I spend a lot of time on the CLI, I often need to look up commands, even if I’ve used them before. I like to offload memory elsewhere if I don’t need to remember things, including commands, boilerplate code, birthdays, phone numbers and so on, and do a search…

Use threat modelling to choose a password manager

Common ways of choosing a password manager are to see what everyone else is using, search for what’s popular, or just pick something convenient. I do the same, but also want to spend some time evaluating my choices because password managers are the ‘keys to the kingdom’. Threat modelling feels…