Kevin B. Ridgway's Blog

Software Engineer, Creator, and Curious Mind

May. 21, 2025

8-Bit Spelling Game: Built with Claude

Wanted to share a fun little project I built this morning for my 9-year-old daughter: an interactive, retro-styled spelling game that she absolutely loves!🎮 The "8-bit Spelling Game" is a fun educational tool where players hear words through text-to-speech and type them out letter by letter, with cute dolphin animations...

Tags: ai, projects, claude, gamedev | 165 words

May. 17, 2025

May. 1, 2025

Apr. 29, 2025

Git Blame Ignore Revs

I've been a part of a lot of code cleanups, and touching legacy codebases. Often times I'd run prettier, or a linter or formatter across the entire codebase and change a whole lot that is not really changing the functionality, but the readability of the codebase. And I didn't like it when my name would be the last name on a git blame when I may not really know much about that part of the code, but my name is there because I ran that linter/formatter.

Tags: git, til | 160 words

There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding"....

There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It's possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even touch the keyboard. I ask for the dumbest things like "decrease the padding on the sidebar by half" because I'm too lazy to find it. I "Accept All" always, I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I'd have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.

This tweet has 4.9 million views.

I think this is the origin of "vibe coding"? I didn't know it was from Andrej Karpathy!

Posted 2025-04-29 | Tags: vibecoding, andrejkarpathy

Apr. 26, 2025

How We Diagnosed and Fixed the 2023 Voyager 1 Anomaly from 15 Billion Miles Away.

David Cummings (JPL) presents how they did it in this video. Incredible longevity from 1970s technology. Imagine trying to debug something, where you send a command and then wait 45 hours to see the result. 😅

The only human-made objects that are in interstellar space. Technology that's been going for 47 1/2 years at this point.

Fun facts: The programming language? A custom assembly language for the processor used in question. They don't have the source code, they do have the intermediary output, in a Word doc that was OCR'd in, so it has a lot of typos!

Posted 2025-04-26 | Tags: nasa, space, videos, debugging

Apr. 25, 2025

Hello, There Will Be Some Changes

I've done it. This thing is no longer Next.js, but Django.Many reasons. But wanted to get this cut over, and continue from there.There will be some dust for a bit while I ramp this thing up. :)

Tags: blogging | 39 words

May. 23, 2024

React Conf 2024 - Unleashing the Future

It’s been a pretty exciting couple of days in Las Vegas attending React Conf 2024. Not only was it the 10th (+1) anniversary of React, but the vibes were awesome, and talking to the community was super inspiring. Both React and React Native are here for another 10 years.

Tags: conferences, reactjs | 1303 words

Feb. 21, 2023

Weeknotes - 02/21/23

As mentioned previously, I've really enjoyed working on this native macOS app that is built with Tauri!

Tags: weeknotes | 731 words

Feb. 10, 2023

Mar. 3, 2020

Nov. 21, 2019

Choose Your Own Adventure

I loved the Choose Your Own Adventure books growing up. A childhood friend had almost an entire bookcase of these. Near the front door, on the side of the staircase, a short, squat bookcase, with an entire shelf dedicated to these gems.

Tags: nostalgia, algorithms, books | 313 words

Nov. 2, 2019

Flash is Very Dead

In April 2010, Steve Jobs, co-founder, and then CEO of Apple outlined why Flash was not going to be included on Apple mobile devices.

Tags: flash, web | 386 words

Oct. 29, 2019

The Internet is 50 Today

In the third floor of Boelter Hall on the UCLA campus, in room 3420 some historical computing happened at 10:30pm, the 29th of October, 1969

Tags: internet, history | 281 words

Oct. 31, 2018

100 Days of Sketches

I want to be a person who draws all the time. I used to do it all the time as a kid. My itch for drawing came back around again when I was doing sketches of Pokemon for my sons and putting it in their lunches for them to find.

Tags: projects, drawing | 173 words

Jun. 12, 2018

Sep. 17, 2017

Sep. 14, 2017

How I Use Bear Notes

Talking about my note taking process with Bear Writer in the context of being a knowledge worker. This is what my setup/process looks like right now, for my work related notes.## Looking for a Notes App in All the Wrong PlacesAs I started a new job, I wanted to change...

Tags: writing, bear | 940 words

Jun. 11, 2017

Jan. 21, 2017

Explore vs. Exploit

I recently started listening to the audio book Algorithms to Live By - The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths, and it has been very good. There are a few points that stuck out to me:Tradeoffs: In life, just like in computer science, it's all...

Tags: computerscience, algorithms | 718 words

Jun. 8, 2015

Abstract Syntax Trees in JavaScript

An Abstract Syntax Tree (AST), is a powerful concept in computer science. It is something that allows you to do some interesting things, especially in JavaScript, that you may not have thought possible. If you didn't come from a computer science background, then I hope to show you how you...

Tags: javascript, ast | 648 words

Apr. 20, 2015

Things Great Engineering Managers Do

Reacts quickly, and decisively.Has a leadership philosophy. Has thought about it, a lot. Can speak at length about it.Is passionate about engineering. Is passionate about management. Understands the intersection of the two.When there is a problem, fixes it quickly.Cares about women being in tech. (Also see diversity.)Understands the engineering hierarchy,...

Tags: softwareengineering, leadership | 263 words