In September 2025, I wrote about my early experiments with AI coding tools. Six months later, I realize we're living through another abstraction leap, like the jump from assembly to C, or from C to higher-level languages. And for the first time in years, I'm genuinely excited about what I can build.
Here's a question that's been bothering me: We religiously containerize our applications with Docker. We preach about reproducibility, isolation, and "it works on my machine" being unacceptable for production code. Yet somehow, we're perfectly fine installing Node.js, Python, PostgreSQL clients, cloud CLIs, and dozens of other tools directly on our host machines.
Why do we containerize our code but not our toolbelt?
The goal isn't to replace my mobile phone. It's to have a playground for voice technologies that are increasingly relevant in modern applications: IVR systems, conversational AI, voice assistants, and telephony integrations.
I wanted to experiment with:
Sometimes the best lessons come from projects that humble you. Meet Illico.be, my side project for organizing board game nights with friends and family. What started as a simple playground to experiment with AI coding tools became a fascinating journey through the current state of development workflows – complete with unexpected detours and surprising discoveries.
TL;DR: If your LSI/Avago/Broadcom SAS2308 (e.g., 9207-8i/9208-8i/9211-8i) card refuses to see drives or shows “0 B” ghosts, you probably need IT mode P20. The gotcha: the classic
sas2flash.efionly works from a UEFI Shell v1, not v2—boot a TianoCore UEFI Shell v1 (link below) as\EFI\BOOT\BOOTX64.EFIand the flasher will finally run. Also, don’t trust passive VGA→HDMI “converters” during setup—use real VGA or an active adapter so you can see the shell.
From quarterly chaos to seamless automation: How I solved my invoice management nightmare in one weekend The Problem That Was Costing Me Money Every three months, the same dreaded routine would begin. VAT filing time meant hours of tedious work that I'd inevitably procrastinate on: - Hunting through my inbox for invoice attachments - Downloading PDFs one by one -...