Another May update ! Not much going on as usual, rainy season arrived in Ho Chi Minh city so we get some strong rain and nice sunsets. Yesterday we got the announcement that Pocket was saying goodbye. Kind of bummed because I found the service convenient, though I just used it as a link bookmark (I never cared much about the reading mode, I always go to the original link - though apparently that worked well with the Kobo e-reader). Anyway I switched to a self-hosted alternative immediately: Wallabag. It’s kind of sluggish but it does the job, and it has an Android app so I can still “share link” to save a link from my phone. ...

So MCP is all the rage these days, and it’s not very complex: it’s basically a standardized way to provide tools to LLMs. So you have an RPC server that provides a description of the tools and the parameters they expect, and your client (a LLM based application) can connect to it and tell the LLM what tools are available, and the LLM can decide to call them when appropriate. Easy stuff and the SDK provided do most of the heavy lifting. ...

Unsurprisingly with a newborn and a very sticky 3 years old at home, I haven’t been doing much in the past 3 weeks. Since I stopped working on it, I’ve released my thematic crossword generation app, Prosettr, to a complete (and expected) indifference (zero traffic came from the HackerNews announcement, and I got about 10 likes from LinkedIn). Oh well, it was a fun project anyway and I’m quite happy with the result! ...

My son Liam was born this Monday! He is healthy and everything is good. I haven’t touched the computer for the week, and as a result I don’t have anything technical to share. The week before however I gave a try to Browser Use, a tool that allows LLMs to use the browser more effectively. I haven’t read in detail how it works but it seems to highlight the interactive areas (buttons etc.) and then take a screenshot for analysis, instead of only sending the DOM as text. It worked pretty well, I was able to fill a form entirely with it (prompting it to not press submit!), and to use Google Translate as well. I don’t have a special use case idea for it at the moment. ...

Not much going on these days. At work, we started migrating some apps from Google App Engine to AWS, which gave me a chance to learn about AWS CDK. As a learning step, I’ve made a small template to deploy a static website on S3 + CloudFront for the frontend and ALB + ECS for the backend, with some CloudFront behaviors, Route 53, and ACM certificates sprinkled in. As far as I know, it’s a standard architecture (though I need to lock down the S3 permissions a bit more, add logs to CloudWatch, etc.), and it’s really nice that it is reviewable by our security guy before we deploy it. And also, it can be deployed to staging first and later on to production with little to no changes. ...