tomjuggler

Thank you for the link - I was just thinking that there were some core principles missing imo and yet there they are in the full text

For me "Persevere" is probably the main one, many people in the comments here mention the difficulty of making it in a niche field, one that you love and are good at. Personally I lived in a tent/garage for 5 years before finally becoming successful.

Also "Location" resonates. I had to move to a new city when I was starting out due to over saturation in my field at home.

So I'm involved in an open source AI cli coding assistant called Cecli (cecli.dev) which is specifically designed to work well with DeepSeek.

DeepSeek is a great model, and Cecli is all about efficiency. It works great for my purposes - agentic programming on a budget.

LOL DeepSeek V4 just reduced their price to less than $1 per million tokens for Pro and people are worried about Claude

Awww I have one of those. It still works after more than 10 years!

Maybe that's what happened, everyone who needed one bought and we don't need an upgrade

Same here. I really wanted Orange Pi to work, tried, but after getting my raspberry pi 4 it's night and day.

The battle of Hastings features prominently in my house, it's one of the first history subjects we taught the kids about.

Tom Hastings

I started learning CAD with Free cad and never looked back. Yes it's clunky but it's free, and does the job!

Looks like everyone is trying to solve the same problem - here is another example I've been trying to wrap my head around lately:

Brainfile - An open protocol for agent-to-agent task coordination.

https://brainfile.md/

Well worth a look imo

Cool! I wrote a similar blog post last year when I decided to "Cut GitHub out of the loop"

https://www.circusscientist.com/2025/07/23/cutting-github-ou...

My motivation was mainly the fact that Bitbucket cut their free tier, and who knows how long GitHub will be free? So I tried and found out how easy git actually is to sync without third parties

There's a gap in the market here - not me but somebody needs to build an e-commerce bot and call it Santa Claws

I got into embedded 10 years ago, there really is something about driving hardware directly that is just so rewarding.

For AI I've been using Cecli which is cli and can actually run the compile step then fix any errors it finds - in addition to using Context7 MCP for syntax.

Not quite 10x yet but productivity has improved for me many times over. It's just how you use the tools available

Cecli (pronounced like "Ceclily") is a new AI coding assistant. Originally forked from Aider but now over 1000 commits ahead of the old project, Cecli has evolved to be much more.

Now with MCP, tools, skills, built-in TODO list, repo map, ask-code workflow OR agentic OR in-line coding. Includes the git integration, auto linting and testing that you need.

Open Source, built with Python, actively developed.

Personally I use "agent mode" in Cecli for almost everything - I don't know about other AI coding agents but you can easily set up tests to run and validate the output.

Since MCP came out the quality of code has improved since there is always context7 and fetch to look up syntax.

But yes at some point you need to look at the code yourself just to be sure

https://github.com/dwash96/cecli

It's a fork of Aider but with agent mode, MCP, skills, task manager and more. Very active development team!

Pretty cool idea, I'm going to be trying this only using open source Cecli (with DeepSeek API) instead of Claude CLI because I don't have infinite $$$

For posterity, if anyone can ever find this comment amongst all the others:

We went with Instagram ads, where we have the most followers. The result: 4 paid bookings in 48 hours - all confirmed leads from the new Instagram ad campaign.

Blog post updated.

Oh right Battlestar Galactica! I watched that like 3 times already, best sci-fi ever

20 Years now. I'm from Cape Town, but the weather here is better. And no need for a wetsuit!

It's fine now, somehow got to #1 on Hacker News and 1000's of visitors did that. Learned something new about Cloudflare Cache Settings, it won't happen again

Not much chance of that at this point - I'm almost 50 years old and managed to make a living purely from performing so far (with a small exception of the pandemic, where I did coding mainly)

You must be referring to my personal Blog and Tutorial Site. It's messy, and serves no purpose other than to talk about whatever I am interested in at the time. Sometimes other people are also interested. And it's 14 years old now, so yeah.

If you need a payoff, click the Patreon link banner on top and go support development of my Open Source LED Poi!

I think the Magician equivalent is David Blaine, making people pass out from shock because you smuggled a fake spider into their ear or something.

Mostly we do kids entertainment though, so that's not really going to convice moms to hire my magic show for Bobby's birthday

We are on Google Maps. Many 5* ratings (apart from that one psycho neighbour who objected to me asking him to turn his base down - they left one night without paying their rent and a week later my business has 1* review. urrgh 10 years and I'm still annoyed)

Instagram has apparently got hyper specific location targeting, so we are doing an ad on there now.

Yes our ads were geo-fenced when I had them on. We have always had a good web presence, I think the conclusion is that nobody looks for services on Google, and our reliance on it above other channels is now no longer viable

There is no ad - that's organic. Money ran out day before yesterday

what community? There's almost nobody there! (it's nice)

Page rules did it!! thank you

I updated CloudFlare settings, yes. Seems to have worked?

My entertainment website typically gets 10-100 visitors per day, yesterday it was more like 1000 per hour. The only reason it's still online is because of CloudFlare CDN!

My content is best live and in person but you are right, will be concentrating more on video content for yt and others going forward

I can't remember I think it's just the assets though - seems to be surviving so far. How do you get it to cache everything, is that a paid thing?