No analogies, no metaphors. This model is based off the excellent paper Defining, Measuring, and Managing Technical Debt by Ciera Jaspan and Collin Green. The findings come from the Engineering Productivity Research Team at Google based on five years of company-wide engineer surveys. This post is largely copied verbatim from the paper. Full credit to the authors.

Tech Debt is omnipresent and nebulous. We narrow it to only refer to the detrimental: Technical Debt or un-necessary complexity which …

August 2024 Update: Now a solved problem. Use Structured Outputs .

Large language models (LLMs) return unstructured output. When we prompt them they respond with one large string. This is fine for applications such as ChatGPT, but in others where we want the LLM to return structured data such as lists or key value pairs, a parseable response is needed. In Building A ChatGPT-enhanced Python REPL I used a technique to prompt the LLM to return output in a text format I could parse. Here I explore …

You’re in a new city for a weekend and take a bunch of photographs. When you get home you review your shots and delete some of them. The Keeper Rate is the ratio of shots you keep versus those you throw away. It’s a concept, not a literal metric.

I’ve got a camera on my phone, a Sony digital camera, a 35mm film camera, and a medium format film camera. Shooting film made me start thinking about Keeper Rate. A roll of film in a 35mm film camera can store thirty five images. Film …

A collection of film photography shot over April and May. My aim was to experiment with films I’ve never shot before. All pictures were taken an Olympus OM-1 with a 50mm lens.

These first two pictures are shot on Kodak Vision 500T film. The film is tungsten light balanced (ie. not daylight) so I shot it exclusively at night. …

The appeal of a road to nowhere. The South Island of New Zealand has the Milford Road which brings the traveller to the vista of Mitre Peak and the Milford Sounds. Tasmania has the Gordon River Road terminating at the hydroelectric systems at Lakes Gordon and Pedder. The eighty five kilometre road runs through the otherwise untouched Southwest National Park.

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