In a very unusual Tidbit episode of Programming By Stealth, Allison interviews NosillaCastaway and Programming By Stealth student Steve Mattan about how he's running Large Language Models locally on his Mac. He pulls this off using a series of open source tools, starting with Ollama for the models from the command line, and then Enchanted to give him a nice GUI. He explains how he's integrated the local LLM into VSCode for his coding, and how he uses Keyboard Maestro to launch all of this at once.

You can find the outline and links to how Steve's doing this at pbs.bartificer.net.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: PBS_2024_12_07

Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and look for the #pbs channel, and check out our pbs-student GitHub Organization. It's by invitation only but all you have to do is ask Allison!

Referral Links:

In this installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart completes his miniseries on Git Submodules. Last time he created an imaginary company with three developers and went through three relatively simple scenarios where Git submodules were implemented. In this finale installment, he takes it up a notch in complexity and we actually get to push submodule changes. The path is fraught with danger and I get stuck on the very last scenario but Bart wouldn't let me give up and eventually helped me understand.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: PBS_2024_12_07

Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and look for the #pbs channel, and check out our pbs-student GitHub Organization. It's by invitation only but all you have to do is ask Allison!

Referral Links:

In PBS 172 Bart Busschots explained what Git submodules are and the kinds of problems they solve. In this practical lesson, he walks us through three scenarios where we actually get to type in Git commands to learn how the process works. We get to pretend we're in a small web app business where company branding is important.

In the first scenario, we're a new developer joining an app team and we have a repo that already includes the branding submodule. In the second scenario, we're a seasoned developer on the team creating a new app and we need to import the branding submodule. Finally, in the third scenario, we're one of the brand designers and we want to update the branding.

In the third scenario we learn two different ways to incorporate the branding changes into our web apps.

I'm always happy when I get to play along in the Terminal, so this lesson was great fun.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and check out the Programming By Stealth channel under #pbs.

Support Bart by going to lets-talk.ie and pushing one of the big blue support buttons.

Referral Links:

Bart takes us back into our Git miniseries to explain Git submodules, which are essentially nested Git repos. After we learn what they are, he explains why nesting is needed. Then he takes us through three use cases as a way of illustrating the kinds of problems Git submodules can solve.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and check out the Programming By Stealth channel under #pbs.

Support Bart by going to lets-talk.ie and pushing one of the big blue support buttons.

Referral Links:

In ye olden days, iOS kept everything sandboxed in a way that apps weren't allowed to reach outside of their own data to open individual files. But with the aptly named Files app, and an API to allow a human to do the picking, apps can now open files directly on iOS.

This "innovation" allows us to have a Git client on iOS and have it use a linked repo that's stored in the Files app. This means we can use any text editor we like to open the repos files for editing.

In this tidbit episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart walks us through how to configure the iOS Git client Working Copy to clone a repo from GitHub, and then open the files in his favorite text editor on iOS, Textastic.

Hat's off to Jill of Kent that explained to Bart and me more than a year ago that this was possible, but a fist shake to Bart for not telling me how to do it till now!

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and check out the Programming By Stealth channel under #pbs.

Referral Links:

We have a bit of a changeup for today's lesson. While Bart Busschots is in attendance for this episode, he is not be the instructor, he is a student like me. Our instructor today is the delightful Helma van der Linden and she's going to teach us about how she applied the Model View Controller pattern to our project XKPasswd.

You can find Helma's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Referral Links:

We're back from our summer hiatus (actually scheduled for the first time ever instead of accidentally happening!)

In this week's episode, Bart takes on the task of explaining the philosophy behind why having a framework for software development is useful and even crucial as projects get bigger and more complex. We chose this topic because the XKPasswd project has already started using a framework called Model View Controller. We get the barest understanding of MVC in this explanation from Bart, and the next episode of Programming By Stealth will be the wonderful Helma van der Linden explaining the details of her implementation of MVC for the XKPasswd project. In the first episode of its kind, I won't be the only student in the class - Bart and I will be learning together.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Referral Links:

In this Tidbit version of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots interviews Mattias Wadman, one of the maintainers of the jq project. This was great fun as we just finished learning jq in Programming By Stealth.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: PBS_2024_08_06

You can find out more about Mattias & the various projects he is working on at the links below:

Follow Mattias on Mastodon: @[email protected]

Mattias’ GitHub Profile which hosts some notable jq-related projects:

fq for querying binary files with the jq language: github.com/wader/fq

The language definition file for adding jq support to IDEs like VS Code: github.com/wader/jq-lsp

jq implemented in jq: github.com/wader/jqjq

Some notable jq commits & files mentioned during the interview:

A version of jq implemented in Go: github.com/itchyny/gojq

A version of jq implemented in Rust by Michael Färber: github.com/01mf02/jaq

In this special tidbit installment of Programming By Stealth, Helma van der Linden joins Allison to walk through how she solved a real-world problem using jq. The problem to be solved was a need to analyze the installed applications on her Intel-based Mac before migrating to her new Apple Silicon Mac.

She used a built-in Terminal command to access System Information to create a JSON file, and then used a series of jq filters to remove data she didn't need, and format what she kept into human-readable form. Helma walks us through every step of the way as she built up her jq script file to massage the data to her needs.

At the end Allison explains how to take Helma's final CSV output and analyze the data in a spreadsheet using a pivot table.

You can find _Helma's_ fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: PBS_2024_07_20

Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and look for the #pbs channel, and check out our pbs-student GitHub Organization. It's by invitation only but all you have to do is ask Allison!

In this second (and final) installment about YAML, Bart teaches us who to write multi-line strings and how not to write multi-line strings. He teaches us about String Blocks which is a bit head-bendy but allows you to write human-readable strings and also tell YAML what to do with empty lines and white space.

After that slightly heavy lift, we learn about how to write much simpler-looking Sequences and Mappings than the way we learned in our introduction to YAML in PBS 168. It's really nifty how you can write them in compact, sensible forms, and even easily combine separate YAML documents into the same sequence or mapping.

Finally we learn how to use the `yq` language to query JSON, CSV, and XML files using a language that uses `jq` syntax so you'll feel right at home.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: PBS_2024_07_06