Andre Torrez

The next thing I thought this site needed was a blogroll, but I didn’t want to just make a list of people and sites I liked. I wanted a light-weight reader I could use myself.

I asked Claude to read my 14-year-old exported Google Reader OPML, check which sites were still active, and then check if there was a recent date somewhere on the page. I then picked through that list to get this randomized list:

/blogs

One cool thing about this page is if I command-click to open a link, that link will drop to the bottom of the list and turn grey, giving me an idea of which ones I’ve visited for that session.

Did I mention that I originally wrote my own blogging software last year? That’s what powers my site now. It’s stupid simple and I was originally just using the Django admin to manage it but this morning I added a host of new features including image embedding.

Here’s our creek a few days ago in regular weather (mallard for scale):

And here it is today:

The cool part is I can drag and drop (or paste) into a regular text area and it produces the Markdown for me in the preview. Deleting the Markdown reference will delete the image from view and the server. Amazing.

I cleaned up the blog a bit and added some posting features I'd been wanting.

I had all but given up on most projects these days but Claude Code + Jesse's Superpowers has given me new life.

I had tried Cursor out last year and while it worked, it felt off. It wasn't as fun to have my code generated as I typed. I felt detached from making things and grew tired of correcting assumptions the LLMs were making.

Claude Code feels different. Maybe it’s the conversational aspect and the guardrails Superpowers gives me. Maybe it’s that it’s taking me outside of the minutia of so many little decisions that were slowing me down.

Whatever it is, I’m hooked. I’m enjoying making things again and I’ve been able to build out some fully fledged apps I’d been kicking around but not even attempting.