A brief review this month. It’s gone by in a whirl!

Things that happened

• I've spent the last few months doing some technical upgrades for a client. I've come to the end of that work and started working in our support department.

Things I learnt

• I read a lot about the Domain and SameSite properties on cookies, as part of planning some work to change what subdomain an application is hosted on. Cookies are used between multiple applications which are all currently on the same domain, so I was reading up on the details of how browsers treat these cookies to ensure we don't break anything. I think I came away with a good understanding in the end, but I regret that I used an LLM for some of the research as it ended up being quite misleading. Happily I checked what it told me with human-written sources and found its errors, but I probably ended up spending longer clarifying my understanding than I would have needed to if I'd skipped the LLM and just done my research manually in the first place.

Things other people said

Quote of the month

“It’s also become clear to me that LLMs actively reward existing top tier software engineering practices
…
If you’re going to really exploit the capabilities of these new tools, you need to be operating at the top of your game.”
Vibe engineering

Things I've published

• Installing a .crt file as a Trusted Root Certificate in Windows 11 while Kleopatra is installed

Things I haven't published

Most ideas I have for blog posts never see the light of day because I don't find the time to write them. Here's what I didn't get round to.

• Code reviewing out loud

• Claude style for writing code review comments