Weeknotes 25:21

May 26, 2025

Week of May 18–24

Weeknotes or Weeknote

I am not sure if this is something I have thought about before, but I started questioning the naming of these posts I do each week. Should it be ‘weeknote‘ or ‘weeknotes‘ (the naming convention I have been using for the past 6 years)? As I was thinking about it, the singular version seems to make more sense. Each one is a note about that particular week. The plurals form would make sense for the collection.

But as I did a brief amount of research today, several people that are listing on the weeknot.es directory use the plural form for their individual posts. I believe that I had referenced Sam’s site about Weeknotes when I originally started. So for now, I think I am going to continue with the same format I have been using and name each post “Weeknotes.” I had already decided that if I changed to the singular form, I was not going to go back and change the previous notes because I don’t want to spend the time and have to set redirection for the urls.

Thinking about how I want to approach using LLMs

I read several articles this week that challenged me to evaluate my use of LLMs, more specifically ChatGPT. I read several thought provoking articles on the subject that approaches the subject from many different angles. A majority of what I read this week was more focused on the spiritual dimension. I used ChatGPT to help me in my job search this past year to adapt my resume to each different job that I applied to. I also used it to help me to write cover letters based on the job description and my updated resume. Recently I have been dabbling with using ChatGPT to help me write scripts in my development work. I am glad that I have explored using ChatGPT as a tool but I want to take more time to evaluate and determine my own personal approach and boundaries based on ethical, spiritual, and other factors and the standards I want to set for myself.

Just to clarify, I have already been thinking about this subject but the articles this week gave me more to think about and push me further in the direction that I was beginning to lean more toward. My youngest daughter has a pretty passionate viewpoint that lines up with a lot that I have read recently so I want to give her credit for informing my thinking on this subject. I need to continue thinking about this and determine what I think is the right approach for me. I hope to write more about this as my thinking evolves.

Thoughts on the week

My work week consisted of a lot of small tasks that needed to be addressed.

• I had to fix a broken layout on our Spanish and Porteguese sites due to a change I made in the default template when I added focus indicators to the site. It was a learning experience as I still have not gotten use to a working with a multi-site CMS. I had refactored a card component to wrap the content with an anchor element (<a>) to make the entire card clickable instead of just an inner button. I needed to refactor the same code in the override templates for both of the sites.
• I created a new template for the Join the Team page. I added several images to the page. I had made some small but significant changes a couple of weeks ago to the page. I used the Django “plugins” to add the content to the page so that the content is managed through the CMS and not as a static template. I am trying to follow the Django CMS conventions.
• I made a lot of small tweaks to some registration forms on our French and German sites.
• I helped my teammate, Nicolas, to solve an image display issue by refactoring the code to use aspect-ratio to control the images. Several of the images contain text which were getting cropped with the previous solution using object-fit.
• I watched Rachel Andrew’s talk, What’s New in the Web, from Google I/O. She does discuss what’s new on the Web but a lot of the talk focused on Baseline and how some new tools can help developer teams make better decisions on what features to support.
• I had some trouble concentrating and experienced brain fog in the afternoons. I think it was allergy related. It was one of those weeks where it was more of a challenge to engage in more creative thinking. Much easier to just do tasks where the answer was more straightforward or easy to address. I was able to push through on several things but it required much more effort.

Head in the clouds

I was fascinated with the clouds I saw outside the window on Friday. They were more vapory or fibery and had some interesting textures. Several of them looked like they were elongated by the winds. I feel like the image I took did not capture well what I saw or felt. It was a fun little distraction to go outside and watch them evolve in form.

Articles I read

• Multiple Computers (Jim Nielsen)
• Moving for the Sake of Moving (Alan Noble)
• Scroll-Driven Animations Inside a CSS Carousel (Geoff Graham, CSS Tricks)
• Since 1968, Wisconsin lost 64,000 dairy farms. Where did they go? – I read this after a comment by my team leader on his recent trip to Wisconsin. They did not see many cows.
• The Impact of the First 100 days of the Trump Regime on Americans with disabilities (Access*Ability on ButtonDown)
• Modern layouts with CSS (Chris Ferdinandi)
• White Noise (Chris Coyier)
• Tools (Jeremy Keith) – One of many articles I read this week about LLM
• Boston Red Sox Unveil New “Fenway Greens” City Connect Uniform (via Studio Notes)
• Studio Notes #33 (Dan Cederholm)
• The magic developer wand… (Chris Ferdinandi) – More thoughts on AI/LLM.
• Is ChatGPT Forming Your Faith? (Katie Laitkep, Revive Our Hearts) – I met Katie earlier this week during a prayer breakout session.
• We Must Relearn How to be Human (Alan Noble) – Very thought provoking article that is contributing to my thoughts about LLM and how I want to approach using these tools.
• Small (web) is beautiful (Fred Rocha) – A great read on having your own website and empowering others to have their own.
• What’s new in web (Rachel Andrew, web.dev)
• Masonry, Item Flow, and… GULP? (Eric Meyer)
• The landing zone (Jeremy Keith) – An interesting idea for talking about the bit of the page where people first show up.
• Gordon J. Wenham (1943–2025) (The Gospel Coalition)
• Not Every Meal is a Steak Dinner (Jacob Crouch)
• Authentic Preaching in the Age of AI (Tony Reinke, Desiring God) – Another thought provoking articles about the use of LLMs. Some good advice for those of us listening to a sermon also.
• When the Music Stops (Brad Littlejohn) – More thoughts on AI and LLMs.
• There’s Pride in Choosing Our Own Preferences over God’s Revealed Doctrines (Randy Alcorn)
• Do you See God? (Mark Jones, Desiring God)
• Open Tabs (Jonathan Snook)

What I watched

What’s New in the Web, Rachel Andrew’s talk from Google I/O – I enjoyed finding out more about the Baseline project and the new tools the Chrome team is building to help developers decided about using newer Web features.

Resisting Sin Is Not Enough A Lesson from The Hobbit (Brad Bright)

• M*A*S*H (MeTV)
• NCIS (Netflix)
• Andor: Season 2 (Disney+) – We finally finished it on Thursday night. Words escape me in describing it. I enjoyed it. Thought it is some of the best Star Wars that has been made. Not disappointed at all.
• Nuggets-Thunder, Game 7 (ABC) – We were disappointed that the Nuggets lost and it was such a runaway game.
• Light & Magic, Season 2 (Disney+)
• Nonnas (Netflix) – My wife and I enjoyed this heartwarming story.

Books I am reading

• Sunday Matters (Paul David Tripp) – I read one devotional a week.
• Everyday Gospel (Paul David Tripp) – Reading through the Bible this year with this devotional.
• Stickman Theology (Terry Ewing)
• Universal Principles of UX Design (Irene Pereyra)
• The Basketball 100 (David Aldridge & John Hollinger)
• You can trust God to write your story (Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth and Robert Wolgemuth)

Walking

• Wednesday – 4.14 miles in 1 hour 24 minutes – My son and daughter joined me for the first part of the walk and then I continued on to get 4 miles in.

What I played

• MLB The Show 20 (Twins) – I went 4-1 this week.