Greg Herlein
Building tech, and teams that build tech. Software, cloud, electronics, whatever.
AI / MLEmbedded / microcontrollersEngineering management / careersSoftware / engineering practice
- Posts
- 186 from 1 Jan 2001 to 27 Oct 2026
- Posting
- weekly (64 in the last year)
- Kind
- personal blog
- Feed
- https://blog.herlein.com/index.xml
2026 54
- Skills Are the New Man Pages
- Your BrightSign Player Can Watch the Room, Not Just Play to It
- Why Not Use Shelly Cloud (And Why That's the Highest Compliment I Can Pay It)
- The NPU Works. The Compiler Doesn't.
- It Was the Harness, Not the Model — 90% of It
- Senior Engineers Are the Next DRAM Shortage
- Buy the Metal: Local Inference Is a Hedge, Not a Hobby
- My Office Has an On-Air Light (And Yes, It's a Robot)
- Right, But It Wouldn't Stop: Turning Thinking Off in the Agent Loop
- Harness Engineering Has a Name Now
- Radio - Not Satellite - for Whales!
- AI Agents are a Context Management Strategy in a Trenchcoat
- Argus, BrightSign machine vision - it's not difficult!
- A 27B Model That Reverse-Engineered a License Check (And How to Run It)
- Re-use your skills across all your coding agents
- Engineering Middle-Management to become extinct?
- A Quieter Place: Why textlog Reminds Me of the Twitter I Actually Miss
- I Wanted the Laptop to Win (an Inference Challenge)
- Tokens Should be NRE, Not COGS
- Stop Putting Your UniFi Admin Password in an Env Var
- Hey Claude, Set the IP address and name for the new BrightSign Player?
- The Bosses Are Coding Again
- gofi - a Go library for Ubiquity Unifi control (written by AI)
- Announcing Gorai! A Modern Robotics Framework
- Developing a BrightSign Extension
- Agentic Python Considered Harmful
- The Chainsaw I Built Was for Learning. Superpowers Is for Scaling.
- A Chainsaw at an Axe-Chopping Contest: My Current Agentic Loop
- We've Stopped Arguing About Whether
- Taste Is in the Spec (Cooking Is Not the Recipe)
- Procedures Travel. Knowledge Stays Home.
- Your Organization Must Learn As Fast As Your Best AI adopter
- The Room Is a Robot (and the NEXXT Sprint to Prove It!)
- Your Career Isn't Eroding - You're Just Holding the Wrong Moat
- Is Waterfall Coming Back? Sort Of. Not Really. Both — And the Bigger Question Underneath.
- How AI Coding Agents Work: First Principles
- Digital Signage: From Playback to Perception
- The Future of Software Engineering: What I Know and How I Know It
- AI Inference Costs: The Wake-Up Call for 2026 and 2027
- The End of the Glorified Babysitter
- Get Stuff Done
- How the AMD ISP4 Camera Stack Broke My ZBook Trackpad (and How Claude Helped Me Find It)
- Agentic Coding is About to Fracture Open Source
- Where I Learned Excellence
- My Janky Little Git Scripts That Keep Me Sane
- Tooling Is the New Model
- What Would Grace Say?
- Builders Build
- SaaS is Dead, Long Live Platforms
- Guest Post: Robots and Drones Are the Same Thing (And Pretending Otherwise Is Holding Us Back)
- AI-Boosted Building - It's All About Agency
- Don't Miss the Train!
- Automation Is Robotics (And You're Already Building Robots)
- The Three Tiers of Software Development (Where will you land?)
2025 18
- The New Whale Chase: Drones, Hydrophones, and a Father-Son Project
- 2025 In Review: The Year AI Changed Everything
- Programming Languages in 2026
- Foreign Cinema: My Favorite Restaurant in the World
- Coding is Solved (And That's Fine)
- Putting Claude in Container Jail: My localdev Setup
- Vibe Coding Book Review
- Why Go for Robotics?
- Using Claude Code to Build gocat
- From Clicking Yes to Letting Claude Run Wild (Safely)
- AI Agent Naysayers
- Agent Building: Ollama Hosted Models Token per Second
- Creating Blog Posts with AI: My Experience with Zed and Claude 3.5
- Advice to New Developers (or, How to Get Hired)
- Agentic Programming: The New Robot Revolution!
- Pulseview on Linux - UPDATED
- MacOS and Ubuntu Keyboard Remaps
- Finally Got my Ham Radio License - and Whales!
2024 20
- Foundations of High-Performance Engineering Teams
- Long Time No Post! RPi Pico, Zephyr, and Whales (oh my)
- Changing Chrome Address Bar Suggestions
- Book Review: Managing Priorities
- Guest Appearance: Women in STEM Podcast
- Learning gRPC in golang - with some ChatGPT help
- Book Review: AI at the Edge
- Developing Leaders in the post-COVID Era
- Lost Boats Ceremony - Tolling of the Boats 2024
- Whale Song Delayed - New Technology
- Dream Teams
- Whale Song Update
- Hiring is a Two-Way Street
- Guest Appearance: Software Synergy Podcast
- Bristlemouth Dev Kit: SLOW - and Thinking
- Book Review: Extreme Operational Excellence
- Book Review: Operational Excellence
- Bristlemouth Dev Kit: YES!
- Embrace AI Pairing: The Future is Already Here
- Bristlemouth Dev Kit May Not Happen
2023 9
2022 20
- No More Twitter
- Fixing Hugo Scaled Images
- Advice to New Developers (or, How to Get Hired)
- Git Clone Workaround
- Goodbye Twitter
- September Update
- BrightSign!
- How I Locked Myself Out of my Linux System
- Book Review: AWS Cookbook
- Book Review: Linux for Networking Professionals
- DevOps: Manage the Cognitive Load
- Using Clicky Web Analytics with Hugo
- First Trials: ESP32-POE-EA Board from Olimex
- Playing like it was summer (but with an ESP32)
- Making Prometheus Alert Manager (more) Consistent
- Enable Chatbots on the phone using Amazon Lex and the Amazon Chime SDK
- Goodbye Ubuntu, Hello Debian my old friend - AGAIN
- DevOps - All Things To All People - or Not?
- Thoughts on CI/CD
- Creating an Ephemeral EC2 Instance for Development for Testing
2021 19
- Learnings from patching a bug in a modern project
- Spiral Again?
- Thirty Years Ago Today
- My First Amazon Blog... ML/AI Chatbot over the Phone!
- Local Data Collection and Command Distribution
- Beaglebone Black - Getting Started
- Back to the (Phone) Future! Changing roles!
- VLC Error
- The Power of xdotool in X11
- Goodnight Twitter
- Thoughts on MQTT
- Summer
- Playing with Tasmota - A Swimming Pool Story
- Progress on ESP32 and FreeRTOS
- Back to Basics: AWS IoT C SDK
- Dabbling into ESP32 and FreeRTOS
- ESP32-C3 First Playing
- Kinesis Video Streams - Just Getting Started
- AWS SysOps Administrator Certified!
2020 24
- Changes - Ending 2020
- Programming Serial in C
- Power Costs
- Using CloudWatch for On-Premise Ubuntu Servers
- Disposability - the Missing ility
- GitHub Actions - Copy to S3 on Commit to Master
- Golang Unikernel Is Reality!
- Building Solution Architecture Teams - A Software Approach
- Mac and Chrome HotKeys
- iTerm2 Paste Buffers on MacOS/OSX - how to increase size
- SRE 123
- Fixing Hugo Social Media Icons in Blackburn
- Hello Ubuntu - Kinda
- Raspberry Pi Zero W Fun
- Goodbye Ubuntu, Hello Debian my old friend
- Blast from the past - Linux Telephony API
- Docs as Code
- Terraform in AWS: use AMI Names not IDs - and is Terraform the right answer still?
- Black Lives Matter
- [Catchup Post] Speaking at SphereIT in Krakow, October 2019
- Make RDP work from OSX
- SSH Tunnels
- Baking Sourdough Bread
- COVID-19