Software on JKTDEV.CO.UK

Revisiting Some Internal Development Tools

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 21:52:06 +0100

Today I worked on some internal tooling for my software development, revisiting two small command-line utilities that I originally created some time ago:

Both tools were originally created fairly quickly to solve specific problems I had at the time. They worked, so naturally they remained largely untouched after that!

They are now undergoing fairly heavy revision, including refactoring, improving code quality, adding tests and generally bringing them closer to something I would consider suitable for use outside my own development environment.

AI Writes the Code, I Still Engineer the Software

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 23:15:23 +0100

Over the past few months I’ve been using AI tools to a much greater extent in my coding work.

In particular, I’ve increasingly been using them to generate the code that I would previously have written myself.

That does not mean I’ve moved over to “vibe coding”, at least not in the sense that I understand the term: repeatedly prompting an LLM until whatever it produces appears to work, running it, kicking the tyres a bit, and moving on without necessarily reading or fully understanding what has been produced behind the scenes.

Defining the UCMOD Auxiliary Connector

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 20:39:04 +0100

Today I decided to define the UCMOD Auxiliary Connector layout.

UCMOD Connector

As a prelude to designing the UCMOD Auxiliary Connector, here is the current pinout definition for the existing main UCMOD connector.

Pin	Function	Pin	Function
1	GND	2	3V3
3	GND	4	RESERVED
5	I2C_SCL / GPIO0	6	I2C_SDA / GPIO1
7	UART_TX / GPIO2	8	UART_RX / GPIO3
9	SPI_MOSI / GPIO4	10	SPI_MISO / GPIO5
11	SPI_SCK / GPIO6	12	SPI_CS / GPIO7
13	AN0 / GPIO8	14	AN1 / GPIO9
15	AN2 / GPIO10	16	AN3 / GPIO11
17	RESERVED	18	GND
19	3V3	20	GND

There are 12 GPIO pins available through the standard UCMOD connector, with a defined primary function assigned to each where appropriate. These include I2C, UART, SPI and four analogue-capable pins.

Kubernetes, Hugo, React, MkDocs and Docker

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 22:31:29 +0100

Today I decided to do some maintenance on my various websites, which are built using a mixture of React, Hugo, and MkDocs, then packaged as Docker containers and deployed to a Kubernetes cluster.

The setup has grown gradually over time, but the basic idea is fairly simple.

The Deployment Pipeline

Each site lives in its own repository on my Git server. When changes are pushed to the main branch, a Drone CI pipeline builds a new Docker image, pushes it to my container registry, and updates the relevant deployment on the Kubernetes cluster.

Improving My Demos

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 23:56:17 +0100

Improving My Demos

Over the last week I have mainly been working on other things: business admin, planning, and some improvements to the Demos and Tools section of my website.

Business admin is not especially exciting, but it has to be done. The more interesting part of the week was spending some time improving a couple of technical demos that are useful both as website content and as practical tools for my own work.