Trust me I wish we could go back. Not just to before llms became popular but back to when it took at least a little knowledge and effort to host things online. The internet used to be so cool and full of unique stuff.
Unfortunately though I fear the toothpaste is already out of the tube with llms.
As tempting as it might be, don’t use AI in the learning stages. Spending time figuring out why your program isn’t working is what really cements that knowledge in.
Dang that is solid writing too
Personally I always get excited by process automaton. Been a minute since I’ve done any VBA but my favorite projects I used it for were probably:
Depending on age/interest there’s stuff like luanti
Favorite I’ve had was a switch just sitting on the panels of a drop ceiling. Wasn’t documented that’s where it was either. I spent an hour or so hunting around a department when somebody mentioned, “there’s that tech thing in the ceiling”.
Oooh thanks for the tip. Just learned about typocorrection that way!
Small static websites. You can get surprisingly performant and easily managed websites if you don’t actually need the overhead of common frameworks. For instance giving your kid a real domain they can update and show to their friends.
On the slightly more resource intensive side, OpnSense has been a game changer for me.
Yeah the author talks about how on the old internet it was great that you’d just stumble across people on blogs\rss, mailing lists, and other things you subscribe to. Then just chucks all that to the side and sets up automated ways to force his work in front of people.