March came with a slight improvement in my work on personal projects. Although I still had to work overtime several days, and had to skip working on personal projects due to that, I was able to get more done this month. Here is a short summary.
Achievements
JenAI
JenAI is a CLI frontend for chatting with local LLMs that I have been developing (and using) since last year (I wrote about it in a previous blog entry). Every now and then a new model comes up that requires changes, usually because it very heavily uses a problematic character or special token that needs to have special treatment to not break requests. That was the case with Google's gemma3, which is actually one of the best open and local models of the current generation.
In order to support gemma3, I released two new version of JenAI in March: 1.7.2 and 1.7.3, both with some minor adjustments in the sanitization logic to prevent gemma3's quirks breaking everything.
Despite being a very simple application, and not being targeted at anyone else but myself, JenAI has become my go-to choice for daily interaction with LLMs. The beauty of building your own tools!
Finished The Captain Class
Since the start of this year, I had been working through the book The Captain Class as part of my personal studies habit. I was able to finish the book in March.
The Captain Class turned out to be a great food for thought about leadership. Although I do not agree one hundred percent with everything the book says, I found even the parts that I disagreed with, or that did not seem totally accurate, to be very intriguing and to lead to some deep thoughts about the topic. I saw a strong correlation between the Captain ideal the book talks about (mostly derived out of analysis of sports teams) with the professional role of the Scrum Master.
I would like to write a full review of the book in the near future, though I am unsure how soon I will have time to work on this.
Downpoints
No progress on hobby studies
March was yet another month in which I wasn't able to put any time in a hobby book, for the personal studies habit. Since I finished the last one, in December, I have not yet even chosen the next. Hopefully around the middle of the year I will be able to organize my time, have less extra hours of work, and then pick things up again for this, but for now it remains an unfortunately paused part of my routine.
Plans for next month
Innoweeks
April will have the start of the Innoweeks event. This is a hackaton-style event that my company holds every year, in which employees get together with customers to come up with an innovative solution to a real problem in only a few weeks.
I participated in the 2019 and 2024 editions, and I will participate again this year. Now, as a dev lead, which will be a new experience for me. I am very excited for this!
Finish third project on First Steps Into AI Engineering series
I have been working for a while now on the third project for my First Steps Into AI Engineering series, and during March I was able to make good progress but not reach a state in which I felt comfortable releasing an initial version of the project. This should be feasible in April.
Start last project of First Steps Into AI Engineering series
After releasing the third project of the previously mentioned series, I intend to immediately start working on the fourth and last project. It should be a simple one, but it is one that I have not yet sketched out (the other 3 already had a functional sketch I could use as a basis while developing). I will share more details once I have released it, but I don't expect to spend more than 3-4 weeks in the development of this one.
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