// Personal website of Chris Smith

Image of Chris, distorted with scan lines and a hologram effect
Name:
Chris Smith
Class:
Programmer
Type:
Human
HP:
929
✪✪ Yak Shave After attacking, add 1d6 side project tokens to this card.
✪✪✪ Side project Multiply all damage by number of side project tokens.
01/001

Chameth.com

Hello :)

Hello! I'm Chris, a software developer from the UK. Welcome to my personal website.

The site is mostly organised around a bunch of slash pages:

  • /posts is where all my blog posts live
  • /projects lists my various side projects
  • /interests is a big ol' list of things I'm into
  • /films logs films I've seen and my reviews of them
  • /uses has an overview of the software, hardware, services, and so on, that I use
  • /contact provides a way to drop me an e-mail
  • /colophon details a bit about how the site is made
  • /snippets has little bits of code or other info I find useful
  • /sitemap is a more exhaustive list of contents

If you're just here for the blog posts, the latest ones are:

Word cloud featuring: monthly, posts, scrapers, combinations, play, moving, seem, still, talks, bryan, previously, data, last, albums, towards, website, slowly, prompts, pace, classic, frozen, feet, versions

Monthly Meanderings: September 2026

Where has the year gone? How is it October already? Although I’m actually writing this in September, so it isn’t. But the point still stands, I think. Man, I’m getting good at these intros. They just flow right off the page, right? … Right? Website updates A couple of new posts appeared in September. Lego, ACME DNS-01, and negatively-cached surprises is a rather snappily t...

A screenshot of gmusic, showing a sidebar with playlists, a large table showing tracks in the selected playlist, and a control bar at the bottom.

The expanding scope of coding agents

It’s time for another post about LLMs! I know, I know, that’s basically all anyone talks about these days. But that sort of makes sense: it’s what a significant number of software engineers spend their day using. And they’re changing so rapidly. Back in May last year, I said:

Word cloud featuring: query, chameth, records, caching, recursive, resolver, cnames, lego, nxdomain, responsible, simon's, check, rcode, propagation, nonexistent, opcode, behaviour, centauri, drill, systemd-resolved

Lego, ACME DNS-01, and negatively-cached surprises

Recently a friend was deploying Centauri, my reverse proxy service that can obtain TLS certificates using ACME DNS-01 challenges. He asked a seemingly innocent question: “When Centauri is ‘waiting for record propagation’ is there an option to increase the time?” But that’s a question with a hidden, concerning XY problem. We both use the same DNS provider, and it defin...