Daniel Broderick's corner of the Internet

Keeping my personal website up to date has always been a pain, so the contents below are automatically synced with single note in my notes app. If it were even a tiny bit inconvenient I would never update it. I'll list my projects and maybe braindump here a bit. Stuff should be in roughly cronological order. Message me on LinkedIn or send me an email if you want to chat.

Stuff I’m working on

This site, first of all. Its been up since July 26th and it’s definitely not finished yet so pay no mind to the incomplete sentences and weird formatting https://clipzy.app lets you search any show for dialogue. I used https://opensubtitles.org for the dataset. Ideally I could make it into a vector search across all subtitles for every movie/show but that would require some serious hardware costing north of $10,000. If I aggressively clean my dataset and do some clever optimizations I could maybe do it on sane hardware.

on the utility of personal websites

The internet is firmly in the era of platforms. Frankly, everything on this page could be replicated in my LinkedIn in a more universal, searchable format. The “omg you have a website” 2005 era has passed; it’s accessible to anyone - not a technical feat. The reason I made this site was as an exercise in just how convenient I could make the publishing process. It gets synced every hour from my notes app with an n8n workflow, which actually more convenient than updating LinkedIn. Also, I needed to show off my 4 letter domain name.

Link dumps and old projects

CartoonFlux

<cartoonflux.com> A full on saas MVP with payments, accounts, everything. Ultimately it flopped. It’s simply outclassed by civitai. Still was good way to get my feet wet with AI image gen. I did NOT enjoy the training process. Technically boring and very hit/miss.

Bioinformatics File Converter

https://bioinf-file-convert-2.pages.dev/
Description:
Converts a bam file to a fastq file completely in the browser. This is unique; almost browser based bioinformatics tools do their computation on the server.

Vault QR Code Generator

Application Pitch page

I made this in college with my friend Ethan Lutz. We even pitched it to an investor he knew! Never went anywhere but it was the first MVP I built.

Fyxia

https://bug.fyxia.dev/api/v1/health
https://auth.fyxia.dev/admin
Description:
I just host this for my friend Caleb

Torrent Streaming Server

https://torrent-stream.danb.ro
Description:
This is offline apparently

Minecraft Server (TCP 25565)

<minecraft.danb.ro> Description: Because of course.

MySetup

Sort of a checklist is so I can quickly get established on any machine but also just my opinions on tooling and stuff. It’s good for me to write it down because writing=thinking it is creates an opportunity for me to revamp the tools I use to keep getting better. It’s also a reminder for why I chose the tools I did, because I don’t want to get stuck in the loop of picking up new things for no new benefit, or revisiting alternatives I’ve ruled out for good reason

OS choice

I use Linux Mint on my desktop and Ubuntu LTS for my remote machines. I like the JustWorks philosophy of the Mint project. Its popularity and being based on Ubuntu means support is readily available. I may move to Linux Mint debian edition and Debian for servers if Ubuntu keeps getting more and more corporatized.

I used windows my whole life and WSL for 2-3 years while I was learning programming in college. I ultimately made the plunge into linux because:

  • Windows has extremely poor interoperability between the terminal and its native file system. WSL gives you a working terminal but transferring files between it and the native os is still tedious
  • Networking is messy on WSL
  • WSL has stability issues and obscure bugs
  • Windows is declining in quality while Linux is getting better
  • Telemetry and privacy issues
  • Windows is so non-performant; my PC fans are roaring for basic tasks and I need all 40gb of my RAM

Arch is silly because

  • I rarely require bleeding edge packages
  • For the once a year I do require a bleeding edge package, I can install from source
  • Bleeding edge, frequent updates are problematic for servers and for a stable desktop experience
  • Sticking to debian distros allows me to develop the most broadly applicable skillset; why learn 2 package managers
  • I believe in a good workflow, but customizing everything to be perfect has dimishing returns on productivity

Setting it up

  1. Install kitty. It’s crazy how gnome-terminal doesn’t support scrollback while selecting stuff for a copy. Ridiculous. Kitty also makes syncing its clipboard with the os clipboard easy.
  2. CopyQ, this should be a default program IMO
  3. install neovim, Nerd Font, and NVChad
  4. VSCode. Yes I use both VSCode and Neovim. I think they complement each other.
  5. Brave browser because the built in ad blocker is fantastic. Add Bitwarden and paywall bypass
  6. Kde connect so I can send stuff between my phone and pc.
  7. Simple Notes
  8. docker, docker compose, and lazydocker
  9. Various GUI apps like Discord, Slack, PGAdmin