Hey this is Isaac, I met with some dear friends, Danny and Audrey Roy Greenfeld, in Baltimore for a mini-sprint on the air web-dev framework. Walking around a science museum while brainstorming and cafe-hopping while hacking together was a blast. During the sprint I created a new testing example (unit, integration, and end-to-end playwright tests) and began extracting features from private codebases into small, public libraries. I also learned that a late evening espresso martini is not the...
4 months ago • 2 min read
Hey this is Isaac, This week I was fixing some basic and classic async problems: a "processing" pill that never updated to "complete." Blech. The goal is to prevent long-running tasks from freezing the user interface. If something takes a second, it’s fine to expect the user to stay on the page until it completes. But if it takes 5 minutes? Users will want to be able to do other things while it’s processing. So we have background tasks that run independently of the UI the user sees. But the...
4 months ago • 2 min read
Hey this is Isaac, Welcome to my new weekly newsletter. Each week, we explore one build, one lesson, and one refactor. Only practical ideas to help you build better. This week I jumped from untangling a messy Stripe integration to light creativity generating an AI promo video. The mental whiplash is real. Let's start with the AI Promo Video. The Build: Directing an AI to Make a Promo Video I created a 74-second promo video draft in about 30 minutes. AI wrote the code, but I was the creative...
5 months ago • 2 min read
I know I don't send updates as often as I should. I get too caught up building stuff! But I've been working on a lot of exciting stuff and have a big backlog of things to share. 🚀 What's New I'm partnering with Eleanor Berger to launch a comprehensive course on AI-Assisted Coding. As part of this project, I'm publishing tons of free content on my new Substack. Want to stay in the loop? Follow my substack here for all the latest updates and free resources. 🔍 What I've Been Working On I've been...
8 months ago • 1 min read
Isaac's Tech Digest Join me for weekly insights on tech, coding, and AI. I share practical tips and learnings from building real-world applications, delivered straight to your inbox. Ad: I am an independent AI consultant. To get my help or get more information go here: https://bit.ly/isaac-consults Building custom annotation tools for error analysis with FastHTML Published on May 27, 2025 My talk in the AI Evals course that shows you how to use a new python web framework called FastHTML to...
10 months ago • 1 min read
Isaac's Tech Digest Join me for weekly insights on tech, coding, and AI. I share practical tips and learnings from building real-world applications, delivered straight to your inbox. Late Chunking: The Better Way to Embed Document Chunks Published on April 9, 2025 Solving the lost context problem in document retrieval with the embed-then-chunk approach Your RAG system is probably broken due to the “lost context problem”: When “Berlin” in one chunk can’t link to “3.85M inhabitants” in another,...
11 months ago • 1 min read
Isaac's Tech Digest Join me for weekly insights on tech, coding, and AI. I share practical tips and learnings from building real-world applications, delivered straight to your inbox. Building Dynamic Web UIs with FastHTML and HTMX Published on April 3, 2025 A simpler approach to creating interactive web applications using Python and hypermedia Read more... Perl Command-Line Magic Published on April 1, 2025 Mastering text processing in the CLI : the -p -i -n -e -l -a -0 -w -s options Read...
12 months ago • 1 min read
Isaac's Tech Digest Join me for weekly insights on tech, coding, and AI. I share practical tips and learnings from building real-world applications, delivered straight to your inbox. FastHTML Applications 1 Published on March 27, 2025 Learn to build web applications with FastHTML using Python Read more... DNS 101 Published on March 25, 2025 A Practical Guide of key information needed to know about DNS to host web apps Read more... Stay up to date on all my writing at isaacflath.com
12 months ago • 1 min read
Isaac's Digital Digest Join me for weekly insights on tech, coding, and AI. I share practical tips and learnings from building real-world applications, delivered straight to your inbox. Check out the companion repository with code, data, and the application built in the blog posts below! It's a great starting point for experimentation :) Building a Search Evaluation App with FastHTML and MonsterUI Published on March 18, 2025 Create a professional web application to evaluate search algorithms...
12 months ago • 1 min read