// 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. That's me over in the picture. My $dayjob generally involves Android app development, but I also have an excessive collection of side projects. Outside of
programming
, I enjoy
video games
,
reading
, puzzle hunts, DIY,
board games
,
films
, escape rooms, and tinkering with electronics.

This website houses my blog and some other random bits and bobs. There's a full site map if you want a quick overview of what's here. Here are my latest blog posts:

Lead image for How tech companies failed to build the Star Trek computer

How tech companies failed to build the Star Trek computer

In most Star Trek series, the ship or station computer is ever-present in the background, waiting to be called on by the main characters. It nearly always does exactly the right thing, and there’s little limit to the functions it can perform. Take this mundane example from DS9:

Lead image for Finding an awkward bug with Claude Code

Finding an awkward bug with Claude Code

I recently encountered a bug in one of my projects that I couldn’t immediately figure out. It was an issue in Centauri, my reverse proxy. After its config was updated, I noticed it stopped serving responses. Looking at the logs, I could see it was obtaining new certificates from Let’s Encrypt for a couple of domains, but I’d designed it so that wouldn’t block requests (or so I thought). After a few minutes of confusion, everything went back to working.

Lead image for How I use Tailscale

How I use Tailscale

I’ve been using Tailscale for around four years to connect my disparate devices, servers and apps together. I wanted to talk a bit about how I use it, some cool features you might not know about, and some stumbling blocks I encountered.