What’s New?
There’s a lot new with me! I have now been at Plainsight Technologies for over 6 months, crazy how time flies when you’re having fun. I get to learn new things daily and push myself in new and different ways. I’m learning tech like I’m drinking from a fire hose at the moment, but that’s just fine with me. Many people ask what I do; for the most part I do a bit of everything except sales and core engineering. Sometimes I’m referred to as the Swiss Army Knife, someone who can be pointed at just about anything to be worked on. This is where I can really excel because I like to learn fast and fix things.
The other new thing is announcing the closure of Stew’s Self Service Garage, my company I started back in 2014. It is officially being sold.
Saying Goodbye to Stew’s Self Service Garage
It’s time to close the book on this chapter of my life. What started as a big dream in a dorm room had turned into a multi-location successful company. We spent the past 1.5 years exclusively licensed out to Rivian, and it is now time to move on. I have learned a lot over the 10 years we were in operation. When we first opened I had to learn how a self service garage would run, and how to keep the doors open. Fortunately for me I had an excellent team that helped me along the way, and I’ll forever be grateful to the commitment they made. There will always be a taste of disappointment to me that it ended like this, but it was time.
The biggest lesson I learned through the years of Stew’s Self Service Garage was, “Fuck it, I’ll do it myself.” That does not literally mean just me, a lot of the time it was a team effort. “Fuck it, I’ll do it myself,” meant WE were going to figure out how to do something. I didn’t always have a huge budget to get something done, which meant I wouldn’t be paying someone to solve my problems. Countless hours on Google and YouTube were spent to figure out how to do a lot of things. From how to market the company, to how to design and manufacture foam tool organizers, to how to save money on the phone bill, and everything in between. They all were things we figured out how to do ourselves.
I’d like to end with my deep appreciation to the main team of Shawn, John, Rick, Steve, Sam, and Nick. Each member of the team brought their own unique skill set that allowed this company to open our garage doors. I hope to one day work with you all again, and for you guys I am always here. Like we joked many April fools days ago, “We are all Stew”.
My Auth0 Authentication Project
To follow up that last section is tough, but I’d like to write in depth about my latest project for the site. We used WordPress for Stew’s Self Service Garage, which makes auth and user management pretty easy. However, after a decade in the WordPress world I was ready to shift gears and implement scalable API-driven authentication without relying on a CMS. I am not a programmer, my knowledge of the programming languages I interact with is very rudimentary. I heavily rely on Stack Overflow, and various LLMs to help me with coding. With some time off over the holiday break, I decided it was time to learn. Where better to start than my own Astro site?
The very easy way to add auth would be to create my own database and login forms. There are plenty of tutorials on how to do that, including the online course I bought to learn Astro. The more fun and challenging way would be to use Auth0, an industry standard auth provider. Another strong reason for doing this was I did NOT want the responsibility of security for a self-hosted user database. Though I couldn’t find documentation specifically for Auth0 with Astro, that did not deter me from figuring it out with the help of LLMs.
My love of LLMs knows no loyalty and I am happy to try the different options. ChatGPT-4o, Llama 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, Gemini 1.5 and 2 are all LLMs I have used in the past. Anthropic’s Claude 3.5-Sonnet was one I had yet to try, mostly because their usage limits are exceptionally bad for their chat. It took a few limit caps before I found myself spending $20 with Anthropic for their API. With my API key in hand I was ready to get to generating code free from only about 20-30 chat messages per 5 hours.
Setting up basic authentication with a login and logout button was up first. Claude easily generated a new React component for my login and logout button, as well as additions to my api js file. I was able to login and logout using my Auth0 Universal Login form; my first goal was accomplished. Stopping here would be easy enough, but I wanted to have a personalized profile page for logged in users. This would show off the authentication on the site better, and have more interactivity.
Research skills are important when it comes to working with LLMs. My initial focus was on understanding how Auth0 could serve dynamic user profiles on ‘my-profile’ pages. This would allow me to prompt Claude to create a React component to serve the profile details from Auth0 to the frontend. With some iteration it was pretty quick to get the profile details served to the page. I probably spent more time figuring out styling than I did on core functionality. But why stop there? Why not add the ability for users to change basic profile info, and even reset their password.
My new found confidence in Claude, and ever expanding prompting abilities had me iterating on the profile feature a lot more than I expected. Updating user profile details proved a little more difficult, because it took significantly more code for the API endpoints. Auth0 required setting up a management API, the functionality that I’d need to be able to make calls to the proper endpoints. After some iteration with Claude my site was able to get a management token, which then allowed it to properly GET and POST to the respective Auth0 endpoints. With some styling, and a couple code updates I had reached a point where I could consider this little project wrapped up. Here are a few key takeaways from this experience:
- Using good documentation for RAG reduces hallucinations and allows for much faster completion times for tasks.
- Auth0 is a very complex and broad product, there is a lot to learn about it.
- Iterating through multiple versions enhances the development process by building out features as you go.
- APIs make serving tailored user profiles to the frontend simple and scalable.
Patch Notes for JustStewIt.com v2.9.1
- Upgraded to Astro 5.1
- Added basic implementation of content layer for /blog
- Removed Astro SEO integration
- Refactored directory
- Added Auth0 authentication
- Added /my-profile page
- Added update profile picture, update name, reset password
- Added profile picture button to navigation that points to /my-profile
- Switched to Chainguard Node image
- Plenty of new recipes are available on /recipes pages, and are constantly updated between versions