Building the things that nobody is asking for
I'm Olaf Alders. I write software for the web. I'm a White Camel Award winner. Currently building My Mind is Racing — every run, swim, ride and race — all in one calendar.
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AI Scraping on the Cheap
I’ve been able to gather over 53,000 events and over 22,000 organizations for My Mind is Racing mostly by not using AI. In the cases where I do use an LLM I try to minimize its use. My token spend has been less than what I spend on fancy cups of coffee.
CPAN Uploads Are Up 50% Year-over-Year
An unsatisfying halfway point as we wait for Neil Bowers’ next annual CPAN Report: a month over month comparison of Jan-Aug 2026 against the same period in the previous year — uploads, releasers, first-time releasers, and new distributions. By all of these measures, CPAN looks to be a healthier and more vibrant …
Building Your Race Calendar
Races can be hard to track: many are listed on one of many ticket-selling platforms, or are smaller, grassroots events that only really exist on Facebook or Instagram. I built My Mind is Racing so you can search events quickly, star the ones you like, and sync one calendar to all of your devices — more like Wikipedia …
The United States Is Not America
Google’s developer documentation style guide says to use America and American for the Americas, not the United States. One country has co-opted a name that belongs collectively to all of them – and many of us don’t realise that we can take it back.
PrettyGoodPing: Now With Even More Goodness
PrettyGoodPing started off as a little hobby project back in 2022. It has saved me more than once when it comes to catching expirations in time and watching for uptime issues on projects I care about. Here’s what’s new over the past few weeks.
You Rename My Lake — I Move My Hosting
Last week I moved PrettyGoodPing from DigitalOcean in the U.S. to Hetzner in the E.U. Price was a factor, but not the only one. If I now have to check the provenance of my produce, I should probably do the same for my hosting bill.