johnreine.com

Why:

  1. I am unemployed and need to figure out my next step.
  2. My goal is to create a startup that makes open source ocean robots and sensors that work together. 
  3. I have never written much publicly but have always wanted to.  This is a chance to finally do that.
  4. Writing things and making them public is an incredible amount of pressure to do things the right way.  I like this pressure.  It is this kind of accountability that I can get used to.
  5. I tried using Claude to code in spring of 2025.  It was decent.  I tried again in Fall of 2025 and it was downright amazing.  I am now realizing that my watered down engineering skills can live a new life with Claude, and I am determined to scale up what I am capable of doing.  I am a generalist, which helps me to know what and how Claude should be doing things, and would previously spend weeks in the weeds of actually getting things done.  Claude can circumvent that effort.  It still take a lot of time, but I am seeing a lot more capacity for innovation with it.  One might say I am addicted.
  6. I did a startup when I was younger, directly out of college.  To some degree it broke me and I spent my 30's enjoying life and making video games.  I spend my 40's starting a family and getting into Oceanography.  I am to spend my 50's doing exactly what I want to be doing: working from home on my own stuff while spending ample time with my family.  It seems like a far away goal at this point as I have nothing to speak of towards that effort, but this is my start to that.

How:

For years johnreine.com languished with just a simple html page I threw together years ago that had a brief review of my life.  I had setup SSL at some point but those certificates had expired.  It was an old ubuntu server on linode that had since been purchased by Akamia.  I don't know if this is good or bad for the world, but it happened.  I had been on linode for a long time.. I think since the early 2000's?  I was a wannabe linux geek and thought it was the most pure linux experience.  Overall it was.

I had used publii before for other websites and I really liked the idea of a static website.  I aspire to write more but do not need a 'blogging platform'.  Overall using publii is a very nice experience, though sorting out themes and trying to do anything outside of their templates proved to be difficult with my limited web capabilities.

I spun up claude and asked it to sort out a stftp setup for publii to upload to, and to fix the out of date SSL certificate.  I had done this last in 2017.  I can do all of this but it often takes me a long time to sort it all out.  The last time I setup SFTP for publii it somehow took a long time on a new Digital Ocean droplet..  I wasn't looking forward to that again. 

Claude seemed to do all of this fairly easily.  It had a few hiccups that it sorted out, mostly with permissions, the same thing I often stumble over through brute force.  It installed sshpass which allowed it to run commands on the server.  I have no doubt this is all awful network security, having AI set it up, but I was simply awful at it, so hopefully this is a better approach.  If anything happens to the server I'll just make a new one as well - another reason I like publii. 

When claude thought it was done the browser still said it was insecure, but that it had a valid certificate.  It got www.johnreine.com correct but johnreine.com was still invalid.  It quickly sorted this and all was good.  I would give Claude a B+ for it's effort.    

Why am I building out my website at the age of 51?  Let's break it down.

When:

I am to do regular updates and get into stories of my startup.  I've lived a couple of lives already and have been through most professional scenarios at this point.  It would be nice to share those with some hard earned perspective.