Ultrathink and Build: Weekly Dev Log with AI Tools and Side Projects

What I'm Reading and Watching This Week 📚

• [Article] "Deep Work in the Age of AI" by Cal Newport. Proper interesting take on how AI coding tools change our relationship with focused work. Made me rethink a few things about how I structure my own deep work blocks.
• [Video] "The Art of Code Review" by ThePrimeagen. Some good bits on making code reviews actually useful instead of the usual rubber-stamping faff.
• [Book] Currently reading "Staff Engineer" by Will Larson. If you're a senior dev wondering what comes next, this is the one.

Side Projects and AI Dev Tools I'm Building 🛠️

stevengonsalvez.com 🟢 Active
Next.js 15 + MDX blog platform with the byte-sized banter section you're reading right now. Foundation's done, blog section coming together. Next up is deploying to Vercel and sorting the domain.

Personal MCP Server 🟡 On Hold
Custom MCP server for personal productivity tools. Paused while I wait for Claude Desktop to get its MCP support properly sorted.

What Changed This Week 🗞️

Migrated the blog from dev.to-only to a self-hosted Next.js site. Launched this new weekly banter format. Still experimenting with how often I actually want to publish, reckon weekly is about right but we'll see.

Developer Tips and Tricks 💡

Quick git alias for better logs:

git config --global alias.lg "log --graph --oneline --all --decorate"

This creates a beautiful visual git history that's way more readable than the default log.

Claude Desktop optimization tip:
Keep conversations small and restart often. The message limit resets every 5 hours, but shorter conversations use fewer tokens per message. You can get 2-3x more usage by starting fresh chats instead of continuing long threads. (If you're weighing up Claude Code versus other terminal tools, I did a proper comparison of Claude Code vs Warp AI a while back.)