Anna's Meanderings

👋 Hola! I'm Anna 🌍 Ex-Nomad, #Kiwi + code-wrangler | 10 years, 42 countries, endless stories 🛫🍹✈️ | Automattic Developer by day, AI explorer & full-stack magician by night 💻✨ | #Latindancing 💃 | Toddler-wrangling mama 🍼 | #Mexican vibes 🇲🇽, #Melbourne life 🇦🇺 | #Garden dreamer, wannabe #author, and quirky decor addict 🌱📚🎨 🔗 Wandering (and wondering) about the world at https://anna.kiwi @[email protected]

[annakiwi]

Hey, I'm Anna 👋

Nice to meet you! Here's a few other places you can find me: - My Blog - Me on Mastodon - My blog in the fediverse - Github

[annakiwi]

My book has a publish date (And I need your help.)

The ebook for What Machines Can’t Replace is scheduled to publish in August, 2026. I still feel a little giddy each time I type those dates. You can find the book at whatmachinescantreplace.com, and pre-orders are open now for ebooks on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple books, and Kobo. Print pre-orders are coming soon. The book is about what humans bring to creative work in an age of AI, and…

My book has a publish date (And I need your help.)

[annakiwi]

Building Evals for an AI Memoir Writing Coach

I’ve been travelling for years. Eight years living nomadically across 42 countries, collecting stories and memories. I have numerous travel journals, thousands of photos. I remember fireflies in the Colombian Amazon, night trains through China, getting spectacularly food poisoned in India. But when trying to turn these memories into something coherent, I keep getting distracted by the structure…

Building Evals for an AI Memoir Writing Coach

[annakiwi]

A Bridge Between Soil and Silicon

Sometimes I feel caught between being an AI engineer and a gardener. A champion for sustainability. An artist who values what is made by hand. And then — for 40 (or let’s be real, more) hours a week — I am a software engineer. And yet… here we are. More and more, I’ve started to see myself not as divided, but as a bridge. A translator between two worlds. Someone fluent in both languages. I’m…

A Bridge Between Soil and Silicon

[annakiwi]

Bridging Vibe Coding to Production with MCP

Thankfully, the room laughed when I showed my AI-generated headshots at Web Directions Developer Summit last week. I’d asked AI to remove my boyfriend from a photo, and it gave me a different man instead. Then a jungle background with a cocktail. I built a portfolio site using Lovable – a currently popular no-code AI builder where you can describe what you want, and watch it come to life in…

Bridging Vibe Coding to Production with MCP

[annakiwi]

A mostly-metaphoric MCP glossary

When I first started learning about Model Context Protocol, I kept finding that there was no “intermediate” level. Every explanation assumed either I knew nothing, and that I should just like to know “What does MCP stand for?” or that I was an expert and already knew what everything meant. I’d read “the MCP server exposes tools that the client can invoke” and think… right, but what is a server in…

A mostly-metaphoric MCP glossary

[annakiwi]

From Geocities to GPT

I’ve been trying to find my first website for ages now. The McPhee Family Pets, circa 1999. Hours down rabbit holes of the Wayback Machine, trying every possible URL combination I can think of. Was it heartland/prairie? EnchantedForest? Did I use underscores or hyphens? The internet has swallowed it whole, along with Porygon’s Cave and whatever I called Horsea’s page (Horsea’s Haven? Horsea’s…

From Geocities to GPT

[annakiwi]

Three AI customisation concepts

I think in metaphors. It’s how I understand anything complex – by finding connections to something I already know, preferably from a completely different domain. When I first started learning about AI concepts, I’d read the formal definitions and feel like I was staring at a wall of text. But then someone would say “it’s like…” and everything would click into place. So I started collecting…

Three AI customisation concepts

[annakiwi]

AI Replaced My Boyfriend: A Story About Context in Machine Learning

AI Replaced My Boyfriend: A Story About Context in Machine Learning

[annakiwi]

Are we underestimating junior developers?

I keep seeing these LinkedIn posts about how we shouldn’t treat AI as our junior developer, how we still need to hire juniors so we have seniors when the current generation retires. And while I agree we absolutely need junior developers, something about this framing sits wrong with me. It feels like we’re defending junior developers by essentially saying “we need them as human code-writing…

Are we underestimating junior developers?

[annakiwi]

I Am an Engineer

I had Engineering AI live-streaming on my office screen yesterday afternoon when Geoffrey Huntley gave his talk “The future belongs to people who can just do things“. It was the third time I’d heard this presentation this year, and I found myself nodding along to his point about the shift from ‘artisanal hand-crafted commits‘ to something much bigger. But this time, instead of thinking about what…

I Am an Engineer

[annakiwi]

Cocina Oaxaqueña

I’ve been collecting these photographs across more than a decade of visits to Oaxaca, starting from my very first trip in May 2013. When I look at them now, the textures and colours transport me immediately – those distinctive Oaxacan tablecloths, the hand-painted dishes, the flowers scattered in the background. I can taste the flavours all over again. What surprised me most, initially, was…

Cocina Oaxaqueña

[annakiwi]

I've always been curious about everything, but I'm learning there's a difference between wonder that explores and wonder that performs.

Living in Wonderment

[annakiwi]

Why Your Bread Recipe is an Algorithm

Tomorrow I start Joe Hudson’s Connection course. This week, I’ve started reading Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s Tiny Experiments. Each evening, I’m working with apps to sharpen my algorithmic thinking. Somehow these three seemingly separate things feel deeply connected – the science of small experiments, the art of human connection, the systematic way of approaching the world with curiosity. All mindset…

Why Your Bread Recipe is an Algorithm

[annakiwi]

Chocolate Frogs and Infectious Enthusiasm

I remember nothing from that biology class at Otago University eighteen years ago – not the curriculum, not my classmates, not even what grade I got. But I remember his frogs. There was this professor who would hand out chocolate frogs when we answered bonus questions correctly. He’d share a frog fact of the day during breaks, and his face would light up talking about the incredible healing…

Chocolate Frogs and Infectious Enthusiasm

[annakiwi]

We're drowning in Generative AI, making it tough to spot human-made content. how do we find the genuine, human-made stuff online?

Digital Artisans

[ducktracy-deactivated20260315]

sharing a very sage bit of advice from The Simpsons' own John Swartzwelder that i've been trying to hamper down in my writing and drawing alike. let your inner crappy little elf do his worst

[mintakablue]

[ID: How much time and attention did you spend on these scripts? Another "Simpsons" writer once compared your scripts to finely tuned machines--if the wrong person mucked with them, the whole thing could blow up.

All of my time and all of my attention. It's the only way I know how to write, darn it. But I do have a trick that makes things easier for me. Since writing is very hard and rewriting is comparatively easy and rather fun, I always write my scripts all the way though as fast as I can, the first day, if possible, putting in crap jokes and pattern dialogue--"Homer, I don't want you to do that." "Then I won't do it." Then the next day, when I get up, the script's been written. It's lousy, but it's a script. The hard part is done. It's like a crappy little elf has snuck into my office and badly done all my work for me, and then left with a tip of his crappy hat. All I have to do from that point on is fix it. So I've taken a very hard job, writing, and turned it into an easy one, rewriting, overnight. I advise all writers to do their scripts and other writing this way. And be sure to send me a small royalty every time you do it."

/end ID.]