My New Role – Helping AI Adoption at Cursor / / No Comments This will be a short and sweet post to announce that today is my first day at Cursor! I’m starting today as an AI Adoption Engineer, which basically boils down to helping our customers make better use of Cursor and AI in general. If you’ve been visiting my site for a while now, you know I’ve been using AI for quite some time, but more importantly, I’ve also been adopting AI in my own workflows and processes. It takes time and energy but the payoff can be so incredible, and that’s what I get to help our developers with. Happy Day One! Raymond Camden… more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Adoption, Cursor, Helping, Role
TIL – Algolia Makes Creating an MCP Server Stupid Easy / / No Comments A few days ago I was chatting with Chuck Meyer (devrel for Algolia) and I casually mentioned, "It sure would be cool if Algolia had an easy way to turn my search index into an MCP server." He promptly responded, "Of course, you complete and utter dufus, which is why we already have that feature." (Not an exact quote.) This is exactly the kind of thing I love to hear. I’ve been using Algolia for my search here for years and honestly have not paid much attention to the new additions on their platform. That was a mistake. Let me show you how dang easy they made this. First – what’s Algolia? Chuck, forgive me, I’m going to do a horrible job summarizing... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Algolia, creating, Easy, Makes, Server, Stupid
Turning my Cursor Performance Work into a Repeatable Skill / / No Comments Yesterday, I wrote about using Cursor to review my blog for performance. Cursor (and again, for full disclosure I work here now 😉 did a dang good job of finding performance issues with my site, handling the huge size and various languages, platforms, and so forth. As I said, it worked well, but I wanted to look into making this more of a repeatable process. I’m saying "repeatable", not "automated", on purpose here. I can automate the process, but a full performance review feels much more like something I should run when I think it makes sense, for example, when I know I’ve tweaked my blog at the ‘code’ level versus writing cat-related blogs. I do... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 'turning, Cursor, into, performance, Repeatable, skill, work
Asking Cursor to Review My Blog for Performance / / No Comments Last week I decided to try something interesting. I opened my blog up in Cursor and asked for a basic performance review. That seems like a no-brainer, but keep in mind, my blog’s source code clocks in at near seven thousand files (ignoring node_modules of course), so this wasn’t some small request. My blog is built with the Eleventy static site generator. It’s a mix of JavaScript and Markdown primarily, with a huge portion of the codebase being Markdown and not ‘code’ per se, but me rambling on about cats and Star Wars. There’s also Liquid templates which are parsed into HTML by a JavaScript library. But that doesn’t quite tell the whole story. In Eleventy,... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Asking, blog, Cursor, performance, review
Links For You (7/5/26) / / No Comments In my last links post, I hinted that I may have some good news on the job front, and if you follow me on LinkedIn you already know that I’ve signed on to my next gig. Tomorrow morning I’ll share on here (and on LI) details about the new gig, but I am beyond excited about this new job. With that out of the way, how about some happy links for what’s going to be a really dang good week? JavaScript in the Shadows As one of the new proposals for JavaScript, the ShadowRealm API is pretty interesting. It allows for the creation of a realm, or in my mind, an environment, with JavaScript that is 100% disconnected from the main environment of your browser window. Mat Marquis gives a great... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 7/5/26, links
Building Custom Form Selection Boxes – Working on Accessibility / / No Comments Whenever I find myself needing to update a previous blog post, I either correct it inline and add a small note on top, for small tweaks, or write a whole new piece for larger changes. My last blog post talked about how to use CSS to style a "block" such that it acted like a form radio button. When I worked on that demo, I was a bit worried about accessibility. I did one quick check with an online tool, and thought I was ok. I was not. When I shared my post on LinkedIn, Kevin Bonett shared this feedback with me: I would argue that, despite using correct semantic HTML, the “custom” radio buttons are inaccessible. If you’re a sighted keyboard user, how will you know... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: accessibility, Boxes, building, custom, form, Selection, working
Building Custom Form Selection Blocks – no JS, all CSS / / No Comments I apologize for what may be a slightly misleading title. The topic for this post is something I’ve had on my list of things to explore for some time now, and while I wait for the new job to start, I’ve found myself with time to kill. Let me explain what I’m talking about and hopefully it will make a bit more sense. You are, dear reader, familiar with form controls and how to build forms both big and small. One type of user interface I’ve seen from time to time is the ability to select an item where the "item" is an arbitrary block of code. What do I mean by that? Typically a choice element in a form is either a select, checkbox, or radio set. But I’ve seen... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Blocks, building, custom, form, Selection
Use AI to not use AI (as much) / / No Comments This squarely falls into the "everyone probably knows this but it didn’t click with me right away" category so please feel free to laugh at my ignorance, but it’s something I realized over the past few months, and as I just used this technique this morning, I figured I’d share it on the blog. The idea is simple – it’s trivial to ask a Gen AI tool to do something for you – and depending on the ask, may work great. But what I realized a few months back, especially in regards to having AI parse data, is that you can also use the opportunity to generate a tool (like a Python or Node script) so you don’t need to return to the AI tool again. This... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Much