Hung Truong: The Blog!

  • June 29, 2025

    My Obligatory Blog Post About Vibe Coding As a Software Engineer

    Vibe Coding Origins

    As generative AI has gotten better in the past months/years, I’ve been trusting it more to do stuff that I’d normally only trust myself to do. Earlier this year I started yet another refactor of my web app, Anime Nano, since I wanted to get it off of the $10 a month DigitalOcean host I was using. I decided to try using Cloudflare since it’s “serverless” and seems to be able to handle a buttload of traffic (which Anime Nano will never see).

    I usually reserve Anime Nano refactors (at this point they’re a pretty regular occurrence, as I’ve refactored it from Rails to Django, and using different databases and hosts, and deployment technologies like Chef and Docker) for technologies that I’m somewhat familiar with. Or technologies that I want to learn. At this point, though, I have a lot less patience for learning stuff that I’m unfamiliar with.

    I decided to try and let AI do most of the heavy lifting, and successfully used Google Gemini (I think it might’ve been 2.0 Pro) in January to move the most basic functionality of Anime Nano to Cloudflare. I was hoping to stay on the free tier, but I think the CPU time limits were being killed by my cron jobs for fetching blog posts. So I ended up signing up for the $5 a month plan for workers, which isn’t really that bad. There’s still plenty of capacity left for any other online experiments I want to run, so that’s a bonus. I was thinking of hosting my personal blog on Cloudflare Workers at some point, but GitHub Pages is free and it works just fine. It is a bit annoying writing my blog posts in Markdown and using Jekyll though.

    Anyway, this blog post is supposed to be about vibe coding! I did pretty much vibe code the MVP of Anime Nano in AI Studio, though it was kind of a pain because I had to copy and paste stuff and make sure that it worked. And if it didn’t I had to really yell at the AI until it did what I wanted it to do. Still, I found it was a success, and I relaunched the web app in Next.js, a technology that I still don’t really understand all that well!

    More …

  • February 27, 2025

    I 3D Printed a Replacement Part For My Toto C200 Washlet Baseplate

    Like washing mud off a car with water...

    We recently moved (I guess it’s been like half a year now) to a house that only had “round” (short) toilets, so I lost the use of my butt-cleaning Toto C200 Washlet. I’ve been super busy with home projects and I only just got to the point where I could rectify (pun intended) this situation.

    I probably could’ve just attached a way too big bidet toilet seat to a way too small toilet, but whatever. I ended up buying a Toto Drake (meme incoming) toilet because everyone says it’s like the best toilet ever. I never really thought about comparison shopping toilets (or even shopping for a toilet) before, but I figured I might as well get the best one.

    So what if I bought the toilet just to make this joke?
    More …

  • December 27, 2023

    Extremely Online: a Book Review and a Retrospective on My Blog!

    Was this book written for me?

    I recently found out about a book called: “Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet” by Taylor Lorenz. As someone who self identifies as extemely online, I needed to see what this book was about. It ended up catapulting me on a journey through my own blog and online history.

    More …

  • December 20, 2023

    The Making of a Christmas Album: Hung For the Holidays

    It's not a Christmas album without wintery wonderland album art!

    This year, I wanted to make something special to go along with my annual holiday cards. Much like a washed up singer, I decided to produce a new holiday album. And since 2023 has been the year of AI, I decided to revisit my voice cloning projects in the process.

    More …

  • June 14, 2023

    Introducing The Talkboy Ultra! An AI Powered Voice Cloning Toy

    The Talkboy Ultra is So Bad

    Note: This blog post is based on a YouTube video I made, which you can watch in the embed, but it also has some stuff that’s not in the video, so read the stuff I wrote below!

    So while I was learning about AI voice cloning technology to make myself sing better (and to make Kanye sing stupid songs), I got an idea into my head that I couldn’t let go of. I was reminicing about the original Talkboy Deluxe from the movie Home Alone 2 (and the subsequent commercial that played on kids tv for years after), and how it was supposed to change your voice but really it just kinda slowed it down. I realized that I could make the dream of the Talkboy come true, and do it with real life hardware.

    So here’s the story of how I made the Talkboy Ultra, which it turns out is a pretty fun toy.

    More …