Sharon

The Secret to Easy Vibe Coding? Stop Building for the Cloud

Note: This is a copy of an article I posted on LinkedIn in June 2026. I’m sure many of my fellow instructional designers have struggled with vibe coding. I share your pain. The endless prompting and re-prompting, the tedious wait between responses, and the hopeless feeling that the project will never be finished. Despite these irritants, I continue to push through vibe-coding projects because the result is usually worth the effort. But a recent project reminded me why I fell in love with the vibe coding concept. Unlike previous slogs, this one came together in an effortless afternoon. The “secret sauce” didn’t have anything to do with prompts. Instead, I changed where the app lives. I stopped building for the cloud and brought everything local. (Note: This is also my first GitHub project!) Background While playing with AI video tools, I followed common Internet advice to concentrate on getting good first and last frames for each video clip. If I supplied these two frames along with direction instructions (lighting, camera movement, character movement, dialog, sound effects, et cetera) then the AI model combines this information and returns the video clip. Here’s an example of first and last frame images, and the resulting video. So, since the first and last frames are critical, it’s important to have consistent characters and locations across all the shots. The usual workflow is to create a starting image from a description in a generative AI model, then use that image as a “seed” to generate additional images. For example, if you want an over-the-shoulder shot of one character looking at another, you’d use a prompt like this: “Cinematic over-the-shoulder shot. The camera is positioned closely behind [Foreground Subject/Character], looking past their shoulder to focus sharply on [Background Subject/Action]. Match the exact visual style, lighting, and color palette of the attached reference image. Depth of field with the foreground shoulder slightly blurred. [Optional: Add specific vibe or lighting, e.g., dramatic studio lighting, bright daylight].” The AI Lift Gemini easily created additional prompts for other common cinematic shots, like a close-up, bird’s eye view, two-shot, or three-quarter view. I’d cut and paste the prompts as needed, customizing them on the fly to make sure they matched the mood and lighting of the seed image. And I’d repeat some prompts multiple times, because the first AI attempt didn’t match the vision in my head, or because AI made poor choices, or didn’t keep the characters consistent. So a lot of tedious cut-and-paste, trying to get shots that worked. CTRL+C ➡️ CTRL+V, over and over and over. So, after about three hours of cut/paste, I decided to vibe code a tool that would create multiple shots from one reference (aka seed) image. The finished app, ShotSmith, works on a “wizard” style workflow with three main tabs. First the user uploads an image. Next the user selects what type of shots they want, and how many of each shot they want to generate. (Up to ten shots per shot type). … Read more

Resume Updates

Wow, the job search has changed. In the past, I usually had a 1:6 interview ratio. For every six applications I completed, I had one interview. I understand the landscape has changed a little? /s My graphic resume opened many doors, but I can’t use this format today. Instead, everything has to be one column, and fairly boring, to better comply with the needs of ATS systems. In the past I had one brief paragraph per job. Today I need 10+ bullet points per job, and it seems I need measurable metrics at every stage. That’s the hardest part for me. I can tell people why my projects were innovative or important, but I don’t always have hard numbers to explain if a project was a success. I have questions about the whole ATS thing; questions I need to research once I feel I’m past the post-layoff Endless Revisions Cycle. For example, if I used Captivate in all my jobs, and I mention Captivate as part of all my jobs, does ATS see that as greater proficiency if I mentioned it once? If so, how many mentions make a person expert level? So may questions, so many tasks, and only so much severance. I’m a little stressed. Guess I need to stop writing and return to revisions.

Portfolio Updates

About six months ago I migrated my website. My former company kept jacking up the price, year after year, until I was paying an outrageous $200 per year for their baseline hosting package. To add insult to injury, they offered me better pricing after I told them I was moving. What’s up with that? If you wanted to keep me as a customer, HostGator, you should have kept prices reasonable so I’d never need to look at other options. Honestly, hosting is worse than car insurance. The migration made me face up to several issues on my site. The theme I bought five years ago was broken, and the developer had moved on to other fields. The portfolio contained a lot of outdated content, including Flash content I hadn’t completely eradicated. Broken shortcodes littered the posts, as I disabled a bunch of plugins as part of the migrated. I made lists of things to fix, and promptly ignored the fixes because, work. Funny how quickly your priorities can shift post-layoff! My resume and the portfolio are now the center of my life. I feel like I can’t apply for jobs until both items are healthier. I had a specific vision for the portfolio. My last portfolio was all on one page, with 40+ items showcasing skills I’ve picked up over 30 years. It had category buttons for filtering, but feedback lead me to believe people weren’t using the filters. I also felt the portfolio wasn’t telling a story. Viewers didn’t necessarily understand my strengths, my career path, or what I wanted from my next job. At the same time, I loved visual impact of the masonry grid on the old portfolio. I decided to go with multiple pages highlighting key career strengths — Interactive Content, Graphic Design, Workflow Transformations, and Documentation/Training. I threw in a section on Personal Projects for fun. Each page features its own masonry grid. If viewers mouse over a grid item, they can see a short description of the post, and clicking opens the post in a lightbox window. Users can navigate through all the grid items without leaving the lightbox thanks to forward/back buttons. I think it works from a usability perspective and as storytelling. For anyone interested, my WordPress setup uses Essential Grid, GeneratePress, and GenerateBlocks. The basic layout is finished now, and my next step is to start working with the content; adding new materials and editing the old!

Introducing the Layoff Chronicles

Last Monday morning I was struggling with my PC, trying in vain to get it to boot, when my co-worker C jumped on the SMS chat that a few of us in my department participate in. She said she had been laid off. My heart sunk into the ground. C, who everyone loves, had been with The Company for almost 20 years. If she wasn’t safe . . . So I reached out to my Director, and informed him of the PC issues as a just-in-case. He responded immediately, and in moments I was in a phone call with HR, getting the dreaded news. My first layoff at age 55. I’ve had all the feelings, and I don’t want to dwell on them here. Instead, these posts will focus on how I’m managing this problem. How the job hunt is going, what hunt-related activities I’m engaged with, and how this opportunity will change my life for the better. This will help me stay accountable, and hopefully positive. (Make a note: This might be a good answer to one of those standard, dreaded interview questions.) Soon I’ll write about the changes I’ve made to my resume, and later in the week maybe the changes to my portfolio.

Planners

While I’ve more than successfully transitioned from paper books to ebooks, I haven’t been as enthusiastic about giving up paper calendars and to-do lists. Paper lets me create attractive planner pages that I can customize to fit my life. Apps can’t do that.

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Post to Twitter using IFTTT and GMail

This short tutorial was inspired by a professor with a new cell phone who wanted an easy way to share articles with students using his Blackboard class.  The first part, shown here, describes how to post to Twitter using Gmail using IFTTT.  The second part, which is unfortunately not available, teaches how to set up a Twitter feed in Blackboard.

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