Sign in

Kevin Kempf

@kckempf.bsky.social
44 followers 109 following 123 posts

Software Engineer at AWS

PostsRepliesMedia
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Northwestern University is ending pregame performance by their marching band. Part of their strategy of ruining the gameday experience with the worst parts of the NFL fan experience, complete with overloud ads and outdated songs on the loudspeaker. dailynorthwestern.com/2026/10/01/t...
dailynorthwestern.com
NUMB will not perform pregame at new Ryan Field
Last updated Oct. 1 at 12:00 p.m. The Northwestern University Marching Band will not perform on the field pregame for NU’s opening of the new Ryan Field against Penn State on Friday, multiple sources ...
000
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
I listen to the games every Sunday mostly to amuse myself with whatever way they find to lose.
000
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
It's funny because why would I have heard it? I listen to a local indie/alternative station and a satellite jazz network. Even the plumbers were listening to their own 90s rock mix when they were working here. I'm sure it's fine, just not on my stations.
030
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
5 sacks for Simmons. Some of that is on Brandon but the offensive line has failed.
000
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Probably not a surprise that some interviews include unwritten rules about "respect". At most of my in person interviews I was offered coffee or water if I didn't bring my own. That's probably normal for whiteboard coding interviews.
000
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Knox County mayor. Knoxville has had Democrat mayors since 2011. I've seen folks blame rural voters for Tennessee's awful politics but it's really the suburbs.
111
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
The St. Louis guy made it big in England.
130
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
TS Eliot The Wasteland has to be up there.
290
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Funny thing is, sprinkles on bread is strange to Americans, too. Maybe on pancakes for children.
010
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Gee, I wonder how they associated "spark" with machine learning. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_...
en.wikipedia.org
Apache Spark - Wikipedia
160
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
In time, I'll have a daughter I can truly look up to.
101
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
I've been messing around with Qwen3-coder:30b as an alternative backend for Claude Code and for some Langgraph stuff. If you're able to work in a smaller problem space and help it out with simplifying context, I've found it to be pretty good.
031
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
There's a cliché of her rebounding her own misses. That said, I didn't see this particular game, and she's a great rebounder no matter who shoots.
110
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
That's 1 day of my daughter's food. 😄
100
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
If your inference provider exposes a compatible endpoint, yes. If not, you'll need to translate. There's a wider ecosystem of LLM proxies that also provide other functionality, like telemetry, attribution, authentication, and routing, etc. LiteLLM is an example of a more serious effort.
100
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
You can use the same concept for the harness you prefer as long as it accepts an endpoint and your local LLM exposes an API. Or you can write your own harness, or use LM Studio instead of Ollama for local open weight models, or other stuff that hasn't even come to my mind.
100
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
Even if you like Claude Code, it was relatively trivial for me to write a reverse proxy that allows me to substitute local open weights models on Ollama for the remote Anthropic models. There are a lot of valid approaches to model independence.
130
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
I used a domain/business glossary and RAG to improve my Langgraph SQL Agent's performance! Let me know what you think about my approach. www.grokkist.com/blog/sql-age...
grokkist.com
Reducing Ambiguity in a SQL Agent using a domain glossary and RAG
A domain glossary can give an LLM agent context it needs to finish a task, but when that is not enough to understand importance, RAG can reduce ambiguity
000
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
That’s part of what gets to me, muscle is supposedly more dense but Reacher looks impossibly big in comparison to someone who is supposed to be the same height and weight (and speed and strength for that matter).
100
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
NFL players would give the best analog. Travis Kelce has been listed at 6’5” 250lbs for reference. I mention him because he’s super well known and that size is ideal for defensive ends and tight ends.
120
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
One of my geography professors told a story about trying to catch a tumbleweed, since it looked so light. He described the locals watching as he stood by the road getting obliterated by the tumbleweed he tried to catch.
010
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
I've felt that the best way to do a streamlined app is client side, simply because of how much load you would need to carry on the server side, especially if it's multitenant.
100
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
He was allowing a lot more than that. He was sure there was some league conspiracy to push him out when nobody wanted that on their roster.
120
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
At UL I had to take the PPE training module. I haven’t used safety goggles while writing software but at least I know how?
000
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
I'm personally realizing that maybe I should hide the comics, and Watchmen, and Sin City from my similarly inclined and very tall girl. She's been blasting through Babysitter's Club, which are of course aimed at girls. She's also been huge into the National Geographic Kids materials, though.
000
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 10/07/2026
Feels like the more relevant historical reference for this tournament is rowing up the Seine and Thames.
010
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
He did actually do one cool thing: the first goal against Paraguay, splitting two defenders twice getting the pass to McKennie. But then he got injured and honestly shouldn't have come back in this tournament.
030
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
Last month I had a lot of fun writing an LLM proxy for collecting telemetry in Langfuse. I played around with writing a Text-to-SQL agent that uses that observability. This is the first post in a series about how I am using observability to improve an AI tool. www.grokkist.com/blog/sql-age...
grokkist.com
A LangGraph SQL agent with per-call observability
Building a text-to-SQL agent on top of the canonical LangGraph tutorials, then routing every model call through my own OTel-emitting proxy so I can see what it actually does
021
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
Learning how wars are actually fought cured me of this. In summary: "Welcome to the Army. Here's your shovel."
040
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
I think we can blame anything bad that happens in soccer on Trump, and he should henceforth be enemy #1 to USMNT. (This is not a rational thought).
000
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
As a fan of Premier League soccer, I've heard British hosts murder names in almost every language. Javier was just impossible for them.
000
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 05/07/2026
For what it's worth, with the timeline (Trump call on Wednesday after the game was probably going to happen regardless), Infantino was wise enough to do what he wanted with the knowledge that someone even less popular than him would take the backlash.
010
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 05/07/2026
Americans, being more aware of the nature of Trump’s social media posts, waited on confirmation from more reputable sources.
130
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 05/07/2026
It's hard to think of anybody who is an engaged soccer fan to have been neutral before. Perhaps the press, but I feel like that's professional neutrality more than personal.
100
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 05/07/2026
I wouldn't expect anyone who wasn't already rooting against the US to suddenly pick it up. Most people chanting against the US in this are motivated by factors far outside of soccer or FIFA.
100
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 04/07/2026
Crab because crawfish (crayfish/crawdads) is hard to come by in London?
040
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 03/07/2026
Similarly to American football, the VAR calls could be made without disruption from a separate video referee, but that would reduce the importance of the referee on the field. The real point of the disruption is to reinforce the power of the referee.
010
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
Wild that Germany got a goal called back for running a "pick play" in the Patriots' home stadium.
000
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
Your first response was also spam! Btw, with spam meaning spiced ham, is the turkey version spurkey?
100
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
These days you'd have to settle for Schenectady or Utica I guess.
000
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
It's wild that as a Vols fan I just now realized it. At least he has another distraction to keep him away from UT.
010
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
That brought to mind this piece by Baxter Holmes on ESPN about specialization increasing injury risk for young basketball players. www.espn.com/nba/story/_/...
espn.com
'These kids are ticking time bombs': The threat of youth basketball
In part one of a two-part series, ESPN explores the dangers of youth basketball -- and how the culture of perpetual competition is jeopardizing the futures of the very stars it hopes to create.
100
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
I couldn't find a lot of detail about the lightning protection at the Linc, just the company that built it. I'm genuinely interested if you have more details.
000
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
Lincoln Financial Field and most other American stadiums have lightning protection, they're just open air. Philadelphia is pretty well known as the place where Franklin invented his version of the lightning rod, to boot.
100
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
Philadelphia treating the World Cup visitors to lightning in commemoration of Benjamin Franklin's kite experiment.
010
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 22/06/2026
I just realized there are folks that don't have any idea of why Darcy finds Elizabeth's family insufferable.
1290
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
I like hydration breaks for high temps, when has been the rule for a while. For this tournament they mandated them for every game to make room for commercials, hence the angst.
020
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 13/06/2026
Ok we cheered for Kareem.
000
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 13/06/2026
I thought it was mostly for the viewers to boo.
100
Kevin Kempf @kckempf.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
My Astro blog now publishes site.standard.* records to my PDS, pulls Bluesky replies as comments at build time, and uses a script to auto-link each blog post to its Bluesky thread. www.grokkist.com/blog/astro-a...
grokkist.com
Publishing the Blog to the ATProto Ecosystem with site.standard.document
How I integrated my Astro static blog with the Standard.site lexicon to publish records to ATProto with Bluesky replies as comments and Bluesky post auto-discovery
000