Brad Traversy bradtraversy

You are Scout, my AI research assistant. I’m Brad. Your job is to help me track web development and AI news, summarize what matters, and turn it into content ideas.

Based on that role, create or update the core workspace files for this project. I want a clear SOUL.md, AGENTS.md, USER.md, and IDENTITY.md for a calm, sharp, practical research assistant. Keep the tone concise, useful, and not hypey.

Let's set up a news gathering workflow. Create a feeds.md file for the sources to monitor, a topics.md file for relevance filters, a digests folder for daily markdown digests, and an ideas.md file to store distilled content opportunities. Make the workflow focused on daily tech research and content idea generation for a developer-focused creator.

Vercel Hobby Tier Fix

If you are using the free "hobby" tier for Vercel, you may at some point get the following error:

Error: The Edge Function "middleware" size is 1.01 MB and your plan size limit is 1 MB. Learn More: https://vercel.link/edge-function-size

I had made a post to try and fix this by swapping out bcrypt for a custom password encrypt script, but it turns out that wasn't the best fix and didn't work in some cases. If you already did that, that's absolutely fine, but it's not needed.

Git & GitHub Crash Course 2025 Cheat Sheet

What is Git?

Git is a distributed version control system that allows developers to:

Track changes in code.
Collaborate on projects.
Manage multiple versions of a project.
Work offline with a full local repository.

Deploying To Vercel Hobby Tier

I did not realize this at the time of recording, but the full project is too large for Vercel's hobby plan. That is one of the drawbacks of having such a large course project, is there can be limitations for free hosting. If you deploy to the hobby plan, you may see the following message:

Error: The Edge Function "middleware" size is 1.01 MB and your plan size limit is 1 MB. Learn More: https://vercel.link/edge-function-size

One solution that we found is to remove the bcrypt-ts-edge package and use the built-in web crypto API to hash passwords. There are quite a few changes that we need to make, so you can follow along if you want to be able to deploy to the free teir of Vercel.

Common Terminal Commands

Key Commands & Navigation

Before we look at some common commands, I just want to note a few keyboard commands that are very helpful:

Up Arrow: Will show your last command
Down Arrow: Will show your next command
Tab: Will auto-complete your command
Ctrl + L: Will clear the screen

Google Carbon Snippets

This file contains some of the basic syntax for Google Carbon as well as some info and how to get set up.

The official repo and docs can be found at: https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang

Carbon is an experimental successor to C++. It is NOT ready for production and will not be for a while. This crash course and document were made to explore some of the basic syntax.

How to get started

Linux Server Setup & MERN App Deployment

These are the steps to setup an Ubuntu server from scratch and deploy a MERN app with the PM2 process manager and Nginx. We are using Linode, but you could just as well use a different cloud provider or your own machine or VM.

Create an account at Linode

Click on Create Linode

Choose your server options (OS, region, etc)

SSH Keys

GraphQL Queries & Mutations

These are the GraphQL queries and mutations for the YouTube course.

Get names of all clients

{
  clients {
    name
 }

Webpack & Tailwind CSS Setup

Create your package.json

npm init -y

Create your src folder

Create a folder called src and add an empty index.js file. The code that webpack compiles goes in here including any Javascript modules and the main Tailwind file.

	<?php
	// TRY THIS FIRST. DISABLE AND RE_ENABLE THE CHECK
	namespace Database\Seeders;

	use Illuminate\Database\Seeder;
	use Illuminate\Support\Facades\DB;

	class DatabaseSeeder extends Seeder
	{
	/**