SSchoepfer

Photonics Bull Case: POET and AAOI Into 2027

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been watching the photonics sector. The AI datacenter buildout is the catalyst. Moving data between chips and servers at the speeds these workloads require is pushing copper to its limits.

That red-glowing optical cable on the back of your TV, the one that runs to your receiver, transmits data as pulses of light through a fiber. That’s been standard on consumer electronics since the late 80s. Data centers need to do the same thing at a scale and speed that makes copper wire a bottleneck, not a design choice. The buildout is just getting started.

Two names I’m paying attention to heading into 2027.

POET Technologies is a fabless semiconductor company building an optical interposer, a platform that integrates lasers, modulators, and detectors onto a single substrate instead of assembling discrete components. If it works at volume, it’s a cost structure story. Traditional optical engines are expensive because the assembly is precise and largely manual. POET’s approach could change that math. They have design wins and are moving toward commercialization. The risk is the gap between a working prototype and a product that ships in volume. That gap has ended a lot of photonics companies. Close it and the upside is significant.

AAOI (Applied Optoelectronics) is a different kind of bet. They already make transceivers. Hyperscalers are spending heavily on 800G and 1.6T transceivers. AAOI has the manufacturing and customer relationships to be in that mix. The stock is off its 2026 highs and revenue has been improving. Recovery story with a real tailwind.

More AI compute means more optical interconnect demand. That’s the whole thesis, and neither of these is a blue chip.

Jekyll Tags and GitHub Pages

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The two posts I pushed this week both had tags: linux in their front matter. The tag showed up on each post but clicking it went nowhere.

The site keeps tag pages in a tag/ directory, one file per tag. A post with tags: linux expects tag/linux.md to exist. If it doesn’t, the link is there but the page isn’t.

You could use a plugin to generate those pages automatically, but GitHub Pages runs Jekyll in safe mode and most plugins don’t run. The files have to exist in the repo.

The fix is a three-line file:

---
layout: tagpage
title: "Tag: linux"
tag: linux
---

Saved as tag/linux.md, committed, pushed. Done after the next build.

Building an AI-Powered Publishing Workflow With Claude Code

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The previous post was about getting a 2014 MacBook Air running Linux and Claude Code. This one is about what that setup actually does now.

The blog was already here

This site has been on GitHub Pages since 2016. Posts are Markdown files in a _posts folder. When I push to master, GitHub builds and serves the site a minute or so later. No build server of my own, no deploy step.

The commit history tells on me. A burst of posts in 2019, then years where I’d post twice and go quiet. The writing wasn’t the blocker. Coming back after six months meant remembering the front matter format, finding the local preview broken because some dependency had moved on, and losing an evening to tooling before I could see a single word on screen. By the time it worked I’d forgotten what I wanted to say.

The pieces

The machine runs Omarchy. VS Code has the Claude Code extension, which puts an assistant in the editor that can run commands and edit files, not just autocomplete. GitHub Pages is the publishing target — push to master, wait a minute, it’s live. Claude Code handles the mechanical parts.

What “automated” means here

It isn’t a pipeline. There’s no GitHub Action, no cron job, nothing watching a folder. Automated just means I stopped doing the repetitive steps by hand and started asking for them.

When a draft is done, I tell Claude Code to publish it:

git add _posts/2026-08-27-my-post.md
git commit -m "New post: My Post"
git push origin master

Then it checks the build:

gh api repos/SSchoepfer/SSchoepfer.github.io/pages/builds/latest --jq .status
curl -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" https://stephenschoepfer.com/my-post/

When those come back built and 200, the post is live. If the build errors, it tells me what broke.

A reader could run every one of those steps by hand, and for years I did. The difference is I no longer have to keep the sequence in my head.

It handled the setup rot too. When I came back on the new machine the local preview wouldn’t build. I pasted in the errors, it worked through them, and the preview was running a few minutes later. The specifics are in the last post.

The commits carry my name, with a line noting the assist. Nothing goes out that I haven’t read.

Next I want it turning notes I’ve left during the week into a rough post I can react to on a Saturday. If that works, those long quiet stretches in my commit history might finally close up.

Installing Omarchy Linux and Getting Started With Claude Code

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I just wiped a 2014 MacBook Air and put Linux on it for the first time. Not a dual-boot, not a live USB to poke at for an afternoon. This is the actual daily machine now. The distro is Omarchy, and within a couple of hours I had Claude Code running inside VS Code and was pushing to this blog again. Here’s how it went as a complete Linux beginner, with the parts that tripped me up.

Why Omarchy on a twelve-year-old laptop

The Air had been sitting in a drawer. macOS stopped updating it years ago and every app was starting to complain. Omarchy is an opinionated Arch Linux setup. The window manager, terminal, fonts, and keybindings are already chosen for you, so you’re not assembling a desktop from parts on day one. That is exactly what I wanted, because I don’t know enough yet to have opinions about a compositor.

Old Intel Mac hardware turns out to be a good target for Linux. It’s plain, ordinary x86 hardware under the fruit logo, so most things just work. The trackpad, display, and battery were all fine out of the box.

Making the install USB

You install from a bootable USB stick, so the first step is getting the Omarchy ISO onto one. I used a 16GB stick, which is more than enough. Anything 8GB or larger works, and whatever is on it gets erased, so don’t use one with files you want to keep.

The ISO is a single download from the Omarchy site. To write it to the stick I used balenaEtcher, a free tool that runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux. It does one job and makes it hard to get wrong: pick the ISO file, pick the USB drive, click Flash. It verifies the write when it finishes. The whole thing took a few minutes.

You can do the same job from the command line with dd, but Etcher won’t let you accidentally target your main drive, which is worth a lot when you’re new to this.

Once it was done I plugged the stick into the Air, held the Option key while it powered on, and picked the USB drive from the Mac’s boot menu.

First impressions

It’s fast, which I did not expect from a machine this old. The whole thing is keyboard driven. That was confusing for about a day and then it clicked. Windows tile themselves instead of floating in a pile, and there’s no dock to dig through. The learning curve is real, but most of it is in the first day or two.

Getting Claude Code into VS Code

VS Code installed without any trouble. Claude Code runs as an extension inside it. Once it’s activated you get a chat panel that can run commands, edit files, and read your project, not just suggest snippets.

Here’s the beginner mistake that cost me time. Signing into GitHub inside VS Code is not the same as logging in on the terminal. I clicked the Accounts button in VS Code, authorized GitHub, saw a green checkmark, and assumed I was done. I wasn’t. That sign-in only covers VS Code’s own features. The command line, where git push and cloning actually happen, has a separate login. You do that one in the integrated terminal:

gh auth login

Pick GitHub.com, then HTTPS, say yes to authenticating git operations, and choose login with a web browser. It shows you a one-time code, you paste it into the browser, and you’re done. After that git push works from the terminal with no extra prompts. Two separate logins, one for the editor and one for the shell, and the checkmarks look identical. Nobody warned me about that.

Reviving this blog on the new machine

This site is built with Jekyll, and it’s an old version of it. The Ruby that ships on a current Linux install is newer than the site expects, and newer Ruby has quietly dropped a handful of small libraries that old Jekyll still depends on. The first build failed with a screen full of errors.

I had Claude Code work through it. It added the missing libraries back in the Gemfile, fixed one incompatibility that was crashing the live-preview server, and updated a deprecated setting in the config. None of that changes how GitHub builds the published site, since GitHub runs its own build. It only matters for the preview running locally on this laptop. After that,

bundle exec jekyll serve --livereload

served the whole site at localhost:4000 and rebuilt it every time I saved a file.

Where I landed

A laptop that was headed for a landfill is now my writing machine. Claude Code is in the editor, GitHub is wired up on the command line, and the live preview is running. This post is the first thing I’ve written on the new setup.

If you’re looking at an old Mac and a Linux download, the hardware is not the scary part. The scary part is the hundred small conventions you don’t know yet, and that’s the sort of thing it helps to have an assistant in the editor for.

Now

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Now Now Now

Update April '26.

I’m making music with my original Digitakt, building up the music player part of my site (using webamp) and designing an albums page.

Updated April '24.

Right now

…I’m adding some musical ideas to this part of my website (updated 7/24/24)

My electronic music making setup right now consists of a Kaossilator Pro into a KP3 into an input on the Digitakt into a DJ mixer, which has a vintage reverb as a send/receive. All of that can be routed into a cassette tape mixer and then export to digital.

I have the clock syncing the DT and KP3

This is a now page, inspired by Derek Sivers. If you have your own site, you should make one, too. This is my page on NowNowNow

Edu Blog Post

Fri, 12 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

BlogPost template by Adobe Dreamweaver

Post Title

SOME AWESOME HERO TAGLINE

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Strength

Fri, 25 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Monday

No Equip

    Push up
    Pull up
    Sit ups
    Back raises
    Squats 

Ready to Run

    Hip extension: Couch stretch (page 114), 2 min each side 
    Bracing Sequence (page 65), at least 3x 
    100 Oz Water (some w/ electrolytes) 

Sculpt

    Lying lateral raises face-down
    Barbell Shrugs
    Curls
    French Curls
    Sit ups
    Dynamic Tension

Tuesday

No Equip

    Back Presses (Dips)
    Pull ups
    Lying OH leg raises
    Calf raises 

Ready to Run

    Hip function: Spend a total of 4 mins in a squat position 
    100 Oz Water (some spiked w/ electrolytes)
    Warm up before workout and cool down afterward 

Sculpt

    Back raises
    Bench press
    Lying lateral raises face-up
    Lying lateral overhead raises
    Lying overhead leg raises
    Stand ups (Squats)

Wednesday

No Equip

    Push up
    Neck tension 
    Sit ups
    Back raises
    Squats 

Ready to Run

    Plantar mobilizations page 217, 2 min each foot 
    Wear flat shoes  
    100 Oz Water (some spiked w/ electrolytes) 

Sculpt

    Standing lateral raises
    Overhead press
    Standing bent over pulls 
    Wrist curls
    Grips
    Calf raises

Thursday

No Equip

    Back presses (dips)
    Pull up (many variations)
    Lying OH leg raises (Heavy boots if too easy!) 
    Calf raises (Ball of foot!) 

Ready to Run

    Lateral ankle smash and floss page 212  
    Medial ankle smash and twist page 213 
    Couch stretch / 100oz water  

Sculpt

    Lying lateral raises face-down
    Barbell Shrugs
    Curls
    French Curls
    Sit ups
    Dynamic Tension

Friday

No Equip

    Push up
    Pull up
    Sit ups
    Back raises
    Squats 

Ready to Run

    T-spine global smash & Hamstring Floss page 244
    100 Oz Water (some spiked w/ electrolytes) 
    Mobility work as a post-workout cool-down

Sculpt

    Back raises
    Bench press
    Lying lateral raises face-up
    Lying lateral overhead raises
    Lying overhead leg raises
    Stand ups (Squats)

Saturday

No Equip

    Back Presses (Dips)
    Pull ups
    Lying OH leg raises
    Calf raises 

Ready to Run

    Barefoot Saturday page 71
    Quad smash roller page 230 
    100 Oz Water (some w/ electrolytes)
    Bracing sequence 5x throughout the day    

Sculpt

    Standing lateral raises
    Overhead press
    Standing bent over pulls 
    Wrist curls
    Grips
    Calf raises

Sunday

No Equip

    Jogging

Ready to Run

    Glute smash floss page 235
    100 Oz Water (some w/ electrolytes)

Sculpt

    Jogging

Ten Tips For Talking To Your Dog About Stock Market Volatility

Mon, 13 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

10 Tips for Talking to Your Dog About Stock Market Volatility

10.

Posting From Mobile

Thu, 09 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A New Post

Writing and publishing a blog post on my site using prose.io from an Android phone.

Hoping this is a good tool to use for writing on the go. I can edit posts and metadata (front matter) from this site, and set postings published setting to true, meaning publishing blog posts from anywhere. The text editor on Chrome for Android doesn’t seem too bad. Less buggy than the first time I tried this tool. Before using it, you need to authorize on Github.

Enter text in Markdown. Use the toolbar above, or click the ? button for formatting help.

The cursor keeps jumping around.

Not sure if its a keyboard issue, or just an issue with Prose.io on my Pixel2XL. Will look into that now.

At least I can confirm that publishing posts works just fine.

Gorgeous Aquarium Residents

Thu, 05 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000