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Building a factory model with ISA-95

· 11 min read
Jonathan Nye
Engineering @ Juna AI

A factory has no shortage of data. The difficult part is knowing what the data describes and how it relates to everything else.

A tag called Line1.Power might be obvious to the engineer who created it. It is less obvious to a scheduling system trying to calculate the energy cost of a production order, or to someone comparing the same machine across five sites.

To answer those questions, one needs a model of the factory. ISA-95 is a good place to start.

Giving an old Ricoh SP 112 printer a second life

· 3 min read
Jonathan Nye
Engineering @ Juna AI

I have a perfectly good Ricoh SP 112 laser printer. The hardware still works, but it is USB-only and getting it to print from a modern Apple Silicon Mac was far more difficult than it should have been.

A community driver existed, but installing it involved old dependencies and manual configuration. I wanted something simpler: open a normal macOS package, add the printer in System Settings and print.

I also wanted to connect the printer to my Unraid server so that every computer on the network could use it without moving a USB cable around.

I used Codex with GPT-5.6 Sol on high to do most of the work. I gave it the old driver and asked it to turn it into something I could install normally on my Mac, then added the Unraid setup. After a few rounds of testing and cleanup, I had a much smaller driver, a macOS installer and a Docker container.

Production vibe coding

· 5 min read
Jonathan Nye
Engineering @ Juna AI

It is June 2026. AI coding is not going away, and given the current trajectory will only get more pervasive. Software engineering is not what it used to be just a few months ago. This post will likely be outdated before I hit publish. Let's go.

Plotly Dash is all you need

· 13 min read
Jonathan Nye
Engineering @ Juna AI

… for enterprise analytics and reporting.[^1]

This post was inspired by DHH's “Merchants of Complexity”.

Over the years, I've seen many teams over-engineer their dashboards. Don't do this. What you want is something that meets your requirements, is as simple as possible and as complex as necessary.

In this post, I'll explain my approach to building performant dashboards that are easy to develop and maintain.

Managers

· 2 min read
Jonathan Nye
Engineering @ Juna AI

Good managers are hard to come by. There are many things that make a great manager, and very few have all of these qualities. See my post types of leaders for more on the qualities one can learn to become a good leader.

Free custom domain email

· 6 min read
Jonathan Nye
Engineering @ Juna AI

I've always wanted to have my own domain and be able to send and receive emails using it. What I don't like are monthly subscriptions.

This guide explains how I managed to set up a custom domain with my existing Gmail inbox, all without a monthly cost. The only cost is a domain if you don't already have one.

The goals:

  • use your existing inbox with a custom domain,
  • send and receive emails with the custom domain,
  • be completely free (besides for the domain cost)

Types of leaders

· 9 min read
Jonathan Nye
Engineering @ Juna AI

Leaders come in many forms and have different beliefs, values, and cultures. This post breaks down some of the high-level differences among leaders and highlights what one should be aware of in a leadership role.