Author Archives: ronaldpringadi

Creating MCP Server for LM Studio and Open WebUI

Posted on June 25, 2026 by ronaldpringadi

Understanding the Three-Layer Architecture When integrating AI applications with existing hardware or services, you don’t need to modify your device code. Instead, you introduce an MCP Server as middleware—a translator between the AI world and your real-world devices. 🤖 The … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged AI, MCP | Comments Off

Breaking Free from the Cloud: A Guide to Free Local AI Tools and Agents in 2026

Posted on June 25, 2026 by ronaldpringadi

The landscape of Artificial Intelligence shifted dramatically heading into 2026. While cloud-based subscriptions were once the default for accessing capable large language models (LLMs), the open-source community and consumer hardware have caught up. 💡 Today, individuals can run highly capable … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged AI | Comments Off

Reviewing Next.js as a Java Programmer

Posted on June 24, 2026 by ronaldpringadi

I came to Next.js from years of Java, and my first reaction was frustration. Java is verbose and has to be compiled, but in the end it’s predictable. Next.js is verbose and syntactically strange and hides an enormous amount of … Continue reading →

Posted in java, javascript | Tagged Java, javascript, nextjs, react | Comments Off

Profiling a Dockerized Moodle with Xdebug and QCachegrind on macOS

Posted on June 22, 2026 by ronaldpringadi

If you run Moodle under moodle-docker on a Mac and a page feels slow, eyeballing the code only gets you so far. The honest answer is a profiler. 🐳 Here’s how I wired up Xdebug for both step-debugging and on-demand … Continue reading →

Posted in Moodle | Tagged docker, moodle, php, profiling, xdebug | Comments Off

Setting Up a Moodle REST API Webservice in Five Steps

Posted on June 18, 2026 by ronaldpringadi

Moodle ships with a full web-services layer, but the admin flow for handing out a single API token is spread across half a dozen settings pages. The first time you do it, you’ll click around for twenty minutes wondering why … Continue reading →

Posted in Moodle | Tagged api, moodle | Comments Off

Enabling Vite Hot Reload for Moodle SCSS

Posted on June 16, 2026 by ronaldpringadi

🐳 I spent an afternoon chasing a deceptively simple goal: edit a stylesheet in a custom Moodle theme, hit refresh, and see the change — without running a full production build every time. The tool that promises exactly this is … Continue reading →

Posted in DevOps | Tagged docker, moodle, vite | Comments Off

A Quick Tour of Mustache Templating in PHP (and Everywhere Else)

Posted on June 9, 2026 by ronaldpringadi

If you’ve worked in a large PHP codebase like Moodle, you’ve bumped into files ending in .mustache and wondered what those double curly braces are doing. 🐘 The short version: Mustache is a logic-less templating language, and the syntax you … Continue reading →

Posted in PHP, Web Development | Tagged mustache, php, templating | Comments Off

Adding a Moodle cron sidecar to moodle-docker via local.yml

Posted on May 28, 2026 by ronaldpringadi

The moodle-docker stack is designed primarily for automated testing — Behat, PHPUnit, and so on — which is why it doesn’t ship a cron container. A background scheduler would interfere with deterministic test runs, so the README’s only nod to … Continue reading →

Posted in Moodle | Tagged docker, moodle, php | Comments Off

Creating a new theme and changing font on Moodle 5

Posted on May 27, 2026 by ronaldpringadi

I wanted to swap the default font in a Moodle 5 install. Specifically: keep Boost, the stock Moodle theme, but use Inter from Google Fonts instead of the Bootstrap system stack. The official path is “make a child theme of … Continue reading →

Posted in Moodle | Tagged css, moodle, php, scss, theme | Comments Off

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