Bienvenue! Welcome!
My goal is to help you work faster.
I must speak and teach until I hear 10 people say, "That thing you taught me? I used it! And it saved me time!"
(Ahem ... although maybe blogging slower than I'd hoped. Ugh, coders' repetitive stress injury.)
So check out the tutorials. Play with code. Tell me about your triumphs.
Adding Tailwind to a Jekyll site on Windows
06 Jul 2021
I’ve been wanting to migrate one of my web sites from the Github Pages Jekyll to 11ty for a while so that I could use Tailwind CSS and facitate a redesign of the look and feel.
In the end, I realized that migrating old .md files w/o breaking anchor links to subsections was going to be a regex nightmare, and I’d be better off figuring out how to add Tailwind to Jekyll.
Jamstack live preview tooling
15 Jun 2021
Vercel announced Next.js Live, real-time previews with live collaborative editing at Next.js conf.
This seemed like a good time to list all the options I’ve explored over the past year.
Continue ReadingGrowing link underline, in Tailwind CSS
15 Jun 2021
Today I learned that Learn 11ty From Scratch opened up for free. Searching for the news, I found Ben Myers’ article “I Finally Understand Eleventy’s Data Cascade,” which reminded me how much I like some of his styling, including links whose underlines are chunky and grow to be full backgrounds when you hover or focus on them.
I’ve been doing a lot of Tailwind lately on landing-page-type sites so I can rip off other peoples’ components, but I hadn’t found a link style I was satisfied with, so I ported Ben’s work to Tailwind.
Continue ReadingSEO savings, one bubble tea at a time
10 Jun 2021
Fact: My Huong Kitchen on “Eat Street” in Minneapolis (Nicollet Ave) has the best bubble tea in the Twin Cities, Minnesota, USA region. Not just on Eat Street. You get to watch fruit go into your blender for a smoothie, not boba powder.
The savory food is also delicately well-flavored, in case you care about more than your sugar rush.
In other words, if you mess with this teeny-tiny gem of a restaurant, hiding in its adorable hole in the wall, you’ve picked a fight with me.
By the way, if you want to do me a big favor, please go buy something, and tell the owners Katie sent you!
Hello world, it's the AWS parameter store
26 May 2021
I’d like to help some cloud-newbie sysadmins write automation scripts that reduce the overhead for common tasks and therefore make them more appealing to do frequently (the whole idea behind “infrastructure as code”):
Continue ReadingA git feature commit squashing approach
03 May 2021
This is a trick that Ramon Snir taught me to transform a git-tracked feature branch with hundreds of commits (which I’ve already pushed to a GitHub-hosted remote) into looking like it never had anything but a single commit with a message of “Meaningful fake first commit message.”
Continue ReadingTailwind JIT starter for Gatsby
07 Apr 2021
It’s not quite a starter – more of a bolt-on to an older project – but check out my work adding Tailwind Just-In-Time (JIT) to Gatsby. It’s a FAST editing experience – I can instantly change “purple” to “green” and see my results when running in “develop” mode, just like with my 11ty Tailwind JIT starter.
This got outdated fast – nice work, Tailwind maintainers. I’ll update the repo when I get a chance to actually test my edits, but note that now you just install the normal Tailwind Node package as instructed by Gatsby & enable JIT mode through tailwind.config.js.
Big Data: What to learn
02 Apr 2021
Migrating an oldie but a goodie to the new blog. Back in 2016, I gave a friend who wants to career-change into data science some advice for starting to learn about big data, and I think a lot of the advice has stood the test of time, even if we don’t hear that catchphrase as much as we used to.
Continue ReadingChecking a password against Troy Hunt's list
28 Mar 2021
Troy Hunt, of HaveIBeenPwned.com, a site that helps you learn what data breaches your email address was involved in, also keeps a database of hacked passwords at api.PwnedPasswords.com so you can check if your password’s as bad as password123 without actually typing your password anywhere on the internet. I can’t remember where I found my instructions for using it anymore, so I’m writing it down myself for future reference, and I apologize to whoever I’m not crediting. I dusted these off recently to make a case to a family member for changing certain passwords I don’t approve of (tip: just get your passwords from Gibson Research Corporation’s random high-entropy password generator).
Anonymous PLSQL subquery from a file
23 Mar 2021
In PL/SQL Nested Queries, we learned how to leverage compiled-into-the-database Oracle SQL record & table-of-record types in anonymous PL/SQL to save the results of one SELECT into a variable, then use them as a filter in another SELECT. But what if we’d rather populate our variable from a file?
