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.
Set plugin names and default visibility in Canvas course navigation menus
16 Aug 2020
David Tod taught the world to hide confusing plugins from faculty using Instructure Canvas’s API. Read on to find out how to rename plugins at the same time.
Continue ReadingHowToGraphQL.com Notes
09 Aug 2020
I stumbled into the Party Corgi Discord, a community of front-end web developers who produce a lot of written, audio, and video content teaching and learning the tech they use.
I happened to be online when the opportunity arose to study HowToGraphQL.com as a group, which is great because at work my team just got access to a new product that uses GraphQL (an HTTP-based communications specification), and I had no idea in the slightest how to use it until I started playing with Gatsby a month ago. I thought it’d be fun to follow others’ lead and take notes in public.
Rate-limiting API requests in Python with a decorator
28 Jul 2020
The other day, I needed to make sure that a Python script I’m writing doesn’t call a REST API any faster than it’s allowed to.
I wanted “DRY,” readable code, so writing “if-else” code around every call to a function from the requests module was out of the question.
Gatsby Cloud live previews for Sanity-based sites
21 Jul 2020
For most projects in this series, I haven’t talked about deployment of your Gatsby codebase to a web host because great official documentation already exists from hosts like Netlify.
However, this project isn’t entirely self-contained the way my other projects were. There are very specific pieces of data to put into “environment variables” for my project, so I’ll show you the step-by-step I do to deploy this site onto the internet.
Besides – we need to see the cool Instant Preview!
Educators and students - get Figma graphic design software free
17 Jul 2020
Figma is a really neat graphic design tool. I’ll let people who actually know what they’re doing tell you why.
I’m just here to say that if you have a “.edu” address or otherwise qualify, get it free while you can.
I’m also here to screenshot a few hard-to-find parts of the process.
PL/SQL Nested Queries
14 Jul 2020
I’m working on a middleware tool to extract “people of interest” from an Oracle database and convert the resulting data into JSON-formatted text ready to load into Instructure’s Bridge learning management system as users via Bridge’s API. Writing PL/SQL to extract the data with reusable “nested cursors” for maintainability was quite an adventure.
Continue ReadingGatsby Minimum Viable Sanity Template
08 Jul 2020
Recap of my latest project as I head into step 2 of 3:
I’m changing my simple Gatsby / React site to use the standalone Sanity Studio CMS instead of in-project Markdown-formatted text files as the source of the “Hello World” text behind generating an index.html with a body of <div>Hello World</div>.
Properly configured, Sanity looks beautiful for non-technical content editors, and paired with Gatsby Cloud’s “preview” sites, content authors can literally watch a preview of their site change as they type – all while getting the performance and security benefits of a static production web site.
Sanity CMS Minimum Viable Build
07 Jul 2020
As step 1 (of 3) of my next project, I’ll set up Sanity CMS instead of markdown as a data source for the “Hello World” in my Gatsby-generated index.html.
Believe it or not, this will allow me to build a static web site with a “preview” version that content authors can watch change as they type into the Sanity Studio content management system.
Why WYSIWYG static site CMS's love Gatsby
24 Jun 2020
Please correct me if I’m wrong.
This is my current understanding of why most Jamstack CMSes with drag-and-drop WYSIWYG previewing seem to heavily favor using Gatsby as a static site generator.
How I brought my Google Page Speed from 80 to 91 in 5 minutes
23 Jun 2020
I finally took the world’s advice and split my blog’s JavaScript into “load first” and “load last” sections. Brought my Google PageSpeed Insights score on mobile up from 80 to 91.
Continue Reading