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.
WCOnline API explainer
20 Oct 2021
Apparently at many schools, Twenty Six Design’s WCOnline cloud software is a popular choice for online tutoring and for making appointments with tutors available through the system.
Continue ReadingHow I added Algolia search: front-end
04 Oct 2021
For a few months now, this site has had an internal search function, and some of you are even using it!
Here’s a new code demo showing how I put an Algolia search box into my web site to actually do something with all that data Algolia had on file.
It’s a great approach for Jekyll, Hugo, 11ty, or other truly statically generated sites. (I’ve tried it on both Jekyll and 11ty so far.)
Continue ReadingInspecting an existing 11ty project
04 Oct 2021
Cassey Lottman’s “Diving into an existing 11ty project” from the 11ty Meetup is great. You can skim a TL;DW on Cassey’s blog, but I recommend listening to the talk, because there’s a bit more “why” behind each of the 6 concepts to orient yourself to in someone else’s 11ty project.
As a case study, let’s follow Cassey’s methodology to look at web-site-11ty-07-movable-git, the most recent 11ty example code I posted on GitHub (which supports my article “Jekyll doesn’t do components? Liar!“).
Continue ReadingDocument Salesforce TDTM to avoid dev-admin handoff issues
30 Sep 2021
Salesforce’s Nonprofit Success Pack (“NPSP”) and Education Data Architecture (“EDA”) installable packages both come with functionality called Table-Driven Trigger Management (“TDTM”).
The admin options are powerful enough to break dev code, so good practices around handoff are essential.
Continue ReadingCustomizing Sanity Studio beyond the schema
27 Sep 2021
Wow, it’s hard to figure out how to customize Sanity Studio’s look and feel, beyond playing with schema definitions, if you’re not a front-end developer and things don’t really make sense to you to begin with. One of those “understand what to Google in the first place” issues, for sure.
But WHY do you need a database?
24 Sep 2021
I’m so excited – a non-desk-job, real-world acquaintance just asked over social media if they knew anyone who could “talk to them about database stuff.” And they picked me! While I waited to see if they’d reach out, I came up with 21 questions to guide the conversation.
If you’re the person who’s been told you need a database, this is a non-technical list, so read on! You might be able to take your own notes and have a really production conversation with a friend in tech. But I know it’s a lot, and you don’t have to – a good database professional will have questions like these floating in the back of their head but be able to just ask you more unstructured questions like, “Tell me what’s on your mind” and ask you these kinds of questions without letting you realize you’re even being asked them.
Continue ReadingJekyll doesn't do components? Liar!
09 Sep 2021
Hot take: anyone who tells you that Jekyll doesn’t support component-based design, and that you need a React- or Vue-based static site generator, is wrong.
Continue ReadingNaomi Kritzer will be blogging some Minnesota 2021 candidates again
08 Sep 2021
Non-tech post: For anyone living in Minneapolis or St. Paul, Minnesota: Naomi Kritzer has announced that she intends to blog about canidates for 2021. It looks like there’s also some coverage of outstate Minnesota 2021 races on another site.
Continue ReadingLearn static site generation with Stackbit
28 Aug 2021
Stackbit does it again: their blog is kicking out articles that are amazing resources for web developers picking up new technologies. Their latest series is called the Jamstack Journey, and it’s a really great deep dive into the concepts I was trying to explain with “What is static web hosting?” and “What is a static site generator?.”
Continue ReadingA dumb Python mistake
25 Aug 2021
Read on for how I went to bed angry over a mysterious API error that turned out to be a Python version error.
Continue Reading