My Blog about Dev Life

A New Blog Beginning

2021-02-23T19:39:11Z

Oh Yeah

I had a simple portfolio webpage I made in book camp and labored many dozens of hours over. After boot camp I stripped it down a little and took out the references to the simple coding projects I'd done, assuming I'd update it at some point with better project references.

The next iteration saw a new background image, some colored containers for the text, social media icons and the removal of a coder's book list once I noticed everyone had such a list. In the age of LinkedIn and other sites used by developers, it wasn't clear why I needed a custom web page, but I liked the novelty of it and that it wasn't part of some official platform.

Oh No

During a work break in late 2020 I wanted to redo the page again but realized I should integrate a blog. From there I went down the Jamstack rabbit hole. That was actually super fun and I enjoyed reading the O'Reilly book. A benefit, of choosing, say, a Netlify template is that you can easily throw together a decent-looking site and be done. I played around with a few different templates but admittedly the layouts were new to me and I wasn't sure it was worth all the trouble. I decided to go with the simplest iteration, the eleventy-netlify-boilerplate that had a contact form and also allowed blog editing via Netlify CMS. I thought this might have the best usability and longevity.

OK

So far it seems good. I've learned how it works though I sometimes still edit in the wrong places. There's nothing worse than an empty blog and this one has been staring at me in an accusatory fashion for months now. After making some rudimentary edits today I decided to make a new blog post to mark the occasion and get started. I hope to continue making a post a week or so, to document knowledge and share with others. I plan on first publishing work on this site and then re-posting to Medium.

Not Learning By Watching Videos

2021-02-25T16:13:52Z

I feel like I'm finally ready to admit that watching videos does nothing for me as far as learning coding goes. And it's not just the need to engage by coding along or something. Watching videos just doesn't interest me. I could read the same content and come away with more , I think, merely because I enjoy reading and engage more with the written word.

Truthfully, having paid subscriptions to the common coding video teaching services just makes me feel good, like I took a step in the right direction, like I gained a resource. I notice I never really follow up with it, though. Having someone show me code and explain how it works never did much for me. Memorizing concepts never did much for me. But doing the work in my own projects, or relating high level concepts to my own code has resulted in knowledge that's stayed with me.

After touching base on a few of the courses I'd bookmarked, I've decided to cancel my last video subscription today. From here on out, I want my independent code work time to either be on something like LeetCode (admittedly I find these kinds of problems inscrutable), a self-driven project, using css to draw a picture, or following along with a book on coding, of which I have several. I haven't coded along with books much but I'm interested to try that.

Using Books To Learn Coding

2021-03-02T16:23:57Z

Coding books are a funny thing because typically when I read I'm either gathering information or escaping. Either way, I'm liable to kick back and relax. But I can't really do that with a book on coding! Beyond basic concepts, it doesn't mean much just to read about code (I'm saying this after reading 75 million articles on Medium, Hacker News and other places over the last 5+ years). So using a coding book effectively means basically reading in front of a computer with the book and coding along.

I got the 4th edition of the Headfirst C# book recently and worked through the first exercise. It was the first WPF I ever made, and the tutorial was nice. It was supposed to take between 15 minutes to an hour but I took a few hours to do it, I guess. It was really an immersive, fun experience.

I have the same modern day screen addiction concentration as anyone else, which is to say, I find it difficult to concentrate and do one thing. It wasn't always that way. It was enjoyable and productive to set some time aside and finish exercise like this WPF. I'm looking to get back to doing more sessions like this.

P.S. Troubleshooting addendum: I actually published this yesterday but the build failed. Tried again this morning and noticed it failed again. Turns out Netlify doesn't like filenames with # symbols (I had a tag that was C#) so I changed it and all was well after that.

Blogs For Folks Who Don't Blog

2021-04-22T20:24:02Z

Ach, I've been too busy to write in this blog. But I don't know if I really need a blog because I don't feel the need to share my life as I once did. Funny how things change like that. I felt compelled to make this web page and I'm glad I did but now I wonder if it should just be even simpler, like the way devs have some sort of snappy business card kind of thing.

I got a notice from Github that it would halt my workflow for this website from inactivity. Sad moment.

On a related note I used to read Medium fanatically, especially the coding articles. None of it did me any practical good besides exposing me to new concepts. But I wonder how many articles I read that were simply wrong. Anyway, now that I work on coding at night I never read that stuff. Medium changed their format too and now I feel like cancelling it since I don't use it. I enjoyed it when I used it but now that, too, seems a bit pointless. Is there a point at which social media just becomes boring because the content is unchanging. It's a bunch of people writing stuff and they can't help but to repeat themselves. You are just chasing the likes after all.

I spent a lot of down time on Twitter in the last few years and loved the writers and devs and people in the peripheries. It just seems dull now. I hate hustle culture, especially in the tech world. I used to enjoy keeping up with art and writing from California but because of life and kids and pandemic I haven't been there since 2017 (!!) so I've slowly lost the connection.

Anyway, I was thinking about it and I decided to keep this up and maybe try some more at it.

Continuing On By Continuing To Touch Base

2021-05-03T20:59:03Z

Just want to keep touching base with this online journal. I've been busy with my first developing job and also working at night studying and coding. I haven't worked this hard or steadily since bootcamp. It's hard, and sometimes super frustrating and the kind of obstacles you get stuck at sometimes make you think, well, that's it, it's the end of the road! And then you figure it out.

There's some things I want to do to this page, like add an RSS feature and maybe a dark mode but I'm not sure when that'll happen. Soon enough!

More Thoughts on Web Page/Blog

2021-05-21T00:56:13Z

I have it on my to-do list to rethink this web page. I think part of the problem when making one's own page is trying to shoehorn yourself into what you think it should be rather than just approaching it more from the thought of who am I? What do I want to show the world?

A primary benefit of owning and moderating your own page is owning the content and not being subject to the whims of a platform. It's your own space to customize as you see fit. When I think about other folks whose content I enjoy, it's nice to be able to visit their page for updates or whatnot. Kind of like visiting them in their space. That's what I'd like to bring to my own page.

Setting Up RSS With Eleventy Ain't Easy

2023-09-29T04:34:52Z

I think I've been trying to set up my rss feed for this site for about 2 years. By that, I mean that about 2-4 times a year, when I remembered I had a web page, I would look blankly at the .njk file I'd made from boilerplate and try to understand why it didn't actually aggregate my past blog posts.

Honestly, I don't even really understand fully how Eleventy even works. By fiddling around, I've learned just enough to be dangerous. Since fixing the rss problem recently, I've found a few online articles for new users I plan on reading which should help with future improvements. I'm hoping to make this site more visually readable (so no more white words on blue background, I guess) and to have dark mode possible based on the user's browser setting. I've seen a lot of nice modern-looking sites but my own design efforts basically always end up looking like a personal website from 1994. Let's hope for the best!

So back to the rss problem, after perusing the Eleventy docs and numerous testimonails from other bloggers as to how easy it was to set up their own Eleventy rss feeds but not seeing any discrepancies in my own setup, I ended up enlisting the help of my pal ChatGPT. I knew I was close to having this working. I fed it my Eleventy.js file and my rss.njk file. ChatGPT found an extra space in my .njk file that may have broken it. Once I fixed that, my local _site finally had a functioning feed.xml file!

It was amazing to see that win. But I realized the changes I was pushing to Github weren't visible on the live site. I finally was able to reset my Netlify password and log into my Netlify dashboard. There I found that there was some sort of deprecated build image I needed to set to another valid one. Also I had set up a new, easier-to-use MFA on my Github account and I needed to unlink and relink it on Netlify. That was it! It all works now. It's hard to believe it took so long but that's how it goes sometimes. Onward!

Writing Habits

2023-10-03T04:34:52Z

I started this post just wanting to make a post and touch the blog again to try and keep it fresh but then I started thinking about other stuff to say. I keep noticing little things wrong with the blog and researching them and improving them, which seems good. On the docket is: improving the design, fixing the tags of the posts, and enabling some kind of dark mode based on the user's system preference.

I still don't understand exactly what purpose this blog serves but I'm hoping it will come clear. I felt a lot of joy writing on Medium because I really like the elegant clean interface. It's not quite the same here, but hey. I'd like to transfer that joy here where I actually own the content and it won't go away suddenly.

Last weekend, I wrote:

First of October Sunday at noon in the backyard on a bench in the shade, looking at the ripples and flickers of autumn color in the woods, blasts of red amid the lingering summer green, the orange and yellow, like beautiful warnings or alarms, and every so often there’s a very solid whack of a black walnut hitting the chicken coop metal roof, little green baseballs and then a sneaky flapping sound of the baseball rolling all the way down until it hits the gutter and there’s a little jump off into the yard.

Where are my beautiful friends, I have neglected them.

Thinking of major Ragain, his backyard with the Tibetan prayer flags across to the little garage. The one I did a tearoff on and re-shingled. Remodeled the bathroom. Tore out the old sidewalk and poured a new one by hand, troweled it till my hands bled. The first time Maj walked out he slipped and told me it had to be roughened and so I came back with muriatic acid, washed it all down probably killed all the plants too. It’s just a kind of thing where Maj would say "don’t you go killing my plants or my ass will be in a sling", pretending like he wasn’t in charge of his household. The black walnuts keep falling they startle all the chickens crashing down into the dead branches. In an enclosure inside the coop there’s five new chicks, thoughtful and curious, picking around watching carefully. Soon they’ll become common-looking ugly normal chickens with a job; no more personality. I think of the river running through Kent in the dark. Think of the dark paths along the brightness of nighttime Taylor Hall. The backroads between Kent and Nelson. Somehow I found my way out of the Darkside of 2008.

New Improved Webpage

2024-02-25T04:34:52Z

My first post of 2024 and first in a while!

Here's an iced over creek I walk past:

Ironically I almost gave this page up because I couldn't seem to think of a point for it. But I kept coming back to the notion that I wanted to own my content and web presence so I persevered. Usually this kind of project stagnates because I want to see big changes but it's hard to find that path. I ended up making a list of small but important changes to make it less like a template. I like Medium's clean appearance so I went that direction. Things I improved:

removing blue background and white letters (which I loved, but);
adding resume page and my updated resume with contact info removed;
a few social media icons and hiding the formerly ugly rss feed link in an icon;
updating content and skills;
lots of small styling things.

I really got hung up on a few small weird eleventy errors along the way. Usually these would be showstoppers for a few years but using ChatGPT really seems to unblock me, even just as an effective rubber duck. One error was that I had a weird problem where every new post I made had the tag "post" added to it. I finally figured out where that was happening.

Then the next day I went through my old posts and cleaned up my tags and pushed it up and it broke! But maybe not because of that. Netlify logs had very unhelpful messages about how my build wanted Node 14 or higher but I have Node 20 installed so.. what!! After a lot of googling and fussing around and updating npm and just dreading having to look through all that more carefully, Chatgpt told me to look at a folder reference which was actually a hidden folder (would have never thought of that, tbh) that had a file (nvrm-ish or something?) in it that had the number "10" in it (and bizarrely, nothing else) which I guess was the Node version it was trying to use. I mean why did that break now?! So I changed that and made sure the Netlify config setting was the same and all is well! Until the next completely obscure problem.