This website has been following the blog software hype train since it’s inception. The progression went like so:

1. Facebook “posts” (discontinued)
2. Blogger
3. Blosxom - a very early static site generator, way ahead of it’s time.
4. Wordpress
5. Jekyll
6. Hugo (current)

At the transition between Wordpress and Jekyll, like many others, I needed a solution for comments on a static site and Disqus was the clear choice. But then many of us learned that by using Disqus, we were allowing ads to be placed on our own pages. We were bogging down our websites with loads of third party trackers and possibly even violating our own reader’s privacy.

There is a Scrub Jay that likes to hang around our feeder we named Little Jay. Lots of birds hang around our feeder, and most of them don’t get names. But Little Jay is challenged, which makes him endearing. It also makes him easy to recognize.

Why do years only last for 12 months? Can’t they last a little longer?

Dear 2019,

You really should have stuck around. Which is funny, because the people living during my time didn’t seem to think you were very pleasant back then. Your news was full of dire circumstance, conflict and uncertainty. People were getting hurt, they were angry and scared. But as your successor, let me tell you, you had it easy.

Immutability is important say the React docs. And of course this is correct, especially in the context of React, Vue.js and the like that depend on immutability to work correctly. It’s also a core facet of functional programming which is becoming more and more popular by the hour. But can you over do it?

Often I get asked by fellow python developers why I chose Django/Flask for a particular project (usually by someone who prefers the framework I didn’t choose 😉). I think both frameworks are excellent and are well suited for a variety of use cases.

So how do I decide which to use for a new project? I found a simple heuristic to get 90% of the way to a final decision, and it’s pretty easy to follow:

Django projects have the ability to install apps, which are analogous to plugins in other frameworks.

Some of these apps provide simple functionality: django-gravatar installs a template tag for displaying a user’s gravatar in a template. Other apps are large, like Mezzanine which provides an entire CMS framework to your project.

No matter what you are building, you should consider the following apps. I use them in almost all of my projects.

After nearly 5 years I’ve left my position at Las Cumbres Observatory. During my time there I got to work with scientists on interesting problems in Astronomy. I wrote a lot of code, most of it open source. Without going into too much detail, it was most everything I wanted in a job and probably the best one I’ve ever had.

I can go into details about why I left and my thoughts on full-time vs part-time employment in another post.

For now I’d like to start the new month, and my new “career” by laying out some goals and how I’d like to achieve them. This is for my own benefit: a soft of self evaluation to nobody in particular except myself.

Yesterday I came across what is quite possibly the most badly designed bike rack I have ever seen. May I present to you: the Capitol Bike Rack by Forms+Surfaces.

Image credit https://www.forms-surfaces.com/capitol-bike-rack

Check out this video of a Dutch person’s perspective of cycling in the US:

password-store (installed via homebrew) on OSX is very slow.

Austins-MacBook% time pass testpass
thisisatestpass
pass testpass  0.55s user 0.25s system 83% cpu 0.969 total

Over half a second to print out a password. Pass is just a bash script. This would not do.