Coding

I lost some momentum on my bootcamp journey in recent days. Both “embers” in the flame panel have gone dim (see banner), signifying I haven’t submitted any work for two days. I had made it a point of pride that those embers were never lost. So, what’s really going on? I was, and still am, working on Chapter 5: Storage. The lessons so far: CH 5 - Lesson 2 (Goose Migrations) - Postgres SQL schema migrations CH 5 - Lesson 3 (SQLC) - Code generator from SQL commands CH 5 - Lesson 4 (Database Review) - Quick notes about dialects and a pop quiz CH 5 - Lesson 5 (Create User) - We have the SQL defined, now wire up the API handler CH 5 - Lesson 6 (Create Chirp) - CRUD operations for “chirps” (where I am now) I’d already been down the Goose and SQLC road in a previous course, so I thought I’d blast right through this part. ...

I’ve been taking a break from gainful employment, and filling the craving for tasks by doing Boot.dev courses. My bio on the site currently reads: Rusty CS masters grad from Canada, minor in psych to help understand HCI. Taking boot camp to cure 5 years confinement to OPS, and prolonged exposure to business 4GL and wishful approaches to AI. I’ll unpack the snark in other posts. Today I thought I’d say a quick thanks to Boot.dev for their work, and to offer the perspective of an aging coder and what I’m getting from the online, gamified bootcamp experience. ...

In this post I discuss some of the potential usability issues when working with static site generation. ...

I can’t say for sure what the poet William Blake had in mind in the early 1790’s when he wrote “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction”, but I hope he won’t my comparing it to learning by building, also known as constructionism 🔗 . The educational theory of constructionism observes that people learn best by making and sharing things. If you’re looking for effective instruction, there is no substitute for facing the claws of a technical tiger, particularly one you have chosen to meet yourself. Conversely, you may find you can’t recall how to proceed with a new program in spite of having read a half dozen tutorials on the subject. If this is the case, perhaps you’re mistaking those forgettable horses for much more challenging tigers. ...

Years ago I built my own CI-CD 🔗 solution for a moderately complex static website. ...

Have you ever spent hours on something, made it work, and then discovered a feature in the language that could have saved you a ton of effort? That’s what happened when I tried to figure out how to draw an arrowhead to a curved line at some distance from the center of a target (see banner). TL;DR When working with custom visualizations, you might need to do some math. But make use of (and give credit to) the community around these tools. It’s there for a reason. ...

I’ve recently found myself with a little more free time, and so this new site is finally coming together. Topics I will be discussing include the typical meta-topic of hosting and updating affordable static sites on the internet, but I’ll also be touching on the challenge of maintaining control of a site while enabling external contributions … clearly not a thing just yet on this site. Tools of the trade may include (in alphabetical order) AWS 🔗 , Cloudflare 🔗 , GitHub 🔗 , Slack 🔗 and Zapier 🔗 . Digging into the weeds on the use of those tools means I won’t be able to avoid things like build automation, cloud hosting (including security issues), possibly some microservice architecture, seasoned with some light coding. ...