Iowa Caucus App

Published on – 500 Words

I really shouldn't laugh so much at someone else's misfortune or frustration. Still, as a 20+ year software developer, I have to wonder why anyone would have expected the plan to use a brand new “app” to count votes for the Iowa caucus to actually work out. It is never a good idea to make the first real-world use of a new application be something important and so publicly visible.

And Therein Lies the Rub

Published on – 200 Words

The tagline of https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/29/browser_security_enigma/ reads: Brave, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla gather together to talk web privacy… and why we all shouldn't get too much of it Browser makers keep coming back to the need to please advertisers And therein lies the rub. Websites cost money to run. Content costs money to create. Software, such as web browsers, cost time and frequently money to create and maintain. As the saying goes, “there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

Great Article: The Top Five Developer Skills That'll Make You a Hero

Published on – 100 Words

The Top Five Developer Skills That'll Make You a Hero (Hint: Involves LEGOs) by Jean-Paul Delimat is a great read. His advice for working on real-world software projects is spot-on. His LEGO analogies are both effective and some of the most amusing things that I have read all week. I've been known to use Voltaire's quote “Perfect is the enemy of good” in the context of finding the line between beautiful code solutions and the pragmatics of delivering on-time.

Howto: Building the Site With Drone

Published on – 1200 Words

Everything that I needed to do to install and configure Drone.io in order to set up a simple CI/CD pipeline to rebuild and (eventaully) redeploy my website was documented somewhere on the Internet. I just had to piece the puzzle together from the information I found scattered among multiple sites. This post is my attempt to get everything documented in one place. I'm sure future-me will need the reminder. Hopefully, this information may be of some help to others as well.

Nested Forms in Angular - Part 2

Published on – 700 Words

After publishing my original Nested Forms in Angular article, my friend and colleague Val Neekman suggested I add a fourth approach, where static factory methods on each of the child components are used instead of a separate factory service. So it is with my thanks to him for the idea, along with some sample code to look at and a much appreciated review of my implementation of the idea, that I am able to write up Part 2 in my Nested Forms in Angular series.

Building the Site With Drone.io

Published on – 200 Words

It only took a few hours tonight to set up a new VPS machine with Docker, LetsEncrypt, and Drone.io to be able to build and deploy my Hugo blog to a test site. The whole CI/CD pipeline takes less than ten seconds to finish. I will have to write up all of the details, including my docker-compose files, nginx configs, and .drone.yml later on this week. It's all super exciting to see it come together.

Nested Forms in Angular

Published on – 1600 Words

The official Angular documentation discussing Reactive Forms shows how one can use groups and arrays to organize a form, and to dynamically add to it. The drawback of the example on that page is that everything is in a single component.

Once a component starts to grow in size and complexity, it becomes desirable to decompose it into multiple smaller components. At this point, there are a number of ways to break up the form into a set of nested form elements.

Add Webmention Support

Published on – 300 Words

With many thanks to Using Web Mentions in a static site (Hugo), published by Paul Kinlan in October 2019, I have added Webmention support to the site. For now, I am using Webmention.io to handle the heavy lifting of providing the Webmention end-point, the same way the above-referenced article describes. With only minor modifications to the Node.js script from the article, I can pull down all mentions for my domain from Webmention.

More Responsive Site Design

Published on – 100 Words

My Semantic IndieWeb Theme currently being used for the site has been updated to provide a more responsive design. On landscape tablet or wider screens, the author card now displays in a column on the right side of the screen. On smaller devices, such as ones phone, the author card will continue to render at the end of the page. There is a fair amount of yet-to-be-used whitespace under the author card in the wide screen view.

It's The Little Things

Published on – 100 Words

While waiting at the local Panera Bread shop for my lunch order, I noticed a fellow patron who was wearing a Miskatonic Observatory t-shirt. It made my day.