Four months into the COVID-19 Pandemic, I finally broke down and built a gym in my basement.

I’ve often seen a joke going around dev circles talking about how developers have tons of half-finished side projects lying around. And as much as it pains me to say, I’m one of them. But now I can say that that pile has decreased by one.

I’m going to preface this by saying that I am by no means an expert when it comes to all the nuances of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. I do however know that Section 230 serves as the underpinning of how the current Internet works and why all the sites that we all love can survive and exist.

Meet Cookie, the cat that I’ve had now for almost 11 years.

In all of my professional experience, I’ve never worked for a company that did any unit testing and because of that, I haven’t really done any either. I knew what unit testing is and the general concepts behind it, but never got around to actually building or implementing any tests. I decided that for Digital Family Cookbook, that would change.

I’ve often joked that the recipe project I’ve been working on is my “white whale”. I have in the past thrown everything out only to start over. I first built it in Ruby on Rails, but it was buggy and my limited knowledge of Rails made it a little hard to debug and figure out exactly what was wrong. I opted to rebuild it in PHP since I was quite familiar with PHP after building OpenVoter. I decided then that I wanted to start over to teach myself Node.js…well you get the idea.

Well, just like many others across the country and the world, I’m now practicing social distancing and staying home just about all the time. While I’m fortunate in that I have a job that allows me to work from home, I can’t help but to think of all those who aren’t as fortunate and have either lost their job or have to go to work and potentially put their health and life on the line. Doctors, nurses, first responders and others are braving this and they deserve nothing but praise and respect for working through these tough times.

One of the things I’ve been trying to do while getting in shape is tracking my progress. Weight is obviously one of the metrics I track, but it’s not the only one.

Another year has passed and it’s been a tradition of mine as of late to look back on the year that was to see what I hoped to have done, what I did, and where I might improve. I really wish I knew where 2019 went because it seemed to have just flown by. It seemed like it was just yesterday that I was writing about 2018, looking onward to 2019. Now 2019 is gone, the new decade has maybe? begun, and I’m a year older.

This week we look at a historical close call with our nuclear weapons, the OLPC laptop, the NSA going after ISIS, good CSS design tips, and ES2019.