Blog

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.

This week I read about Firefox improving users' privacy by default, why the GOP and conservatives are wrong about "censorship" on social media, nuclear energy, and a weird bit of tax policy.

This week I read about a spouse's experience with the aftermath of an NFL career, Apple at least partially embracing the right-to-repair, and the benefits of code deletion.

This week I read about Javascript, jQuery, terraforming Mars, baseball cards and more.

This week I read about changes in the US Navy, another nuclear accident in Russia, a prank gone wrong, and more.

Lately, I’ve been making steady progress on my side project, which I’m currently calling Digital Family Cookbook. I’m making it as a content management system for cooking recipes. As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m writing it using Node.js, React, & GraphQL. It’s been quite a learning curve, but I’m definitely glad I’ve been working on it. The tools are pretty cool and easy-ish to use once you get used to the syntax and some of the idiosyncrasies of React and JSX.

I've decided to start this back up. Some interesting thoughts about making the data social media has on us transferrable, DIY Phone Farms, and a new software development podcast I've found.

At the beginning of July, I decided to change up my gym routine. I had been running a variation of the P.H.U.L. routine, but decided I wanted to try something a little more intense since I felt like I was plateauing with both deadlifts and bench press.