SacMusic.com: an exercise in technology bikeshedding

Yesterday I updated the portfolio page for SacMusic.com on deadhandmedia.com (the page is not published at the time of writing this post). Out of curiosity–and perhaps a bit of self-hatred–I rolled back to the initial publication commit of the SacMusic page. And then I felt like an idiot. In a fit of frustration, I tweet …

Tentative development plans as on Nov 19, 2021

I've narrowed down my areas of technology interests in my next job to Ruby on Rails and Django, with preference towards working in Rails. I love React, but it in most cases it and other JS frameworks aren't worth the cost of implementation or reduced performance. I'm running into a small issue in my job …

I opened sourced the Dead Hand Media site

Right before I hit the "submit" button to apply for USDS today, I took a look at deadhandmedia.com. The footer still said it was 2020. Yikes: it's almost 2022. So I updated the markup then pushed the change. Then on the finest advice of Twitter, I rewrote the footer so the date would load from …

Downloading and filtering Chrome’s history

Well, I applied to work at the United States Digital Service today. While I don't love the idea of living in the DC area, using my coding talents to make the government easier to use is kind of a dream. It's something I actually thought a lot about as a teenager. I had a bit …

Job listings: a dumpster fire of tech

I love coding, but every time I look at developer job listings I think, "is this really the industry that I want to work in? The problems are well documented elsewhere, but I'll list them here as well. The vast majority of the available jobs are for senior level positions with a minimum of five …

Wrapping up my time off

I quit my job at the beginning of July. I desperately needed some time to decompress, and I wanted to learn tools that would have helped me with the pain points I experienced with deployment while working my last job. I also wanted to find a project. I was kind of hoping that I might …

A `loop` directive in Python templates

You know what a Python-based templating language needs? A loop directive. What would the difference be between for and loop? The difference would be in scoping. The loop directive would have block level scoping. It would have access to the outer scope, but any variables set within the inner scope would only affect the inner …

Janky template revelations: Reassessing Project Lightbeam’s goals

I'm still thinking about templating languages in Python. I dislike all of them. Great templating is the core of a great CMS, and I don't think great templating is available in Python right now. Having peaked under the hood at a few Python libraries recently, I'm also fairly confident that it's something I don't want …

Early challenges with Mako templates

One of the things I want most in a web framework or CMS is a good way to build templates. Unfortunately every templating language has their strengths and weaknesses. Templating languages Templates are deceptively hard to get right. There are different philosophies. Django uses Django templates, which is very similar to Jinja2. These don't allow …

Sanic reload problems solved–back to building project Lightbeam

Sanic's maintainer asked me to try using Pull Request 2268 on my project to see if that would solve my problems with stalled reloads in Chrome. Suddenly it struck me: I actually have no idea how to do that. Rather than bugging the maintainer for basic Python help, I tried Googling it. I didn't even …