built with ☕

Welcome to my little slice of the internet. If you want to know more about me there’s an about page. Want to send me a message? Get in touch here.

Some things on this site:

Recently on builtwith.coffee:

  • Weeknotes for the week ending August 1, 2021

    [Aug 1, 2021]
    • I took Monday off and the week flew by. Also, it’s August?
    • Released code at work this week which was a huge refactor that had (🤞) no noticeable changes to the existing application. Another to add to the list of “big red diff refactors” I’ve done. I think I enjoy doing them, but much less than adding features that users get to use, so if I could instead figure out a way to, Terminator style, go back and prevent devs from thinking they need to immensely overcomplicate a handful of asynchronous API calls before building the project that I eventually work on, that would be even better.
    • Got two rides in this week. One where I had a vague idea of where I wanted to go, went a few miles off course, absolutely abused my poor Masi cross bike, ended up with a flat and had to walk the last mile and a half. Hard to say if it was the rock gardens, riding over a thicket of thorny bushes, or missing an enormous pothole on a dirt road and ramming the back rim of it so hard I almost went over the bars that caused the flat but I appreciate that the tube held out until almost the end. Not the first time I’ve ended a ride walking 1, but it’s a uniquely dispiriting experience pushing a broken bicycle and while other bicyclists pass you by. Masi bicycle in the woods
    • Second ride was a much calmer ride with my daughter which was measured in “would you rather” questions per mile 2. Must be a thing the kids are into at Summer camp this week. Lorelei by the gate house at Bradley Palmer state park
    • The tilers came to tile our kitchen this week, it looks great, but I learned that while you might buy x number of boxes of tile, if they’re from different batches, they might not look as similar as you would think. A few last minute shuffles of where the tile would go took care of it. Agile home improvement, I’ve been calling it.
    • The weather this weekend is unbelievable. We had touch up painting to do yesterday and opened all the windows and doors to let the breeze air everything out. Our extremely indoor cats have no interest in leaving the house but they do appreciate the smells and extra clear bird chirps. Maggie relaxing in the sunlight.
    • I updated this blog’s version of react-markdown and cleaned up how it was implemented, the main effect of which is now I can use 3 footnotes!
    1. Nor the worst: I once rode too far for the shape I was in, and my right quad stopped working. I had a fully functional bike but couldn’t physically pedal it any further, and was a few miles and about a thousand feet of elevation away from my car.↩
    2. Hundreds, easily.↩
    3. Abuse, really.↩
    Permalink

  • Weeknotes for the week ending July 25, 2021

    [Jul 26, 2021]
    • I set up a suite of tests on a project I’m working on at work that uses Cypress component tests. This might be the most perfect testing solution for me. I like Cypress for e2e tests, and the component tests allow you to use the syntax but mount slices of your application for testing. Not only does it mesh nicely with e2e tests, it makes testing pieces of your application visually without having to invoke the entire application on a dev server a piece of cake.
    • Finished The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett. Not my favorite Discworld novel but we got it from a library book sale for a few pennies.
    • Our kitchen has a sink again! It’s big and wonderful and I never want to see a double basin sink again.
    • We took up a trip to Vermont for the weekend to see my parents who, intentionally or not, live up there in the Summer. Long trip up in the dark, but we had beautiful weather all day Saturday so I’m glad we didn’t wait until Saturday morning to make the drive.
    • We took a “hike” at Sentinel Rock State Park. It’s maybe a half mile through a field from the parking lot, but it was a good distance on a lazy-day. Trail at Sentinel Rock State Park Old foundation at Sentinel Rock State Park
    • My daughter spent a lot of the morning and early afternoon catching (and releasing) bugs. It’s absolutely crazy how many fewer bugs there are up there then there used to be. My dad remarked how when we drove up in the 80s and 90s, the car would be covered in dead bugs. Now? I think I hit two. Moth on a sock
    • It’s our 10th wedding anniversary (soon) so we wanted to stop by the place we were married. Me and Andrea in front of the Newark Union Church
    • As I said, beautiful weather on Saturday… A nice view from the house in Newark, Vermont And then much less beautiful on Sunday. The view from the house in Newark, Vermont on a rainy day Which is fitting, I think, since we had a beautiful day on our wedding, and then the remnants of Hurricane Irene blew in the next day and it was windy and gross.
    • I planned ahead more than usual for the drive and we stopped at better restaurants on the trip up and back. The Common Man on the way up, and Dos Amigos on the way back, with a stop at NH Doughnut Co. for some post ride treats.
    • Traveling with an unvaccinated kid is more stressful than it needs to be because you have no idea who actually has or hasn’t gotten vaccinated. Leaving Vermont we passed some clown show setting up that was demonstrating for keeping the government out of their veins or whatever bird brain idea they had.
    • I had a little project waiting for me when I got back. The wired mouse had been driving me crazy, so I ordered a new wireless one and figured while I was there, why not color match the mouse to the keys on my keyboard.
    Permalink

  • The Light Fantastic

    [Jul 20, 2021]

  • Weeknotes for the week ending July 18, 2021

    [Jul 18, 2021]
    • 🌧🌧🌧🌧☀️☀️🌧
    • This week was busy, with the general things that makes life busy, plus two social gatherings, which is an increase of 200% from the… entire year before. I said I would take it easy this weekend but it’s real hard to be at home and not do house projects. Now it’s 7:30 on Sunday and I’m ready to relax — right after I do this… and those other things I was thinking of doing….
    • Lorelei started (what we’ve been calling) school camp this week. Since she’s adamant about not wanting to learn how to read, and a mostly remote year didn’t help that, she’s spending the mornings doing “Summer school” activities then going to “fun” camp. The change seemed to affect her absolutely not at all, which is the best we could have asked for.
    • Another child note, she likes to knock on our bedroom door in the morning, peek in, then walk away. It’s a subtle “I’m hungry and I might not be able to prepare the food I want today”, but it’s also a decent alarm clock so I don’t mind it. For a long time, when the door cracked open my brain tried to pattern match “child or cat”. The other day was the first time it went for “child or small burglar”. She’s still on the short side for her age but she’s doing a good job of catching up this Summer.

    Album a day

    I’ve stopped, for now. Might switch over to one finding one song to appreciate every day. For now, please enjoy this song, which has been stuck in my head all week, thanks to the aforementioned child of mine. I listened to a lot of Michael Bolton as a kid, we took long cars rides every weekend in the Summer, and Time, Love & Tenderness was one of the very, very few tapes we had. We later picked up a second tape, the 1991 classic… Brian Adam’s Waking up the Neighbors. Joke Michael Bolton songs couldn’t have a target any better than this elder Millennial.

    Permalink

  • Weeknotes for the week ending July 11, 2021

    [Jul 11, 2021]
    • I spent too many hours dealing with an issue where a previous employer off by one’d my social security number. Double check it! Also, I wonder who this person who is me shifted once is.
    • Safari will be the death of me. Our app at work was using IndexedDB to store state, and I saw this in my timeline:

    But, ok, that’s fine, we were refactoring the app and saving less state in browser storage, and we were going to use localStorage instead because cross-tab communication is easier but haha fuck me right?

    I use Safari on a day to day basis because it is fast, but also because there’s no better way to find out what dumb things are broken in Safari that will break your app than seeing it broken in someone else’s app. Oh and forget Google Lighthouse, you want to know if an app is good just open it in Safari and see if you get the “this page is consuming significant energy” warning.

    • Being generally mad at computers due to the above I’ve gone back to taking notes on paper again. I have a stack of index cards on my desk and I write what ever pops up and deal with it later. I have nice Zebra highlighters to go over the notes at the end of the day and flag things that are important.
    • Our backyard patio project left us with a stack of extra cobblestones and a pile of extra pea gravel, so I dug up some more of the yard and made a nice border around our garden bed. Pea gravel and cobblestone border around our garden bed.

    This used up exactly all of the material, and the grass there is now pleasingly geometric so we’re done with that part of the yard.

    • I was drinking coffee on the back porch this morning and the air had an intense low-tide smell. I know it’s like 1% salt and 99% dead plants and animals but I love it. I took out the bike and rode down to beach, and it was one of those days where when you get to the road that runs along the beach you can feel the air change, it was colder and denser (and… the smell!).
    • I dream of car-free Sundays in town. If you get out before 10 in the morning there isn’t a tremendous amount of traffic but being able to roll down any street without having to check for cars would be 💯.
    Permalink

  • Weeknotes for the week ending July 4, 2021

    [Jul 4, 2021]
    • 🦅🇺🇸🎆. Or not, we’re just bumming around the house. If we’re lucky we’ll see some fireworks from the back deck.
    • Our new kitchen cabinets went in this week. There’s so much room now! The finishing touches (sink, hood, counters, tile) are still a few weeks out so it’s exciting but mostly non-functional. My daughter wondering where our old island went to. My daughter checking out the new island, I guess wondering where the old one went to.
    • We had some electrical work done in the kitchen as well, and it occurred to me how the piece of paper taped to the inside of our circuit breaker panel is like code comments, most of them are wrong and you can’t trust what they say, but they might help you narrow down what you’re looking for a tiny bit.
    • I also learned that electrical code now requires you to have AFCI circuit breakers which are good because arc faults are bad but I also learned that some household appliances inherently generate arcs (brushed motors, mostly) and those can trip the circuit breaker. Which is why using the “brush roller” feature on our vacuum cleaner would trip a few of the outlets in our house, but not others, but now the entire downstairs is on AFCI breakers so it trips anywhere if we use that feature.
    • We watched The Queen’s Gambit this week. I guess everyone else watched it last year? It was really visually interesting, you can play a fun game of “find the chess boards in the set / costume design” while you watch. I enjoyed chess as the narrative frame for a coming of age story, although in my wife’s words, “all I understand is that if you take drugs you can play chess”.

    Album a day

    Getting a little lazy with this. On the plus side, though, I realized the other day that the 3.5mm jack on my monitor is a line-out, not a line-in, so listening while at my desk got a lot easier. Why did I ever think it was a line-in?

    Permalink

  • Weeknotes for the week ending June 27, 2021

    [Jun 28, 2021]
    • Packed up the entire kitchen this weekend. We’re getting some work done to the cabinets, new counters, other things. We’ve lived in three houses and in each wanted to do kitchen work to make it more how we’d want it instead of how we bought it: we DYI’d it in our first house and it was an improvement but didn’t really solve any of the fundamental problems of that kitchen (galley kitchen, 80 year old cabinets), we never even started in our second house (having a newborn was enough), this time we’ll finally have the kitchen we made decisions on, instead of someone else.
    • Complicating the packing process was the fact that my daughter stayed home sick on Friday, and gave whatever she had to me. Between remote school and remote work we spent 2020 germ free, so far 2021 has been more of a normal year.
    • Went to make an update to my wife’s website this weekend on my M1 Macbook Air. Turns out however I left it last time was entirely incompatible with running the site on an ARM computer, and fixing that problem is... not easy. npm update should solve a problem like this, but some packages waited until major versions to ship a fix for ARM which then brought other changes. It was too much for what I knew was a simple update.
    • In work notes, I’m pulling apart a Redux-Saga implementation in favor of just using the React Context API. It’s a moderately complex application, I went about it by removing the brain, essentially, pointing all of the Redux state to a Context store and replacing all of the actions with functions. I’m getting to the end of it and wrote some Cypress tests to go along with it. It’s been fun painting myself into many of the same corners that already existed in the logic, going “oh, that’s how that happened”, and then figuring out how to get out.
    • Finished Deacon King Kong by James McBride. I read The Good Lord Bird two years ago, I really enjoy his writing, lots of individuals who are odd in their own ways that get mashed together by the plot.

    Album a day

    As always, I get lazy about listening to new things when I’m doing house projects. There’s always music on, it's just not often anything new.

    Permalink

  • Deacon King Kong

    [Jun 23, 2021]

  • Weeknotes for the week ending June 20, 2021

    [Jun 21, 2021]
    • It’s finished: Full photo of the patio in our backyard at night. Close up photo of the patio in our backyard at night.

    Well, “finished”. We still need ~1.5 yards of top soil to make a flower bed, and the light “poles” are a “temporary” solution of zip-tying 2x2s to the chain link fence. As with every time we do a yard project I overestimated how much pea gravel we‘d need, so I‘m trying to figure out a place for what‘s left in the driveway before ordering more stuff to... have dumped on the driveway.

    • Woke up this morning and when my daughter came down she said “Happy Father’s day” followed by “... do you like salad?”. Me: “uh, sure?”

    My Dad loves to eat... "salad"

    She came up with the same answer for her Mom on Mother’s Day. We eat a side salad with dinner a lot in this household, but I don’t think either of us have ever been like “oh yum yum salad my favorite”.

    • The above was made during the last week of Kindergarten. Now comes Summer camp. Summer camp days run longer than school days (yay) but means driving there for dropoff and pickup instead of walking (boo).
    • That’s it, I think? After finishing up the patio I spent most of my free time just hanging out on it. We did have mojitos with garden mint last night (on the patio, of course).

    Album a day

    Permalink

  • Weeknotes for the week ending June 13, 2021

    [Jun 14, 2021]
    • Watching more TV than usual around here. Went through the entire first season of Sweet Tooth, and now I have to go back and read the comics. I remember the end of the world events being more vague in the comics, they’ve added detail to the TV series but I’m not sure the details make logical sense. Still, I adored the comics, and the first season does a pretty delightful job of bringing it to life (Bobby is…much cuter). Also watched Bo Burnham: Inside, also good. If you want to be convinced to watch it, just watch Welcome to the Internet here:
    • Read Nothing To See Here. It’s about raising kids who spontaneously combust, which, if you’re a parent, you can immediately recognize is really just all kids. The book included this article at the end, which resonated with me: I Was Worried My Anxiety Would Prevent Me From Being a Good Father. My Sons Changed That
    • Finished Ori and the Will of the Wisps. Great game, one of the few games out there where your character’s movements make you feel super powerful (Spiderman on the PS4 is another one that comes to mind). I wish the Switch Pro controller had a headphone jack because Ori has beautiful music but I had it on low volume since I was playing after the kid was asleep.
    • More yard work. This was the end of last weekend: My backyard with some of it dug out. This is where we are after this weekend: My backyard with a cobblestone border and paver stones It’s so close! And by close I mean many tons of pea gravel away from close!

    Album a day

    I took a break for vacation last week, and apparently forgot to update the last week of May… but now I’m back. The full list remains here.

    Permalink
Back to top