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Why are most Web Accessibility Checkers Browser Extensions or Bookmarklets? 🔗

An answer to a question someone asked recently in a walled-garden, unwalled for the open web. Accessibility testing tools tend to be browser extension [...]

Dev Snippets & Keyboard Shortcuts 🔗

See also: my cheat sheet/personal FAQ when working with static site generators. Here are some shortcuts or short snippets I often find myself searchin [...]

Places I Might Shop Online for Suits 🔗

Sometimes people with a body type similar to mine want to wear a suit to some fancy event, and don't know where to shop. They may be looking for a mor [...]

Board Games for Toddlers 🔗

Do you love board games, and can't wait to play with your kid? You may be happy to learn you can start playing board games before you might think! No [...]

Mid April 2024: Some Joys 🔗

It's been a pretty nice last few weeks for me, all things considered. Here are some things recently that have brought me joy. # Music I got to see Spe [...]

Frontmatter Templates for New Blog Posts 🔗

Updated 3-26-2024: Added timestamp to date to make my RSS feed better I have been thinking for a long time that it would be nice to have a script that [...]

Notes on: 'A Well-Contained Life' 🔗

I came across this essay in the Paris Review titled "A Well-Contained Life". I appreciated the reflection it offered on how sometimes the containers w [...]

C&C Processing Parade Floats 🔗

figure { margin-bottom: 30px; } figcaption { max-width: unset; } For most of my childhood, my parents owned a small meat locker in my hometow [...]

Crafty Thrift Stores & More in the Kansas City Metro 🔗

While we were in Kansas City recently primarily to visit Great Wolf Lodge (read my review!), we did some shopping. We hit some of our usual spots: IKE [...]

Visiting Great Wolf Lodge with a 2 Year Old 🔗

This week my family stayed at Great Wolf Lodge in Kansas City for 1 night. It's a hotel that has a variety of kid activities like laser tag and some s [...]

Taking an old sewing machine in for repair 🔗

I have been wanting to (re)learn to sew, and specifically to sew my own clothing, which I have never done before. I have a machine that I claimed from [...]

Resources To Start a Blog 🔗

# Theory Everyone Should Blog, and That Includes You, a manifesto. I recently read a post (sorry, have already lost the link) that emphasized that you [...]

My Favorite Mugs 🔗

These are my old reliables. I believe they are both from Wal-Mart, and I got at least the first one for my college dorm. They are what I reach for mos [...]

Queer Book Recommendations 🔗

A short(ish) list of queer books I've read & enjoyed over the last couple years. None of these are affiliate links. (read: I'm not making money on thi [...]

Resources for the Fun Web 🔗

Let's make 2023 the Year of the Blog (again). Not sure where to get started? Here are some links you might find useful, to either get started building [...]

Really Big Bike Trailers 🔗

I can haul a lot of stuff on my cargo bikes (one front bucket style, one midtail; both electric), but I'm always interested in ways to haul even more [...]

Life Hack: Add a new list in Paprika for non-grocery stores 🔗

In my household, we use the app Paprika 3 (available on Android or iOS) for managing grocery lists & meal planning. It is vastly superior to our old m [...]

Adding Decap CMS to 11ty 🔗

I've been wanting a way to add posts in markdown to my 11ty site from my Android phone, without using a 3rd party CMS. I'm going to try out Decap CMS [...]

"The Overspent American" by Juliet Schor 🔗

Today I was introduced to the work of Juliet Schor, whose book The Overspent American was published in 1997. Schor is an American economist and sociol [...]

That time I got stuck holding a stranger's baby in my own living room 🔗

Gather round, folks, for a good old Midwestern snow storm story. The lesson here is perhaps "be careful being a good neighbor." Which is maybe not the [...]

Cozy Reading Recs from the Women in Tech chat 🔗

Light & cozy reading suggestions are a frequent request in the Women in Tech slack I'm in. Here are a few that have come up a lot, so we can link this [...]

Ruby on Rails Model Association Reminders 🔗

# belongs_to gets the database column For a one-to-one or one-to-many relationship, the side with the belongs_to is the one where the database column [...]

Abundance 🔗

Check out all the posts tagged 'abundance' on my site. A word that has felt particularly resonant for me lately is "abundance", and particularly, the [...]

Desiring the Product that will Solve a Situation Perfectly 🔗

I am trying to notice more when I have the desire to buy stuff, and ask more questions about why I want to do that. Do I really need to buy the thing? [...]

Using Pronto for CI on a Rails project without cluttery comments 🔗

On many Ruby on Rails projects I've worked on, Pronto is in use to run linting rules as part of CI on every pull request. Pronto was chosen because li [...]

2023 in Software Tools 🔗

I have another post on New Year's Reflections more broadly, but it was getting a bit long so I wanted to move the software & tools section out. Here i [...]

Reflections on 2023 🔗

# Broad Strokes We moved to a new house in Lincoln early this year. We also spent a lot of the year planning to move away from this house, and out of [...]

Transferring my Baldur's Gate 3 Save from Windows to Steam Deck 🔗

Notes to self on the process I followed, to transfer a save file I started on my wife's Windows PC for Baldur's Gate 3, to my newly purchased Steam De [...]

My 'If I Die' Doc 🔗

I think it's really important to be prepared for the unexpected. One of those unexpected outcomes might be that I could die much earlier than I hope t [...]

Language Learning Resources I Like 🔗

I still stand by all the posts in my 2018 French resources post, but there are a few other things I've used since then for languages including French, [...]

So You Want To Move to Canada 🔗

Have you given serious thought to moving from the US to Canada? Are you not quite sure where to start exploring your options for immigrating to Canada [...]

Cassey's Holiday Gift Guide 🔗

Despite my best efforts to embrace a less consumerist lifestyle (a constant work in progress).. I have a deep love for holiday gift guides and product [...]

Board Game Recommendations for Casual Board Gamers 🔗

Recently someone in a Discord I'm in asked for recommendations on upgrading from the classic board games (Life, Uno, Sorry, etc) to new games that mig [...]

Using Obsidian for Notes & Research Projects 🔗

There are a lot of different tools out there that you can use to write notes. There are apps that are very basic, like Google Keep, and apps that are [...]

Notes on Essentialism 🔗

I just finished reading the book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, by Greg McKeown. The core idea of the book is to do less, but better. [...]

Rails controller params can be accessed by string or symbol (with indifferent access!) 🔗

The other day I was writing a Rails controller test on a controller that was using a hash of the parameters. My controller tests were failing when the [...]

Transgender History: transgender & reproductive liberation 🔗

This originally appeared as a series of tweets but I want it to live on my website instead so here it is. Susan Stryker writes in Transgender History [...]

Fetching & caching data from Airtable in my 11ty site 🔗

I've been seeing a lot of people blog about setting up a now page on their website. Kind of like an about page, a now page is a page on a personal web [...]

Notes on Your Money or Your Life 🔗

I've seen people in online personal finance spaces mention the book "Your Money or Your Life" quite positively, but didn't really know what to expect [...]

Lincoln Housing Justice History 🔗

This originally appeared as a series of tweets but I want it to live on my website instead so here it is. The issue of a lack of affordable housing in [...]

CSV.generate behavior change in Ruby 3 vs Ruby 2.7 🔗

Today I was working on some code that generated some CSV reports like this: def self.my_cool_report(options = {}) CSV.generate(options) do |csv| [...]

Manual change tracking in Ruby on Rails 🔗

This week I was working on a project where the users need to see the history of changes to a particular model. We had been using the Papertrail gem fo [...]

Here for Community 🔗

My friend E keeps a truck she calls the solidarity truck. The first solidarity truck was a hand-me-down from another friend who made it available for [...]

Items I loved for my new baby 🔗

these burp cloths are great, get a ton. Skip Hop Baby Activity Center table is life, once baby has some head and neck control. We also used a baby swi [...]

Book Recs for a Parent-to-Be 🔗

I read a lot of books while pregnant and in my first year of parenting, about pregnancy, giving birth, and parenting. Here are some of the ones I like [...]

2022 in Books 🔗

.bookGrid { display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap; justify-content: space-around; } .bookGrid > div { max-width: 31%; [...]

2022 in Review 🔗

2022 started with a lot of impatience and discomfort for me. I was incredibly pregnant, and my baby, due in mid-January, came late. Having a newborn w [...]

Simple Guide to Cricut Models (with no ads) 🔗

For most people interested in getting started with Cricut, I recommend the Cricut Explore Air 2. Personally I got the Maker because I thought I would [...]

My Internet 🔗

Inspired by the Embedded newsletter's "My Internet" series, I'm gonna tell you a bit about what I do when I'm online. Though I wrote this post and wen [...]

Does that thing have a battery on it? a zine about ebikes 🔗

I made a zine about e-bikes. Here it is. You can download a PDF of this zine and fold it. Print as many as you want & do what you want with them, but [...]

Adding stack traces to versions stored by the Papertrail Ruby gem 🔗

I've been working on a tricky bug for a client at Unabridged Software where data records are getting created over and over somewhere in the code, and [...]

Essay on My Baby 🔗

I'm sitting at Cultiva with my baby and I still can't get over the fact of it: my, that she's really mine, and baby, that she's real and sentient and [...]

Resources for a native plant meadow yarden 🔗

Several years ago we converted the lawn in front of my house to a native plant meadow-style garden. My spouse and I have learned so much along the way [...]

Choose Community: a zine 🔗

I made a zine on the importance of community. Here it is. You can download a PDF of this zine and fold it. Print as many as you want & do what you wan [...]

Host your own community event: a zine 🔗

I made a zine on how to host your own community event. Here it is. You can download a PDF of this zine and fold it. Print as many as you want & do wha [...]

Reflections on America in Decline 🔗

I kiss my baby's bald spot after another mass shooting at an elementary school and wonder if anything about the world will be better in 6 years when s [...]

Debugging strategies using binding.pry in Rails 🔗

Something I had to get used to when switching to primarily Ruby on Rails development while working at Unabridged is debugging using binding.pry instea [...]

Verbose Active Record query logs for Rails 🔗

Today I was testing some code in the Rails console and kept seeing the same database call over and over, but I couldn't figure out where it was coming [...]

Making Rails recognize code in subfolders of default folders 🔗

Today I was making some improvements to a client's Rails codebase. This client has many services in the services/ folder of the Rails application, and [...]

Getting all the records of a model created today in Rails 🔗

My favorite thing I've learned recently is something I learned when needing to remove a bunch of records that had just been created in a Rails app. If [...]

Using Sanity CMS to host an image gallery for an existing 11ty site 🔗

I've seen a few tutorials now on using Sanity CMS with Eleventy, but they all assume I want to use the Sanity/Eleventy starter project, not an Elevent [...]

2021 in Books 🔗

.bookGrid { display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap; justify-content: space-around; } .bookGrid > div { max-width: 31%; [...]

Just Enough JavaScript for Eleventy 🔗

Sometimes I hear from people who'd like to try out the well-loved and hip static site generator Eleventy, but their main programming language expertis [...]

Dynamically choosing a data file to use in Eleventy templates 🔗

Today in the Eleventy Discord, someone came in with a tricky problem. They wanted to set an environment variable to the name of a data file, and then [...]

Converting a simple HTML site to use Eleventy 🔗

So, you have a site that currently consists of one or more HTML files, and maybe some images. Your site is growing, and you're starting to think that [...]

What's this tilde arrow thing in my Gemfile? 🔗

Today I learned two new concept-phrases: "pessimistic versioning" and "twiddle-wakka" (yes really). I learned them via a PR review comment that sent m [...]

Deep dive into img attributes 🔗

For a 6-week "Professional Learning Community" initiative at work, I'm in a group focused on learning more about Eleventy, especially using Eleventy f [...]

Using Nunjucks shortcodes in Markdown files in Eleventy 🔗

Today I started taking a look at Eleventy Image, a powerful plugin for Eleventy that generates images in optimal sizes and formats for the web. There [...]

Getting your bearings in an existing Eleventy project 🔗

There are some great tutorials out there on building your own Eleventy site from scratch, but what if you are planning to make some contributions to a [...]

npx eleventy !== npx @11ty/eleventy 🔗

The other day when I went to add a post to my TIL blog, I got a scary error message. The site runs using the static site generator Eleventy, but I got [...]

The Ruby splat operator can destructure arrays 🔗

Today I learned about the splat operator in ruby, aka the * or asterisk operator. I came across some code like this in the readme for Motion: def hand [...]

Polymer Clay and Delayed Gratification 🔗

.img-grid { line-height: 0; -webkit-column-count: 2; -webkit-column-gap: 0px; -moz-column-count: 2; -moz-column-gap: 0px; colu [...]

2020 In Lists 🔗

.post-content h2 { text-align: center } # The music that kept me going The Mountain Goats according to Spotify this is what I played the absolut [...]

2020 In Review 🔗

You have probably already observed, or heard someone else observe, that time seemed to flow in a new pattern this year. It's become common for strange [...]

I'm reading: 'A (Mostly) Complete Guide to React Rendering Behavior' 🔗

This piece by Redux maintainer Mark Erikson called "Blogged Answers: A (Mostly) Complete Guide to React Rendering Behavior" is long, and I've only rea [...]

How to make your Javascript class instance have all the properties of some other object 🔗

# tl;dr: class MySpecialClass { constructor(objectFromServer) { Object.assign(this, objectFromServer); } } # more details Inspired by [...]

Using the beforeBuild hook to render Sass in Eleventy 🔗

Dennis Hagemeier shared a super helpful post on how to compile Sass with Eleventy directly, without needing to rely on a build helper tool like Grunt [...]

Continuous Integration: another definition 🔗

I'm reading "Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code" and it mentions a definition of continuous integration I'm not familiar with. In extr [...]

Settings I want on a new machine 🔗

On a new machine, I want to turn off the pager for git commands. It'd be nice if this was saved in some sort of dotfile that I maintained - I used to [...]

How to open the current directory in finder from terminal on a mac 🔗

Sometimes I'm doing stuff in the terminal and realize whatever I need to do next would be easier in Finder - maybe dragging around a selection of file [...]

How to make asdf recognize globally installed npm modules 🔗

After installing a global module with npm (npm install -g my-cool-module), when using asdf, you might then get command not found: my-cool-module when [...]

How can I see my new blog post rendered before I deploy, if I don't have my whole dev environment? 🔗

Today I learned a new way to write today I learned posts! I publish this site using Netlify, and it's built with Eleventy and hosted on github. Someti [...]

Asdf is a version manager promising to replace all the version managers 🔗

Asdf is a tool for managing versions. It lets you manage versions for a bunch of different things, with just one version manager. (Instead of installi [...]

What is that percent sign doing in my `cat` output? 🔗

On my mac, I did a quick cat of a file in the terminal, and saw an extra % at the end of the text. I turned on 'show whitespace' in VS Code and opened [...]

Adjusting site colors for better contrast 🔗

I picked my own color palette for the redesign of cassey.dev, and this site called Contrast-Ratio.com was helpful in resolving a pesky contrast issue [...]

Firefox Container Gotchas 🔗

My new boss told me about Firefox Multi-Account Containers which I had heard of a while ago, but have never used. I started using them yesterday, and [...]

Starting to pick up Ruby & Rails 🔗

I started a new job this week, at a consulting agency that works in Ruby on Rails a lot. I used Rails at a summer internship in college, but haven't r [...]

Firefox Responsive Design Mode and Hover Events 🔗

I need to preface this with: until recently, even though I used Firefox for browsing, I typically used Chrome and Chrome's Developer Tools for web dev [...]

Setting a layout for every page generated from a particular folder in Eleventy 🔗

As I was working on making my Today I Learned posts first-party members of this very site (they used to live in a separate site on Glitch), I moved ov [...]

Why do some tweets not respect my minimum font size? 🔗

Lately twitter has been displaying short tweet replies/quote tweets on mac/firefox in a way that doesn’t respect my minimum font sizes - they're too s [...]

Visiting Bottomline Corp in Spiritfarer 🔗

This entire post is a spoiler for the Bottomline Corp quest in Spiritfarer I'm playing Spiritfarer, and I got a cryptic note about a strike from worke [...]

Watching 'What the heck is the event loop, anyways?' 🔗

I watched "What the heck is the event loop, anyways?" by Philip Roberts. I really appreciated the way the material was presented and it really helped [...]

Sharing Styles in Styled Components 🔗

On Friday, I was working on converting a very complex tooltip component in React from CSS Modules using Stylus to styled-components. Some of the style [...]

Good Advice for a Pandemic 🔗

As I have mentioned before, I read a lot of advice columns. Here are a few I've read that are especially useful right now. # Feelings "How Not to Tank [...]

Make your twitter cards look nicer 🔗

Today I remembered that I made a change recently to how Twitter cards are rendered when I share a link on cassey.dev, but did not make the same tweak [...]

Using <aside> 🔗

This isn't a "Today I learned" so much as "today I remembered that more people should know this". In accessibility testing I’ve done lately on various [...]

Chrome has its own Task Manager 🔗

Today I remembered Chrome has its own task manager, which is another tool to help decide why my laptop fans are on, and if any sites that I am respons [...]

Delete all local branches that have been deleted from a remote 🔗

You can run git remote prune origin and delete all the remote-tracking branches from your local machine that have been deleted on the origin. Handy! S [...]

Reading the News in This Particular Moment in History 🔗

I have this strange feeling of being saturated in news, from all over the world, while at the same time, feeling like I really don't know what's going [...]

Pandemic Poetry 🔗

A worldwide coronavirus pandemic is going on. A few poems have really resonated with people around me during this time. Here they are: "Pandemic" by L [...]

Advice Columns for the Apocalypse 🔗

It's hard to think of anything that I have loved as long or as consistently as I have loved advice columns. My earliest memories of reading are of lay [...]

Pandemic Memes 🔗

.flex-center.column blockquote { max-width: 500px; } window.twttr = (function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0], [...]

Making a tweet roundup 🔗

I wanted to make a post with a bunch of tweets on it. I've mostly embedded a single tweet at a time before, so this is new territory. Here's what I di [...]

Opening a new window from a Firefox Add-On 🔗

Last year, I made my first couple browser extensions! Both were built to solve immediate needs I have: one to go between the various representations o [...]

Referencing an .env value in an NPM script 🔗

Today I wanted to reference a value from .env in an NPM script, so I learned how! I wanted a script I could run from the editor console of cassey-til. [...]

Testing Modern React with Enzyme Shallow 🔗

# A Litany of Woes # tl;dr: I learned recently that the only way to use Enzyme to test a React component that relies on a useContext hook appears to b [...]

Status Update: a poem 🔗

I have, as the prophets say, "What's on your mind?" the flashing cursor beckons. I feel the need to explain to all these people I have what marketers [...]

Funeral Sandwiches: a poem 🔗

In the community centers and church halls of small town Nebraska, Great salads, in all their Midwestern glory! Mayo, macaroni, jello, and corn. All di [...]

Deep-diving the CSS Cascade 🔗

I knew that a major feature of CSS is the "C", or cascade. I know some stuff about how the cascade works - mostly that it involves specificity, and th [...]

Flash of Invisible Text 🔗

In doing some cursory performance auditing on the site I work on, I came across a recommendation to ensure text remains visible during webfont load on [...]

2019: A year of many apps 🔗

I coded quite a bit this year - I'm a full-time software developer, after all. I didn't just code for work, though - this year, like last year, I bran [...]

My 2019 In Review 🔗

It is very cliche to say that this year, no matter what year it was, was a big year, but... 2019 was a big year for me! I appeared on the ballot in a [...]

Elements with overflow: scroll become focusable 🔗

I was working on re-building a custom select list component to make it more keyboard-friendly when I encountered a strange bug: the <section> element [...]

CSS properties that create an implicit stacking context 🔗

I had a bug where a background image was being set on a container with position: absolute. One of the children wasn't visible on the page, but it appe [...]

Accessibility Insights runs a subset of rules from Axe 🔗

My a11y learning for the week, after playing with Axe a bit over the last few weeks, is that the Accessibility Insights extension only runs a subset o [...]

October 23 Roundup 🔗

This is a newsletter I sent out via TinyLetter. View the complete archive. Greetings, readers! Thanks for being patient through my brief hia [...]

Mocking a React Component with Sinon 🔗

I'm working on writing component tests for React at work. Mocking several layers of Context + Redux + React-Router has been a difficult chore! I could [...]

Teaching Accessibility 🔗

# Reflection from me This talk reminded me a lot of a keynote I saw at Strange Loop this year by Felienne Hermans on "How to Teach Programming (and ot [...]

Learning about styled components 🔗

There's a new library of React components that are shared across the organization at my job, and it uses Styled Components which I don't know much abo [...]

Learnings from Strange Loop 🔗

I attended a conference called Strange Loop in St. Louis last week. I don't have notes or thought on every talk I attended, but here were a few I enjo [...]

I read: "Meet Border-box, my best friend." 🔗

Today I read a short article on a subject I knew at one point, but feels fresh to remember. The article was Meet border-box, my best friend. It descri [...]

September 3 Roundup 🔗

This is a newsletter I sent out via TinyLetter. View the complete archive. Lots of local news here for you today, plus some insight into why [...]

Assorted Readings 🔗

CSS Algorithms - on a process for writing CSS like you were solving an algorithmic puzzle CSS Inheritance, Cascade, and Global Scope - use the cascade [...]

Voiceover with Safari & List Semantics 🔗

I learned that when list-style: none is used, Safari does not expose the semantics of a list to assistive technology, meaning Voiceover won't announce [...]

Notes from "Rethinking Color and Contrast" 🔗

I watched "Rethinking Color and Contrast", a talk by Jared Smith at Inclusive Design 24 in 2017. Some takeaways: True colorblindness is very rare; col [...]

Today I Discovered React Axe 🔗

I just learned about react-axe, which runs while you’re developing and highlights the kinds of errors in the rendered DOM that browser extensions like [...]

Designing Against Domestic Violence 🔗

I'm watching: "Designing Against Domestic Violence" by Eva PenzeyMoog. These are notes from her talk. 95% of domestic violence is perpetrated by males [...]

Notes & Tweets from NE JS Conf 🔗

Most of the tweets embedded in this article are threads; click them if you want more of my in-the-moment thoughts. # Fredd K Schott on Pika Package Ma [...]

Does <details> work with Assistive Technology? 🔗

A coworker & I were talking about the <details> element and I had a hard time finding up to date info on how well supported it is by assistive technol [...]

Therapeutic Refactoring by Katrina Owen 🔗

I'm watching Therapeutic Refactoring by Katrina Owen. The talk starts by giving an example of a monster of a method that one came across. A very large [...]

July 27 Roundup 🔗

Welcome, readers! This week, learn about new research in housing & bicycle safety, the permit process for a new accessory dwelling unit, a transit adv [...]

My first look at Bulma for CSS 🔗

I wanted a simple UI library for making a simple page with a simple form prettier. So I tried out Bulma! My take is that in my quick usage/perusal of [...]

July 19 Newsletter 🔗

Hello, readers! This week is all about the local stuff, including notes on an interview with the executive director of the Lincoln Housing Authority, [...]

"From Puzzles to Products" by Jessica Kerr 🔗

I'm watching "From Puzzles to Products" by Jessica Kerr, a talk from Velocity Conf 2019, along with some coworkers. Here are my notes. At the beginnin [...]

The effects of Neuro and Muscular Disabilities with Dr. Neil Matthiessen 🔗

Originally tweeted. Provided here for posterity! Time for the Nebraska Digitial Accessibility Meetup! Tonight we're hearing from Neil Matthiessen, on [...]

Readings on Accessibility 🔗

I've read a lot about web accessibility today. Here are some of the things I've learned. # Screenreader-aware design tools A colleague shared Screenre [...]

I read (some of) NIFA's '2019 Profile of Nebraska'. Here's what I learned. 🔗

A newsletter I sent via TinyLetter. Data Insights from NIFA's 2019 Profile of Nebraska I went through the Nebraska Invest Finance Authority's [...]

Disruptive Design: Harmful Patterns and Bad Practice 🔗

I'm watching Disruptive Design: Harmful Patterns and Bad Practice by Laura Kalbag. Tech folks like to use jargon and euphemism like "disruption" and " [...]

Thoughts on The Commons LNK and 'Transformations' 🔗

A response to The Lincoln Journal Star's coverage of a new thrift shop on 14th & B that displaced The Commons, possibly permanently. Having them claim [...]

More People Set Custom Font Sizes than Use Internet Explorer 🔗

Reading Every Layout on "Units", I came across a link to an analysis of how many users set custom font sizes in their browsers. Informal research on u [...]

Impact of Accessibility on Link vs Button in HTML 🔗

Today I read this blog post on the difference in link and button in HTML and why it matters. I've learned much of this before, but I want to make sure [...]

Using process.env variables in Eleventy 🔗

In Eleventy (the static site builder used to create this site), you can access Node environment variables (process.env.MY_VARIABLE) in your templates. [...]

Getting your Glitch Project Domain in Your Code 🔗

If you are creating a project on Glitch intended for other people to use, sometimes you might want to include a reference to the name of the current r [...]

Driver Hits Person on Bike, Driver Drives Away, Nothing Happens 🔗

Did you know 15% of all crashes between a car and a bike in Lincoln are classified by LPD hit & runs? And that 31% of bicyclists injured in Lincoln ar [...]

The HTML Element Specification and Accessibility 🔗

I'm reading the WHATWG HTML Specification on 'Element Definitions' to learn more about what constitutes valid HTML, so that I can correct HTML parsing [...]

Great Housing Reads 🔗

# Books Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond. This should be required reading for anyone thinking about housing policy [...]

A perfect Lighthouse Score on a perfectly inaccessible website 🔗

Someone on Twitter built a website that has a perfect Lighthouse score for accessibility, but is nowhere near accessible). It's a neat experiment. [...]

'Making Badass Developers' by Kathy Sierra 🔗

I'm watching the talk today called "Making Badass Developers", by Kathy Sierra with some coworkers at Glitch. # Talk Notes Cognitive resources are fin [...]

Glitch App to Glitch Project Extension 🔗

# What I Made Glitch Project: Glitch App to Glitch Project Extension for Chrome. Install it from the Chrome App Store! It is: a Chrome Extension. When [...]

Navigating Anger & Sadness in the Workplace 🔗

This was a good read on navigating anger & sadness in the workplace, both as a manager and a not-manager. [...]

Meeting Facilitation for Remote Workers 🔗

I learned a lot for example from this blog on remote culture, and it would be great to see more people speaking the same language around remote needs [...]

Favorite Non-Meat Recipes 🔗

A friend asked today what they can eat if they want to avoid meat, but also can't eat peanuts, soy, or a lot of wheat. The answer is: so many things! [...]

Why do remote meetings suck? 🔗

Found this article on why remote meetings suck through a link provided in the Glitch D&I training, and it makes SO MUCH SENSE. And outlines the proble [...]

Is this feature toggle on? 🔗

TIL that I wasn't using a new feature on Glitch, hidden behind a feature toggle, even though I thought I turned it on a week or more ago. If a feature [...]

Using Live Expressions in Chrome to Track the Focused Element 🔗

You can use a 'live expression' in the chrome dev tools to track what element has focus, if you're trying to debug where focus disappears to when you [...]

Developer Tools & Inclusion 🔗

This is a good read on choosing the tools that you'd like to use to build the web, how those affect users, and how those affect other (future) develop [...]

Why I Became a Community Health Engineer 🔗

This post initially appeared on dev.to. I recently transitioned from a general software engineering position to become a "Community Health Engineer" a [...]

Book of Shaders 🔗

I found this in the readme of a cool art tool someone made on Glitch. It looks useful - people keep saying 'shader' or 'fragment shader' and I don't r [...]

Firefox Page Ruler 🔗

TIL firefox has a built-in tool for measuring a portion of the page, but you have to toggle it on in the settings menu of devtools How to turn it on [...]

React Material UI Thoughts 🔗

Learning for today: react material-ui is a good tool for quickly getting something that looks nice, but any customizations you make to the provided ex [...]

Valid Children of `<html>` 🔗

The only valid children of a <html> tag, according to the spec, are <head> and <body>. (So my <script> tag needs to go inside <body, not outside of it [...]

Itemscope Attribute in HTML 🔗

TIL about the itemscope attribute in html [...]

React Component Design Patterns 🔗

Read about React component design patterns & anti-patterns [...]

Alt Text on Stock Photos 🔗

Stock photos on your site aren't necessarily 'purely decorative' - one of a family on your business website might be trying to say "We're family frien [...]

When to use useReducer in React 🔗

When should I use useReducer in React? [...]

useEffect in React 🔗

Reading about useEffect in React. A takeaway: If you’re trying to write an effect that behaves differently depending on whether the component renders [...]

#SheCoded on Dev.to 🔗

I'm a web developer, but first and foremost, I'm a community member. My communities include women-in-tech-on-Twitter, progressives fighting for change [...]

Accessibility on the Million Most Popular Sites 🔗

Reading about (the state of accessibility on the most popular websites on the internet)[https://webaim.org/projects/million/]. The author's estimate i [...]

The Glitch Logo Changes Color 🔗

I learned from a coworker that the Glitch logo changes colors based on time of day, and my mind is blown. [...]

Shadow Power 🔗

One non-code thing I'm learning lately is that the levers of power are more obscured than I thought, even for local issues here in Lincoln, Nebraska. [...]

Class vs Function Components 🔗

I learned from Dan Abramov's latest post about how class components are different than function components in React. It has to do with how this works [...]

Learning to Learn 🔗

Read about Learning to Learn [...]

Speed in Function Components 🔗

I’d been wondering about whether my function components in React (using hooks) would be slow due to creating functions within my function component. ( [...]

Iconfinder 🔗

Found https://www.iconfinder.com/ which has a ton of really high quality small graphics, many of which are free. So I'm updating the avatars on all my [...]

How Screenreaders Use Semantics 🔗

I'm reading about how screenreaders use semantics to decide what to announce. [...]

Accessibility is not a React Problem 🔗

This is a nice post on accessibility in React. [...]

Babel options & require vs import 🔗

I learned why we run babel with modules: false and what the difference is between require and import. [...]

What is Math? 🔗

I’m learning what math is through this article on how it’s different than what we teach kids in schools during math class. I read Good Math a long tim [...]

Manuscript filtering 🔗

In Manuscript, searching for viewedBy:me lastEdited:"this month" in the Manuscript case list will help me find cases I've seen recently. [...]

How Error Handling Works in Browsers 🔗

I watched this video (Everything is broken, and I don't know why) over lunch. I learned a bit about how browsers handle unhandled exceptions. Mostly i [...]

React as a UI Runtime 🔗

I learned about how React works (internally) in this blog post called React as a UI Runtime. It was very interesting and inspired me to finally figure [...]

Parcel Doesn't Support CSS Modules Without Config 🔗

Learning: Parcel seems like it supports CSS Modules out of the box, but it doesn't. :( I was confused about the documentation but figured it out after [...]

Accessibility Testing/Coding Resources 🔗

Here are some favorite resources on designing and developing for all users: Inclusive Design Principles The 6 Simplest Web Accessibility Tests Anyo [...]

Favorite Resources for Learning French 🔗

I learned French in high school by taking classes online from the UNL Independent Study High School, then spending 10 months in France as a foreign ex [...]

Sharing Experiences and Building Community Online 🔗

As a junior in high school, I spent 10 months living in France with a host family and attending a local lycée. I documented my experiences on a blog c [...]

Screenreader Practice 🔗

On Friday, I led a short workshop for my coworkers on how to use the Mac's built-in screenreader, Voiceover, for accessibility testing. I shared wit [...]

How Crisis Text Line Helps Those In Crisis 🔗

(January 2024 note: attribution is no longer there on the linked blog post, and it's likely the post has been edited or changed by others since it was [...]

Converting a Javascript Project to Typescript for Beginners 🔗

I couldn't find a Typescript conversion guide for a new developer on our team who was not familiar with Typescript, so I made him one. Most guides to [...]

Check Build Configuration When the Wrong Project is Building in Visual Studio 🔗

I've been having problems getting a release build of my Xamarin Forms iOS project to work. It failed with "The LinkAssemblies task failed unexpectedly [...]

A Tribute to Friendship with Dan Owens 🔗

"Cowboy Dan" Owens and I were an unlikely pair, but he was my best friend. At the high school basketball game where I met Dan, I was quietly sitti [...]

Xamarin Forms Reading 🔗

From Chapter 27, Custom Renderers, in Creating Mobile Apps with Xamarin.Forms I learned that the way to propagate property changed notifications from [...]

Custom ContentView Renderer in Xamarin Forms iOS 🔗

Today I learned how to write a custom renderer in iOS for a ContentPage in Xamarin Forms. At first I tried using extending Xamarin Forms' View class, [...]

Xamarin Netstandard Blog Draft 🔗

Recently at Ocuvera, we faced the challenge of adding an iOS app to our offerings. We already had a Xamarin Android app, but we decided to try writing [...]

Converting to target netstandard14 in addtion to netFramework461 🔗

Oren says - For some frameworks, like .NET 4.5, that’s all you need to do. However, targeting .NET Standard and .NET 4.x is far from “the world.” We c [...]

Moral Foundations Matter 🔗

In recent political debates, especially over healthcare, it has become clear to me that not only are people divided, but they often do not understand [...]

Useful Textbooks from a Computer Science Degree 🔗

In my time as an undergraduate studying Computer Science, I came across several textbooks that were really useful. (This may be a surprise to you; it [...]

Xamarin Android RelativeLayout Designer 🔗

Summary: In Xamarin Android, if your layout is RelativeLayout, you can only drag controls into the Designer from the Toolbox onto an edge of an existi [...]

Convert Xamarin PCL Template to use NET Standard 🔗

Following this tutorial: https://oren.codes/2017/04/23/using-xamarin-forms-with-net-standard-vs-2017-edition/ Create a PCL Cross Platform Forms app Re [...]

Soft Delete with EntityFramework Dynamic Filters 🔗

# Problem: When we turned off the soft delete filter on our Entity Framework DB connection, we got SQL Exception 26: Error Locating Server/Instance Sp [...]

Async Unit Tests in C# 🔗

Today I learned about ManualResetEventSlim in C#. It's a semaphore class that uses a spin lock for a little bit before switching to a real wait handle [...]

Xamarin Android List Adapter 🔗

Things I learned implementing a list adapter in Xamarin Android - convertView. You can retrieve the tag from the convertView to get the tag bringing [...]

Theme Generators for Android 🔗

I've dove into Android development recently at work, and have found that theming all the various components seems more complicated than I'm used to in [...]

I saw democracy and it was beautiful. 🔗

Today I saw democracy and it was beautiful. I went to a local city council meeting, where a proposal to encourage recycling and divert cardboard and p [...]

What's the Deal with #BlackLivesMatter? 🔗

Don't you mean All Lives Matter? Nope! Another analogy - everyone at a dinner table is served a plate of food, except for Bob. Bob says, "Bob deserves [...]

Two Months of Mobile UX: Just Don't. 🔗

I wrote a blog post for Don't Panic Labs on my experience traveling in Europe with only mobile phone-sized devices, and some of the UX challenges I en [...]

Easy Vegetarian Lunches 🔗

So you want to cut out meat, because it's really hard on the environment and as a first-world resident eating less meat is totally doable. Cool. So, w [...]

Internal Tools are the Worst 🔗

I wrote a blog post for the company I work for on company culture and what it can be like to work on internal tools. Head over to Don't Panic Labs blo [...]

I am part of the problem. 🔗

I realized this a while ago, but it's not exactly something you advertise. It's ugly, and painfully real. I am part of the problem of racism in Americ [...]

All kinds of people help make the corporate world go 'round 🔗

I'm only three days in to my summer software development internship at Microsoft, but one thing has already become abundantly clear: Microsoft does ev [...]

Freemium for [Digital] Print Journalism 🔗

Several of the news outlets I read online are trying to stay profitable by enticing readers with a limited number of free articles per month, with a p [...]

Startup Weekend Nebraska: Serious about being safe & inclusive 🔗

It’s no secret that the tech industry, for whatever reason, isn’t particularly hospitable towards women or racial minorities. Some say it’s because yo [...]

Multiagent Systems - The most interesting field you've never heard of 🔗

As a computer science major, I have the exciting opportunity to occasionally take entire classes about topics that most people have never heard of. Th [...]

You Don't Have to be a Genius to Make the Web Better 🔗

I'm experimenting with the audience/style I want to aim for on this blog. This post is geared towards a non-technical audience - if you're interested [...]

Pourquoi l'attentat de Charlie Hebdo met en émoi la France toute entière 🔗

Click to see this post in English Le 7 janvier, le siège de Charlie Hebdo, un journal satirique français, a subi un attentat commis par trois personne [...]

Why the Charlie Hebdo Attack is So Devastaing 🔗

Cliquez ici pour une traduction de cet article en français. On January 7, the editorial office of a weekly French satire magazine, Charlie Hebdo, was [...]

Can remote work save small town America? 🔗

One advantage of a career in software engineering is the ability to work from anywhere in the world. Remote work isn't just for freelancers any more - [...]

Pretty Scroll Animations - How do they do that? 🔗

I've been looking at a lot of Node.js tutorials lately, and this one from Scotch.io really stood out. While the content was also quite helpful, the fi [...]

It's a Unix system, I know this! 🔗

A couple days ago I finally broke down a and bought a Mac. Why? I was struggling yet again to install a Web development framework on my windows machin [...]

Corporate Finance in a Half-Digital Classroom 🔗

There's a lot of hype about the potential for MOOCs (free, online college-level courses) to disrupt academia. Companies like Coursera, Udacity, and Ed [...]

Raikes Cohort Christmas 🔗

Last night was our annual Christmas party for my Raikes class (aka cohort). These are the people I've lived with all through college. We've taken abou [...]

Why try an hour of code? 🔗

This week is the Hour of Code, a big push by the nonprofit Code.org to get as many people as possible to set aside an hour to learn the basics of code [...]

Cassey Lottman