Writing Firefox Web Extensions at Milwaukee Hack and Tell

Just over two weeks ago, RokkinCat conducted their 14th Hack & Tell. Since I wasn't able to participate last October, I was eager to spend some time working on some project ideas I've been thinking about! This time, I didn't have a single strong idea - instead, I spent my time playing around writing extensions for Firefox using the new(ish) WebExtensions API.

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Posted on 2018-02-12

What Makes a Project "Successful"?

Last night, I was musing about personal projects I undertook in 2017, and I realized that of the two big ones that I made, I didn't know if I could judge either as a success.

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Posted on 2018-01-10

January Milwaukee Hack 'n' Tell

Once again, I found myself participating in a Milwaukee Hack 'n' Tell, organized by RokkinCat and conducted at Ward 4. I wrote some notes on how the day went in my dev journal, so I thought I'd share the experience here!

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Posted on 2017-01-31

git-pisect: A Parallel Version of git-bisect

One of my favorite tools in the git tool suite is git-bisect. For those of you unfamiliar with it, git-bisect is a sort of magical program that you can use to quickly find which commit introduced a problem into a repository. It does this by checking out commits in your repository's history, and you tell it whether the state of the commits for whatever you're testing is good or bad. It minimizes the number of times you need to do this by using a binary search algorithm. Futhermore, if you have an automated test suite, you can tell git-bisect to run the tests on your behalf (using git bisect run) and drive the whole process by itself. It has proven very useful to me over the years, both in open source and commercial work.

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Posted on 2016-11-14

Tiddler's Green

As I've mentioned before, I have a lot of ideas flying around at once. Over the years, I have tried many various systems for keeping my thoughts organized in a single place - I've tried various wikis, vimwiki, a simple Git repository full of text files, you name it. However, lately I have been using something new, and since it blows my mind on a constant basis, I thought I'd share it with you: it's called TiddlyWiki.

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Posted on 2016-11-11