Update

Curse of maintaining a blog

It turns out you have to update it.

Every time i open the repo that this static site is built from, i just see how many npm audit warning it has that I can’t resolve at the moment. This site is built with the metal smith static site generator and it is really nice to work with, but it seems like it isn’t being maintained any more. So I might start experimenting with something newer to have it stay ahead of the trend. Gatsby or Jekyll seem like options off the top of my head. Anyway.

COVID

COVID changed my whole year’s plan around (like most people) so it’s been a slower summer around here, aside from work. Stay-cationing and social-distancing has been our recipe for most of the summer and I don’t see that changing much. Good things are that we’ve been reading with the kids lots, biking lots, running more, eating healthier. So there are some perks there.

OSS / Exercism.io

It’s been awesome over the last few months to see how my contributions to the upcoming version of Exercism.io are coming along. I’ve been able to contribute to the Elixir, Ruby, and Python tracks. Also building a visualization to view the current state of each exercise and the learning path as it is created (Built with Typescript, React, D3).

Other initiatives and memoranda

• Slowly working through a couple fun GoLang things to learn how to consume REST-API endpoints (I’m using the pokemon API).
• Looking at Kotlin from a distance, seems really interesting. Java has come a long way with Java 14, but Kotlin seems really neat. Being able to build upon the JVM is such a cool thing to do.
• I created a new github readme for my profile, which is a really neat feature when you can use the GitHub Actions to generate it.
• Playing around with generating SVG progammatically from data to create lossless badges. See the neenjaw/neenjaw badge branch for my WIP