LornaJane's Website

I'm working almost entirely with docs-as-code setups for prose at work these days and while I do use vim for most of what I do, VSCode is increasingly in the mix.

What happened to my blog?

I'm building a docs-as-code site at work at the moment (you can peek if you like https://developer.aiven.io) and working with ReStructuredText in this setup is new to me.

I've been doing a lot of database stuff lately, and not much PHP, so when I returned to make my first Laravel project for a while, I had to check the docs to remind myself how some of this works.

How do I ensure that I keep my attendees' attention when I'm presenting virtually?

As a newcomer to Sphinx, I found many things confusing, but the table of contents or "toc" configuration was the thing that almost made me change my mind and pick a different platform!

I think that Developer Relations is a fabulous career, and I'm often asked how I got started, or how someone else could get started.

There are some excellent articles around about what a Developer Advocate does, but have you ever wondered WHY we do what we do?

I'm on record saying that GitHub is your Landing Page and when I think about companies having open source profiles, I think about how many developers will have the first contact with them on GitHub.

I've been using some fun open data sets recently but I'm more familiar with databases than with traditional data science formats (this one is CSV).

I am the proud owner of a Raspberry Pi Pico which is a dinky microcontroller from the lovely people at Raspberry Pi.

I enjoy a productivity hack as much as the next person, and I'm often asked about my setup.

I work in Developer Relations, or "DevRel", and 2020 was a strange year with travel restrictions that meant that the entire industry did everything online, or digitally.

With OpenAPI 3.1 coming "soon", I gave a talk at APIDays Paris about what to expect.

Today's post is about bystanders and open source.

I've been working with SDKs quite a bit this year, simple ones that wrap a bunch of API endpoints.

I've seen quite a bit of chatter later about the GitHub Codespaces feature lately, and I have beta access to it so I thought I'd share my first impressions and make some notes of what I've tried that might be useful to others.

One of the major problems I run into with video conferencing tools is how many of them are not at all accessible.

I haven't used a pointing device in over a decade, and I get a lot of questions about how I navigate the web using only the keyboard.

I work a lot with JSON APIs in my Go projects, so almost every struct has some field tags on it to translate AccountID into account_id and that sort of thing.

Once any document gets over a certain length, a table of contents can be useful.

There are a couple of specific web pages I use in separate windows from my other browser tabs, so I can always find them.

Having created a couple of .desktop files lately to make launching apps easier, I thought I'd write myself a quick reminder of what I did and how it works.

With all the video calls, twitch streaming and product demo work I've been doing recently, I've been building up a library of tricks for using my android devices within the video content I produce from my laptop, so I thought I'd share.

I've been using a microchip on my neopixel shelf project but I kind of set it up, changed one thing, and didn't look at it again until this week.

Having API descriptions in your workflow is a game-changer, but how do you get from nothing to a functioning spec in the first place?

I'm using Postman more lately and showing off the Environments feature really often.

As a Developer Advocate for an API company, I spend a lot of time talking about APIs and webhooks and HTTP in general.

In these days of video calling in place of any other social contact, I've seen a lot of excellent video backgrounds.

I'm the proud owner of a Streamdeck XL but as an Ubuntu user, the tool support isn't great.

I'm writing a Go application that glues together a bunch of other things, so it has a whole bunch of basically unrelated config, dumped in a yaml file.

I have a couple of projects in Go where I need to work with a branch that isn't the released version of a library that my code depends on.

When I upgraded my computers to Ubuntu 20.04, I noticed a weird problem with OBS when using an old Wacom Bamboo tablet (because, have you ever tried to use OBS without a pointing device?).

I don't post as much handicraft on this blog as I used to (it's mostly on my instagram account with fewer words now), but I wanted to share my new handmade owl.

Edit: There's a newer post on this topic using Redocly CLI.

I did a fresh install of Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa on my laptop, and was surprised at what happened when I went to install python: $ sudo apt install python Reading package lists...

I love all things serverless, and Netlify Functions is a neat and convenient way to access AWS Lambda.

One thing I find very elegant about working with golang is that it is very open minded about where data is flowing in from or going out to.

I'm working on an API client for some Nexmo APIs and having tests to work through the various responses that the API can return and check that it does what I expect has been very handy so I thought I'd share my thoughts.

When I teach git I try to show loads of good practice about how to inspect what's staged before commit, etc etc.

I already wrote about using Prism as an API test platform but I didn't include an example with callbacks so this post is to fill that gap!

All my talk slides are PDF - I use rst2pdf to transform text-based ReStructuredText content into presentation slides.

I've been writing a bit about OpenAPI lately and I realised that I didn't share how I'm creating local, test versions of production APIs to work with while I develop new client code or test SDK features.

If you've noticed a lot of PDF content around here lately, that's because I work with PDF a lot!

I recently upgraded my smartwatch and the new model needs charging daily (whether that's really an upgrade is a separate discussion!)

When chatting about source control good practice the other day, I got a question about repeated git commit messages.

I'm an Ubuntu user and I enjoy most server-side scripting languages but I haven't done much Ruby and I never get the feeling that Ruby is pleased to see me when I do.

I am not a designer, nor will I ever be.

I've been working on a few OpenAPI descriptions of APIs lately, and really enjoying the benefits they bring.

Using queues for asynchronous processing is one of my favourite tricks for offloading hard work from web servers.