Paul's Weblog

Here’s a quick one live from Hack Night. 🧑‍💻 I met a cool human, Cullan, who made a website that I think is neat and want to share: make-bookmarklets.com.

I’ve written about restaurant week before: Scraping Minneapolis / St.

I recently had a final round “skip level” interview which was with high(er) level leadership folk; think directors, VPs, and similar.

It’s been a rough week in Minneapolis, so I’m sharing my quick win: as of yesterday morning I was ranked #1 in the monthly leaderboard for the E line via the Transit app.

Whew.

Here’s a throwback from my undergrad1 degree: depending on the context, K, M, G, T can be base 10 OR base 2.

Today was my 3rd year volunteering at DevFestMN which is a small annual tech conference put on by the local Google Developer Group.

Here’s a quick tip to improve your “drinking a hot to-go beverage” experience: Index the lid opening so it’s opposite the seam in the lid.

Re: https://patrickerichsen.com/chiseling Hi Pat!

Recently, at work, I had to figure out how to rollback a Homebrew package to a specific version.

Note: this content is adapted from a slide deck I created in 2019.

Heyo, I did it!

In response to RIP Unsplash Source, I went ahead and reimplemented source.unsplash.com via the Unsplash API using Val Town.

tl;dr Use the !

Re: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?

Well, thanks to Ben & Ben at Gears & Gasoline I’m now painfully and acutely aware that when someone says “mil” or “mils”, particularly in North America, they’re possibly referring to thousands of an inch and not millimeters. 😵🤓😣 Thanks.

Right, now that I actually have your attention.

Previously: “Approachable Open Source” Available for Preorder, You Deserve a Tech Bookclub I wrapped up Brian’s Approachable Open Source earlier this month and really enjoyed it.

Inspired by Ethan Marcotte’s You Deserve a Tech Union book title — which is slotted as the next bookclub read — I wanted to talk about the ad-hoc casual bookclub that I’ve been doing for the past few years with friends & coworkers (former & present).

Earlier this week I was listening to an episode of the Changelog & Friends podcast which had Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert from their podcast ShopTalk Show.

I’ve been writing Bash scripts for years and have slowly built up a boilerplate of sorts that I typically copy and paste into new scripts at the start.

Re: https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/11/26/terminal-rules/ (and https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/12/rules-that-terminal-programs-follow/) Informative post on implied “rules” that you can expect terminal programs to follow.

It’s been a while since I’ve dealt with browser vendor inconsistencies, but I hit one recently implementing a design mockup layout using display: flex and doing a final pass of testing in Chrome.

Today was my 2nd year volunteering at DevFestMN which is a small annual tech conference put on by the local Google Developer Group.

I’ve been struggling to write recently so I’m opting to fully embrace capitalism and just write about some stuff I bought over Black Friday / Cyber Monday.

A tool tip for all you fellow gear heads out there.

Green Day is an influential artist for me personally — particularly their American Idiot album.

While coworking from a coffee shop this week I was surprised to see a WiFi SSID being broadcasted on a 6GHz band.

I wish GitHub Gists had an additional privacy mode: private.

Recently I’ve been really digging into transactional email integrations for work.

Every time I go on a meaningfully long road trip (realistically more than an hour or two) I always catch myself staring at the GPS navigation (usually Waze) and anticipating the moment that time and distance intersect.

I was able to attend InsightFest 2024 in Kansas City, KS at Greentec’s headquarters.

Re: https://world.hey.com/jason/version-1-is-for-you-658422f3 I recently read Jason Fried’s Version 1 is for you and liked the core message of being selfish with v1s and building them for you first and the customer will come later.

It rained and turned to snow today here in Minneapolis, so instead of any 🎃👻 plans I’m treating y’all to a quick Git tip courtesy of the fine folks in my local tech-y Slack.

I attended an online workshop for Google’s Technical Writing One and it was a worthwhile use of time.

At a personal level, I’m pretty into domains.

Welp, missed my first week.

I wrote about escaping in-app browsers several months ago and have some updates to deliver on, courtesy once again of Shalanah.

I just found out about Robb Knight’s slashpages.net when I was mentioned in a PR to add slash pricing to the site.

W40 reminds me of WD-40.

I think about it often: my first tech job and the email that helped me get it.

While reading “Why I still blog after 15 years” I came across the section mentioning writing blog content in Djot instead of Markdown and I was instantly intrigued.

Technically, last week is when fall was Official™ but I’m really starting to notice it now.

This week at JavaScriptMN Shalanah Dawson brought up the Interop Project which is focused on improving interoperability within web browsers.

I was recently looking over a code review in the wild and was particularly fascinated when code resembling the following was proposed: // Inside of a parent `async` function (async () => { await myLibrary.someCleanUpFunction(); await myOtherLibrary.a…

tl;dr if: github.ref == 'refs/heads/master' I wanted to decouple the build and deploy steps in one of my personal projects for the sake of being able to have confidence when doing code changes but limit actual deploys to commits to the main default branch…

I think I’ve heard somewhere that it takes 3 weeks to build a habit.

First week of this felt successful, so we’re gonna keep on keepin’ on.

tl;dr arch -x86_64 /usr/bin/env bash.

This is my first attempt at doing weeknotes.