Marmanold.com

Build, Minify, and Upload Hugo to S3

Though I’m not a huge fan of JavaScript, I include a small bit of it in this site to track page views and to generate the tag cloud on my search page. Since my project had already been polluted with JavaScript, I decided a while back to go all in and use WebPack and Gulp to bundle my JavaScript code, build my Hugo site, minify everything, and then upload the whole thing to S3.

Automate Slack Status with IFTTT

Recently I came across the need to automatically update my status in Slack. I have class Monday and Tuesday afternoons/evenings which requires me to leave work a little early. As I’m often rushed, I don’t always remember to set my status. This has, at times, left my team waiting on a response to a message I won’t see for a few hours.

Luckily, using Slack’s legacy tokens and following the guidance of Made by Munsters I was able to use IFTTT to quickly automate the updating of my Slack status.

Hugo Site on S3 and CloudFront

For a very long time I’ve hosted this site at Nearly Free Speech. I’ve been happy at Nearly Free Speech, but with the launch of LectServe and other IoT and Serverless projects of mine on the AWS stack, it made logistical and financial sense to consolidate on Amazon.

Moving my Hugo site to Amazon was a fairly simple affair. First I setup a simple S3 bucket to drop my Hugo generated files to. Nothing special there at all. Next, I setup a CloudFront distribution to handle TLS and serve the files on S3. With a simple change in my domain’s DNS record everything worked perfectly. Perfectly except that all my URLs had to end in index.html to work…

Automated *Pretty* Tweets to DayOne

I’ve been using DayOne as my journal since 2014. Very early on, I realized that a good part of my daily journaling was actually done on Twitter. Over the years I’ve used IFTTT to import my tweets, but the fact that that system didn’t include images or quoted tweets removed a lot of important context. I wanted something nicer that showed the full Twitter card with graphics, etc. DayOne’s recent release of activity feeds seemed to be a good solution, but it, too, lost a lot of context and was very manual.

Antenna Television: My East Nashville Setup

Back in May my Comcast — DBA “Xfinity” because that totally makes me forget they’re Comcast — bill went up to $150. We were paying $110 which was already more than I thought I should pay for data-capped mid-range broadband and some television, but that extra $40 pushed me over the edge. Mentally, $150 is a lot closer to $200 than I felt comfortable with.

In East Nashville, AT&T offers uncapped gigabit fiber to the home for only $80. I was sold. The only outstanding issue was television. Though more than half of our family television watching happened on Netflix, the rest came from Comcast. I did a quick audit of our DVR and realized over 90% of what we watched was available on Hulu or broadcast TV. With the wife’s buy-in, we decided to cancel Comcast and switch to antenna to supplement what we couldn’t get on Hulu or Netflix.

Daddy Status Page

A common problem for my wife and daughter since I started working from home more and more was knowing when I was on a conference call. My office has a glass door and the hallway behind it leads upstairs and to the master bedroom, so my family — understandably — likes to know if they’ll be on camera or not when they walk past. It’s also handy for them to know when they can ask me a question verbally rather than having to send me a text message from the room next door.

Archiving my Website with Workflow & Hazel

I really enjoy automating things using Workflow, Hazel, shell scripts, or just about anything else.

Last night I got the idea that it would be cool to have a graphical archive of each post to my website as it appeared the day it was posted. Over time I’ll have a visual history of how my website has changed and, who knows, might make a little coffee table book or something.

The automation for this is fairly simple. I took an existing Workflow I had that used the JSONFeed of my site to grab the most recent post and modified it

Mermaid CLI via Whalebrew

As I noted in my quick review, I love Whalebrew. Whalebrew has allowed me to use several tools I was too afraid of before in my day-to-day workflow. The biggest of these tools is Mermaid.

I’ve been using Mermaid for years to make quick and simple Gantt charts and other diagrams. Up to now, however, my workflow has involved saving my Mermaid file in a text document and copying and pasting the text into the online Mermaid generator when I need a new image.

Review: Whalebrew

It seems that each and every day there is a cool command line tool to try out to help automate or generally improve some part of my day-to-day. The problem with many of these tools, however, is that they require all sorts of dependencies (Ruby, Python, Node.js) each of which have their own package managers and sub-dependencies. Homebrew solves this for many things, but they are pretty picky about what they allow in, so more often than not, I’m left trying to decide if I risk messing up my machine by installing a web of dependencies or skip giving the tool a try. Not any more.

Sublime Notes on iOS via Editorial

Switching to plain-text notes using the Sublime Note package was a huge boon to my daily productivity. Not only was Sublime Text more stable than the previous alternatives, it used less memory, was easier to search thanks to Alfred/Spotlight, and — when paired with Dropbox — synched quickly across all of my devices.

Sublime Notes Template Snippet

Several months ago I followed the lead of my friend Jon Boulineau and switched from Evernote/Simplenote/OneNote for my note taking needs, to Sublime Text using the Sublime Note package.

Sublime Text uses significantly less system resources than the alternatives and is incredibly stable at all times. Further, when synched via Dropbox, all of my super-small, plain-text note files are instantly available on all of my devices — mobile and otherwise.

The Sublime Notes package gives one syntax highlighting and about everything one might need, except for a default note template. Creating this in Sublime Text 3 is a very easy operation.

Alfred 3 Firefox URL Copy

I’ve been an Alfred user for many years, but until I moved to LifeWay, I’d never had the opportunity to use a Macintosh — and thus Alfred — as part of my daily work. For me, Alfred was always about quick launching applications, doing quick calculations, and checking the spelling and definition of words. Thanks to my daily use at LifeWay and the guidance of the Mac Power Users, I’ve upped my Alfred game significantly over the last several months. Today, I’m going to share one of the many Alfred workflows I’ve come to rely on.

Career Growth Through Upward Empathy

It’s been three and a half years since I closed Sublime Text and entered the world of Outlook and PowerPoint. In a lot of ways management has been what I thought it would be. There are poltics. There are constant temptations to compromise for my benefit over the developers on my teams. There are boring budgeting and strategy meetings. There are e-mails. So. Many. E-mails.

Overall, however, management has, for me, been exactly what I set out for it to be at the beginning. I willfully entered management to be the manager I always wanted — and often needed — when I was a developer. I work hard to cut back bureaucracy, politics, and process from my teams. I look for ways to empower developers to self-lead and self-manage their craft. I strive to be there for developers when needed and be completely invisibile to them when I’m not.

Cross Functional Teams

Development teams are a lot like a church congregation.

LectServe: An Online Lectionary

Back in late February of this year the Liturgy and Common Worship Task Force of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) released an initial version of a lectionary for the upcoming ACNA Book of Common Prayer (BCP). As an Anglican seminarian, I was, naturally, very intrigued by the new lectionary. Though my parish doesn’t — yet? — use the new lectionary, looking at the PDF document released by the Task Force made me immediately clear that anyone wanting to use the new lectionary would need something more. For the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL) there are several sites online and numerous applications to assist people with finding the readings for a given day. I knew people would want something similar for the ACNA lectionary.