Forem: Mark Bussell Jr

Programming Bits from Recent Projects

Mark Bussell Jr — Mon, 25 Mar 2019 03:30:00 +0000

I've got the first live stream for CoffeeCraft coming up this Monday at 7pm EDT (-4 UTC? I think? I hate Daylight Saving). I did a test stream a while back, and downloaded some music to run in the background. I've got a plan and now I need to burn off some nervous energy. There's probably a whole other post in there but I spent too much time today finding stuff to do instead of writing the stuff that was on my mind. With a little more work I'll get the nervous slacking to actual writing ratio tipped in the other direction. 😃

Side note: before I get too far away from the impending live stream, since this is the beginning of the channel I don't really expect much in the way of attendance - so, if you'd like to hop in chat and ask some programming or career questions I'd be more than happy to answer. I'm no tech luminary like Scott Hanselman or Troy Hunt, but I've got 14 years of doing actual work managing systems for a mid-sized health system. I might have a nugget or two worth sharing.

So, if that's not this post, what is? This post is a sort of follow up from my Projects Update post. And a chance to burn off some nervous energy… starting something is, well, something.

AnonJr.com

The GitHub repo is available in all its beauty and horror. Like other projects I and every other human have worked on, present-me is embarrassed about some of the things past-me thought awfully clever. That's ok. I'm sure future-me will also be shaking his head about something that I'm currently sure is awesome.

First commit after things started settling down was to add the Dev.to link as a part of a general update on the sidebar. Funny thing is, not long after the commit @benhalpern posted this reminder:

Ben Halpern 🤗

@bendhalpern

Reminder to put the DEV badge on your personal site alongside Twitter and your other social links. You can either use the SVG or Font Awesome.

dev.to/p/badges

Happy coding ❤️

20:49 PM - 23 Feb 2019

43 261

Fun thing when doing projects like this - you find out what other libraries are out of date. 😕

After a bit of "did I do that right?" style double-checking source, output, references, and such it turned out I hadn't updated Font Awesome in a while. Also turns out they've got an easier way to use the library, but I'll get to that one next. For AnonJr.com I continued using the self-hosting method. For new projects I wouldn't recommend doing this unless you had a clearly articulatable reason why you needed to host those files yourself - e.g. "the project is running internally on the company LAN, and staff won't have access to external resources". That's what I had to do when working at Cape Fear Valley, as some staff had no access to resources external to the corporate network. As for here I wasn't up to ripping everything up and re-working that bit of styling for two icons. I'll save that for the move from Pretzel to Git.

A few days later I set to updating the project links on the sidebar, and realized I really needed to update the pages and add a couple others. It was rather nice to upgrade all the links to HTTPS and check off a goal that you'll see mentioned in quite a few previous posts. It was also nice to add a few logos and tighten up the copy, and a little sad to reflect on some of the neglected projects. If there's a key takeaway for this note, it's take some time to look over your past projects and work, and reflect. Marvel at the growth you've made, and groan at the things you see you still need to work on. If you haven't seen growth, or think there's no growth needed, then you might want to reflect on that.

There's a couple other commits in there, but the only one worth a mention is adding a proper Favicon and getting the images and meta information set up for Twitter/Facebook/etc. to render a proper card. It amazes and frustrates me that we have to add so many icon links because of the wide variety of devices. I could see maybe a "large" and a "low bandwidth" version, but because iPhone needs one size, and iPad needs another, and Windows will pin a site but only with a third size, and so on - I now have 8 or so different size icons floating around. Not to mention Twitter would rather one set of meta tags for a card, but Facebook uses another… I'd recommend a common standard, but we'd probably be looking at the usual XKCD comic.

CoffeeCraft.us

This is the other repo that has taken up most of my commits in the last few months. I'd like to present some interesting technical challenges, but mostly it was wrestling with content, layout, and design. I started with MMistakes "So Simple" theme, and started building from there.

I won't speak for anyone else on this one - for me one of the struggles on this project (and the others I'm working on) is I'm both designer and client. For some reason, despite the ability to make amazing things I can't seem to make amazing things for me. Look at the history. Look at all the parts I waffled on. I even have " Adding search, updated text ... and feeling lost" as a commit message.

Wrapping it up

Ok, so that wasn't as technical as it seemed when I first sat down to write… and as much as I love using Ghostewriter to compose posts, I find it immensely frustrating that the cursor blinks even when the program doesn't have focus - so I've started typing the next sentence in the address bar and done all sorts of funky other things as the thing that actually had focus suddenly started getting random letters and returns. Before I get too frustrated I'll see if I missed an update.

I stayed up far later than I'd originally intended, so I'll cut this one short. I've got to be up for work at 4am… and an impending live stream at 7pm EDT. I'll close with a reminder that since this is the beginning of the channel I don't really expect much in the way of attendance - so, if you'd like to hop in chat and ask some programming or career questions I'd be more than happy to answer. I'm on Twitch, Mixer, and YouTube - use the one you feel most comfortable with. Restream.io should be syncing the chat between all the channels, and I'll have their chat app up and running (it's supposed to show me all the chats as they go across).

Hope to see you there.

In Defence of Almost NaNoWriMo

Mark Bussell Jr — Tue, 06 Nov 2018 03:30:00 +0000

Not 1/6^th of the way in to Almost NaNoWriMo, and I'll admit to feeling a little defensive. I was originally thinking of this article this morning in terms of being a spot-check or reflection on the exercise so far, but if I'm being brutally honest, it was a couple of comments that have been on a slow burn in the back of my mind since last night:

Now please don't hear what I'm not saying: I'm not judging the intent of the commenter, just the approach and the potential results. On the latter part, I won't pretend to speak for anyone else - I lost a bit of the fire and enthusiasm gained from starting the endevour, finding some kindred spirits, and seeing the encouraging comments.

For the first commenter I certainly understand the sentiment.

Nobody has an enlightening though or experience every day. This would be a great source of spam. Please don't.

I've been around the internet for a while. I've got a twitter account. I'm fully aware of what daily, thoughtless posting can produce and wholeheartedly would not encourage more of the same.

I'd also argue that it's not impossible to live a life well examined. A life where every day holds one or more new bits of information, new insights on existing information, and/or new perspectives. Many of those could be shared in short or long form in a challenge like this. For that matter, I could easily see someone grabbing one of the daily writer's posts and using them as a launchpad for counterpoints, expansion, or something more tangential. For that matter, I've written more than a few comments over the years that really could have been the launching point for a blog post (if not a post in and of themselves… I've gotten long-winded from time to time).

Same for the second commenter, I get what they mean.

Write better articles, not more articles. 😃

Quality usually does trump quantity, and we'd all love to see our favorite places filled with better articles, not more articles. I've left some of my favorite sites because they cranked up the quantity for one reason or another, and in the process the quality level plummeted.

The part that would be easy to miss though is that you can't get to better articles without going through more articles; or at least more articles with a particular mindset and approach.

I closed out the first post in this series with an analogy, and now might be a good time to put a little context into that analogy.

Quite frankly I feel like an athlete who's been on a long recovery finally getting back into training. Now that I think about it, that's probably a more apt analogy than I'm ready to admit to.

Part of what makes that analogy apt is I've gone through some fitness roller-coasters - periods of varying length where I worked out regularly and was in great physical shape, and periods where I was … well, not. I've also helped others through similar periods. In college, I worked in the Aquatics department at the local YMCA where (among other jobs) I taught swim lessons and was the assistant coach for some elementary, junior, and senior high school swim teams (I was licensed as an ASCA Level 2 coach for the curious).

In the athletic space we recognize a few things:

The old saw "practice makes perfect" is missing a few words - "practice makes permanent; perfect practice makes perfect".
You don't get to a better 5k without doing more 5k's. (Longest swim I ever did. There's a story there.)

We also recognize this in the programming space, where we understand that growth requires working on projects, exercises, and using various training programs.

Which brings us back to the writing - you don't get to better articles without writing more articles; or at least more articles with a particular mindset and approach. We can see this in some of the more helpful comments.

It's going to take deliberate, focused steps to get the quality where it needs to be. For me, the first few have been a matter of showing up. It's hard to improve if you're not showing up. This is something that others doing the "November Daily" thing have pointed to.

This post and the next few are going to be posts that I've spent a little more time setting up and figuring out what I want to articulate. I'm also going to keep an eye on the reading ease and other statistics Ghostwriter provides. For the moment I'm not going to do much with them, just look at what I'm actually doing, so I'll know where I need to go from there. My target will be a 10^th grade reading level. It's a little higher than the usual recommendation, but is a step better than what I've managed with this post. (I'll put a screenshot at the end)

Having done Projects Projects Projects, I've got a good idea of what I really want to do something with (or at least what in the near future I want to focus on), and from there I can build a more structured schedule. Probably won't happen by the next post or two, but it should be in place before the end of the week. I've got to put the car in the shop which should leave me plenty of time to walk over to the coffee shop and think. 😃

Oh, and for those wondering, here's the statistics for this post.

Ghostwriter's Document Statistics

Special Feed for Dev.to

Mark Bussell Jr — Mon, 05 Nov 2018 03:30:00 +0000

Back in January 2017 I started following what looked like a small and promising community of programmers (and those in adjacent fields) over at Dev.to. At the time I had the site's whole feed pumping into my Feedly list, I'd commented on a few posts, and I was starting to think about either revitalizing this blog or picking some other platform for posting.

In the end I decided to try and revitalize this site, beginning with a bit on the tech behind a couple of projects.

One of the things I'd considered at the time, and mentioned in Projects Projects Projects, is setting up a custom RSS feed for just the articles I wanted to submit at Dev.To. I plan on publishing a wide variety of articles here, and I know not all of them will be right for the community there, so I want to make sure I'm filtering out the rest. I tried just running my regular RSS feed to my profile there, but it left a lot of cruft on my dashboard in the drafts, and even if I deleted the drafts they would just show up again on the next refresh.

Which brings us to this bit - I've got a second RSS feed now with just the articles that I want to send over there.

In the front matter I have a repost variable like so:

(side note: need to fix the highlighting/rendering of markdown code in posts...)

Originally I was going to set up a "to-dev.to" tag, and go that way, but that didn't seem useful for the people who were visiting my site.

And there's now a todev.to.xml that filters through the posts for just those that I want to republish.

At my next opportunity, I'm going to try and pump it through the Compress layout and see if that can get the size down without breaking anything. Though now that I think about it, I'd have to either adapt it to work with Pretzel or do the Pretzel-to-Jekyll conversion first.

So there's the short version. I'm sure there's a more efficient way to do this, but I probably won't worry too much about it until I do the conversion to Jekyll. I don't plan on adding any more features before then.

(Hot damn! that makes 4 for 4 on my "Almost NaNoWriMo"!)

Sabbaticals, Reflections, and Changes

Mark Bussell Jr — Sun, 04 Nov 2018 03:30:00 +0000

(This is the third of three back articles I'm republishing now that I've got an RSS feed going to my profile.)

I've had a few versions of this post floating around for longer than I care to think about. What follows is something closer to what I'd started around the same time I was working on the "13 Years in the Valley" retrospectives. For some reason I thought I'd more directly stated just how bad the burnout was, but after looking back I apparently only had the conversation as fully and expressedly in my head.

So let's start the reflection part of this endevour.

Burnout is one of those things that's been written about a lot lately, particularly in the tech industry. If you're not familiar, the Wikipedia page on Occupational Burnout is a good overview of the subject. Dev.to also has a couple articles worth reading. While I've not quite hit Happy to be Here territory, Furiously Happy certainly had some chapters that resonated.

If I'm being completely honest, the warning signs were there in 2014. I may even get to some of that in a resumed rendition of retrospectives. In January 2016 I reached a point where I was at least willing to admit something was deeply wrong and find out just where I was at. So I took the Maslach Burnout Inventory and found the following results looking back at me:

…ouch.

I tried to work within the system, I tried counseling, and in the end it just wasn't getting better. In an ideal world I would have taken more regular time off, and I would have advocated for a more balanced life for myself, and recognized when the work environment was no longer healthy.

That would have been good then, so what to do now?

I remember a long time ago reading about how we should all take sabbaticals. At the time I read Joel's post I didn't really take it to heart. I'd just finished college, and was still only months into my brand new job. The idea that I could be so tired and run down that an extended time away was needed … I just couldn't comprehend it.

Now I get it. Time to take a sabbatical. December 15, 2017 I stepped down from full-time work and moved to a per-diem teaching position. The end of 14 years full-time work at Cape Fear Valley. Teaching was a nice way to keep up professionally, and get myself out of the house from time to time. Unfortunately, it was also still too much. So in June I quit completely.

To get ready for the sabbatical, in September 2017 I started working part-time at the local Music and Arts. I added the earnings to my current savings and pumped up what I was terming my "sabbatical fund".

Knowing that given my energy levels were what they were, I kept the job to make sure I'd get out of the house and actually engage in the time honored tradition of verbal communication with actual humans.

Jabba, illustrating my energy levels.

This is where the changes part was supposed to go, but I've run out of steam. Definitely to be finished before the month is up.

Projects Projects Projects

Mark Bussell Jr — Sat, 03 Nov 2018 03:30:00 +0000

(This is the second of three back articles I'm republishing now that I've got an RSS feed running to my profile)

In yesterday's post I mentioned my goals for the coming month, and one was going through the various projects and giving a bit of a status report on them. Today's going to be a bit of a high-level overview, and the next few posts will dig a little deeper into each project.

In no particular order, here we go:

CoffeeCraft.us

This project is at the forefront of my mind - in no small part because it's one of the most recent to be started.

I've got a small survival Minecraft server going at home that my sister, her husband, and I have been playing on. Inspired by HermitCraft, we've fired up a fresh world for "Season 00" so we can get used to working together in a way that works better for making videos and live streaming - which we all plan on starting.

The domain registered, I've started in on building the website, and there's a few other bits in the works.

Bible By Example

This is a bible study podcast that I've been working on off-and-on for nearly a year. It's been long past time to get this in gear&helip; A decent enough first run of the website is together, and I'm not entirely sure what's left to do to be ready to launch. Getting a handle on this will definitely be a part of this month's agenda.

AnonJr.com

Yup, this site. I've got a few things planned - from migrating from Pretzel to Jekyl, to getting a dedicated feed for the articles I want to republish on Dev.to. I'd also like to tighten up some style/design bits while I'm at it.

The end goal is to make this the central hub for everything I'm doing, and having various tags for the individual projects or subjects for those that don't want everything.

Wayward Son Developers

This was a site I'd put together long ago when I'd started building sites for some friends and acquaintances, and I figured I'd rather do it under a "company" than under my own name. At the time was considering doing some contract site building.

If nothing else, I'd like to get it to the place where it serves two purposes: a showcase of what I can do for prospective employers, and a home for my programming related posts.

D20 Project

This is an older project that I'd started somewhere in 2014-ish and stalled out. Basically while playing a D&D campaign set in Eberron, I started wondering what it would look like if the traditional D&D setting had grown to a more modern-like world (as opposed to stalling in a Renaissance-esque world like Eberron). So I started working on a campaign setting with my sister and her husband to build just that.

The plan was to build on top of the OGL 3.5e material, and maybe make some tweaks to fit the world we were building and fix a few gripes we'd all had at our various settings. We had some basic character building done, and were starting in on the next steps when everything kinda stalled out. Long story for another day.

ASP-Ajaxed

Right before the burnout started kicking in hard and impacting my ability to function, I'd offered to take over ASP-Ajaxed - a framework for Classic ASP projects. While I'm not doing much Classic ASP work now, and I'm not sure I'm going to continue down that road, I'd like to get a better project site going and tidy up a few things. As it sits now it's still fairly solid for those poor souls who still need to work with Classic ASP.

Some other game streaming

I'd like to get at least one or two more game streams going, just because I'd like to diversify my podcasts. I worry that specializing in just Minecraft might leave me hanging if it ever drops in popularity. (though I don't see that happening for some time)

I've considered doing a World of Tanks stream on Saturdays, and calling it "The 48%" (inside joke for the stat obsessed), though I worry that the game is falling and might not be around in any big way in the near future - and more important than that, I just haven't been having as much fun with the game lately.

I've also considered doing Fallout or something like it just because I'm a bit of an antisocial gamer. 😃

Wrapping it up

I really feel like I've forgotten something, but at this hour that's not surprising. Tomorrow I'll pick one and do a bit of a deeper look at where it's at and what needs to happen. From there the goal is to start making actual progress and to focus the posts on status updates and/or do some thinking out loud type stuff.

Almost NaNoWriMo

Mark Bussell Jr — Fri, 02 Nov 2018 03:30:00 +0000

(A few days after I'd published this on my site, I found a kindred spirit for the exercise. This and the articles that seem to fit in the Dev.to space will be posted here. Expect a rush now that I got the RSS hooked up.)

It seems a little ridiculous to tag this "NaNoWriMo", but I'm not really sure what to call it. I've had a few posts in draft for longer than I care to mention, and while the desire has been there the energy has been lacking… most likely to be the subject of some upcoming posts.

For those who don't know, NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month. The idea being that you just start writing at the start of November, and work at a steady pace to have a completed work by the end of the month. Just writing, edit later. It's a really nice idea for helping those of us who just need a little push to get started.

I've gone through the motions of starting a novel a couple of times, and unfortunately never actually followed through. My intent had been to actually participate this year and produce one of the two novels that's been kicking around in the back of my mind for quite some time. Life being what it's been, I just wasn't ready to start and didn't want to feel behind this early on.

So - new objective. Blogging has been another writing activity that I've long intended to do, but never seem to actually make happen. For the month of November my goal is to get at least one post out a day. By the end of November I'll work out a more reasonable posting schedule. The hope is that once I get started, maintaining momentum will be a lot easier.

Look for some updates on old projects, some "talking out loud" type planning on upcoming projects, and a few other things.

Quite frankly I feel like an athlete who's been on a long recovery finally getting back into training. Now that I think about it, that's probably a more apt analogy than I'm ready to admit to.