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Intro to RPi Pico with Mini Memory Game
08 February 2021
Read moreI am the proud owner of a Raspberry Pi Pico which is a dinky microcontroller from the lovely people at Raspberry Pi. I also have the RGB Pico Keypad Base, because my husband was buying something else from Pimoroni (3D printer filament, more on that another day) and we love them and ... here we are :)
I've tried to write down and link to the stuff I found useful along the way with this project, in case it helps you too. Well, no, really so I can come back to it next time I'm using one of these!
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Lab Book Meets Bullet Journal
31 January 2021
Read moreI enjoy a productivity hack as much as the next person, and I'm often asked about my setup. My background is in engineering (I hold an MEng in Electronic Engineering from York) and recognise the legacy of the lab book in much of what I do. If you're new to the lab book concept, check out this excellent article on how to maintain one properly. My practice breaks a LOT of the lab book rules and is also heavily influenced by the Bullet Journal trend (if you have time to spare, the instagram #bulletjournal hashtag gives a prettier introduction), which is a way to combine the benefits of productivity and processing information by writing it. Today's post gives a quick tour of my process.
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Digital Developer Relations: Past and Future
23 December 2020
Read moreI 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. I see this as a very positive progression of the way we work as DevRel professionals, and I understand that might be controversial, but I'd like to back up my position so hear me out (and then let me know what you think!).
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What's New in OpenAPI 3.1
14 December 2020
Read moreWith OpenAPI 3.1 coming "soon", I gave a talk at APIDays Paris about what to expect. But I'm a great fan of the written word as reference so here's a written recap of what's in the next OpenAPI release.
Top features:- Compatible with JSON Schema 2020-12- Webhook support- Many other minor improvements -
Bystanders Guide to Repository Maintenance
04 December 2020
Read moreToday's post is about bystanders and open source. We sometimes have anxiety about doing things on "other people's" projects but the thing about open source is that those are not "their" projects, those are "our" projects, and they only exist because people other than their nominated gatekeepers chip in now and then.
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Making SDKs a Value-Added Experience
16 November 2020
Read moreI've been working with SDKs quite a bit this year, simple ones that wrap a bunch of API endpoints. The best bits of these SDKs isn't just the delightful developer experience of using the clunky endpoints with the elegant SDK wrapping them. I mean, it is, but I already wrote about consistent and Delightful SDKs for Nordic APIs; today I want to cover the some of the "extra" things that make a big difference in the APIs.
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DevContainers, VSCode and GitHub Codespaces
15 November 2020
Read moreI'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.
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Ubuntu Command for Mic Mute with Pulsemixer
12 November 2020
Read moreOne of the major problems I run into with video conferencing tools is how many of them are not at all accessible. I'm a keyboard-only user so if I need to hover a pointer in a particular area of the screen and then click an icon to mute ... then I can't do that. And if you mute me when I join because there are a lot of people here, then I can't participate at all. To work around this, I need a one-liner to mute (and unmute) my mic ... so here it is.
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Keyboard-only Web Browser
22 October 2020
Read moreI 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. The short answer is: Vimium and funnily enough, it's a productivity tool rather than an accessibility tool. Curious? Let me show you around!
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Combine Multiple Field Tags in Go
21 October 2020
Read moreI 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. Then one day I needed to load data from config using mapstructure and it took a few attempts with the search engine to find the syntax I needed, so it's here for next time I need it (or in case you need it too).
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Adding Tables of Contents to Markdown
18 October 2020
Read moreOnce any document gets over a certain length, a table of contents can be useful. I have a favourite markdown table-of-contents tool but it usually takes me a trip to the search engine to remember what it is! (tl;dr: github-markdown-toc )
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Package Webpages as Apps with Nativefier
15 September 2020
Read moreThere are a couple of specific web pages I use in separate windows from my other browser tabs, so I can always find them. However this quickly leads to a too-many-browser-windows problem. Instead, I have been turning them into basic standalone applications with a javascript tool: nativefier and I thought I'd share my recipes.
