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    Category: tech

  1. Sphinx front matter and template variables

    10 September 2021

    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. One thing I really missed was the concept of front matter, which I'm not sure is even official or documented but seems to be reasonably widely supported (I promise to save the rant about markdown for another day). It took me a while to figure this out for Sphinx/rst but now I'm looking at it working, I had better write it down before I forget!

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  2. Hold Attention on the Virtual Stage

    08 August 2021

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

    I don't.

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  3. Define Navigation Structure in a Sphinx Project

    13 June 2021

    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 now have a setup that works pretty well, using Sphinx External TOC, so I thought I'd share my setup.

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  4. Best Things About Developer Advocacy

    26 April 2021

    There are some excellent articles around about what a Developer Advocate does, but have you ever wondered WHY we do what we do? I tried to articulate this when chatting with another developer lately, and I'm still thinking about it! So I thought I'd write it down to share a little more widely why I love this strange, misshapen career as much as I do.

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  5. Measuring Repo Community Health with GitHub's API

    14 April 2021

    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. If it's a code example you're looking for then like it or not, GitHub is considered a search engine by many developers.

    With that in mind, I wanted to look at GitHub's Community Health measure of the repositories I'm responsible for. You can view each repo's community page separately through the web interface (look under "Insights") but that's not especially scalable if you have a lot of projects to track.

    screeshot of the project's /community page, showing low completion

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  6. From Spreadsheet to Database with ddlgenerator

    22 March 2021

    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). Importing CSV into Postgres is fairly well-established, but you need a table structure to import into ... and I was looking at a CSV with 50 columns (for my post about exoplanets on the Aiven blog). Enter this neat utility: ddlgenerator.

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  7. Intro to RPi Pico with Mini Memory Game

    08 February 2021

    I 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 :)

    image1

    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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  8. What's New in OpenAPI 3.1

    14 December 2020

    With 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
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  9. Bystanders Guide to Repository Maintenance

    04 December 2020

    Today'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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  10. Making SDKs a Value-Added Experience

    16 November 2020

    I'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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  11. DevContainers, VSCode and GitHub Codespaces

    15 November 2020

    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.

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  12. Ubuntu Command for Mic Mute with Pulsemixer

    12 November 2020

    One 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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