Articles

I’m excited to announce that after 10 months of the certification process and years of discussion and planning Bekah and I have been licensed by the state of California to serve as foster parents. Since the earliest days of our marriage, we’ve discussed how we could care for children needing...

• personal
• foster care

2020 Trends After a year of international travel that triggered my re-entry into bird watching, 2020 was a much more restrained year. While life events and global lockdowns kept me in the US, I enjoyed refining my birding skills and focusing on more birding from home. As the stress of...

• travel
• birding
• BirdingYearInReview

On my blog I link to my RSS/Atom feed for the convenience of people who use a feed reader. However, since this is an XML document, clicking on the link could be confusing for web visitors. I had previously looked into adding styles to the XML document to make it...

• technology
• site changes

Carpenters have lots of tools to pick from. Drills, impact drivers, circular saws, and miter saws; each tool may be really good for a specific purpose and a great carpenter will know when to use each one. However, the best carpenter is not necessarily the one who uses the most...

• technology

Birding in 2019

• travel
• birding

Wireless charging has been around for a while now but it’s still not ubiquitous. Many people don’t know their phone supports the feature. While it’s not perfect, I think this is an under-utilized feature of modern cell phones. How does it work? Wireless phone chargers uses what is call “Inductive...

• technology
• hardware
• review

Your team realizes that testing is valuable. Your team creates tests for already completed features. The result was encouraging and your team even found a few bugs hiding in the application. Your team returns to feature development and attempts to add new tests. Features took more time to complete because...

• technology

Your software development team released an MVP application into production. The application only had a few features and the codebase is far from perfect, but there are big plans for the future! Your team presses on, adding features and your user base continues to grow. After a few months, cracks...

• technology

As a boy, I remember my grandmother telling stories of her and my grandfather’s trip to Italy. The two of them were invited by a sibling to go on the trip with most expenses paid. For some reason, the destination that I remember hearing about most vividly was Venice. I...

• travel
• Italy

Rome is such a massively historic city that I didn’t know what to expect when arriving in modern-day Rome. I’ve read so much about it in the context of ancient history but relatively little about the last couple hundred years. What we encountered was a mix of multiple centuries organically...

• travel
• Italy

After meeting up with my family, we drove to the town of Orvieto a little more than an hour outside of Rome. We stayed in Orvieto because my sister was studying there for a semester of her undergrad and had classes during the week. It may not be top of...

• travel
• Italy

The Amalfi Coast is a beautiful section of coastline on Italy’s western shore one providence south of Rome. Its steep hill produces great views pretty much anywhere you stay. We chose to stay in this region for the solo-anniversary portion of our trip based on several recommendations we had heard....

• travel
• Italy

A Change of Plans After our honeymoon in Cancun, Bekah and I started saving for our 5-year anniversary trip to Hawaii because we really enjoyed the chance to travel to beautiful places together. Five years and half a dozen countries later, we were still planning on taking that 5-year anniversary...

• travel
• Italy

This year I was able to attend JSConf US 2019 as a representative of SitePen. It was a very fun conference where people showed off the cool things they were building with JavaScript. There was a workshop day where I was able to program a microcontroller running Node. There were...

• technology

When my wife and I arrived in Peru, I didn’t know that I would eventually identify 75 different species in the country. At the time, I was just getting back into bird watching and had less than 100 species on my lifetime list. Peru is not known as an eco-tourism...

• travel
• birding