Articles

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

Back in February, my wife Bekah and I packed up our things and left the United States for Puebla, Mexico. We left Colorado last year after I began working remotely and my wife began working on her online master’s degree full time. But with no job holding us to a...

• travel

Looking back, the past year has been filled with transition. My wife and I knew that she would be finishing her fellowship program. We knew that we would likely move to California at the end of the year. We didn’t know that half way through January, I would learn that...

• personal

The Ecma TC39 committee, which standardizes the JavaScript language (officially known as ECMAScript), has been discussing a decorators proposal for several years. Transpilers like TypeScript and Babel implemented the initial version of the decorators proposal, allowing developers and frameworks to start using the proposal before the feature became an official...

• technology
• TC39

If you like to automate your macOS configuration via bash scripts and have recently setup Mojave, you may be wondering how to enable dark mode, the configuration is called “AppleInterfaceStyle” and can be set using the following command. defaults write "Apple Global Domain" "AppleInterfaceStyle" "Dark" If you would like to...

• technology