Mike Elliott: software engineering and consciousness studies. Projects and posts.
This Dhamma discourse on the Great Forty has been set rolling and cannot be stopped by any recluse or brahmin or god or Māra or Brahmā or anyone in the world. Mahācattārīsaka Sutta (MN 117.36), in Ñāṇamoli & Bodhi ( 2009 , p. 650) The Noble Eightfold Path is not an à la carte menu of distinct items that can be picked out individually to serve a goal or purpose as someone sees fit. It is an…
The Modern Mental Health Crisis The mental health crisis we are experiencing in the modernized Western world is primarily a socio-economic and political epidemic rather than simply a biological problem sweeping our societies ( Davies, 2021 ). The individualization of mental health diverts responsibility and attention away from the extractive and oppressive systems of neoliberal capitalism and…
What’s a now page? It’s a movement started and popularized by Derek Sivers - learn all about it at this link . In short, it’s a page that tells the world what’s going on with me at this point in my life. I’m using it as double duty for it’s own sake as well as for an “about” page for now, but that will come too eventually. Why now? I’ve been wanting to update my site for a while, and meaning to do…
So here it is.
Get that green Heh, 4,303 contributions? Yeah… I remember when first starting out in development, people would tell me that hiring managers and recruiters really cared about those little green contribution squares on Github. It shows how active you are, they said. The more squares you have the better, they told me. At first I believed them and genuinely tried to commit code near-daily to make sure…
Check out the 404 page in action Every site should have a custom 404 page Don’t you hate it when you hit a dead end on a website and you get the ugly and menacing default 404 page? Well yeah it’s usually not that big of a deal but it’s always nice to see something a little more creative. I wanted to make a 404 page that wasn’t boring but also not too gimmicky. There are a bunch of clever ideas for…
The problem Sometimes one finds themselves with a need to search and replace some text throughout many places in a project. This often happens during a refactor, or when you made a mistake with a CLI code generator (like rails scaffold ), and you accidentally misspell something. In most modern IDEs, “find and replace all” is pretty simple - highlight the text, Ctrl-Shift-F , enter the new text,…
The title is only half true. The other night I was thinking about how my experience being fully entrenched in React and the modern JavaScript ecosystem lately might have influenced how I’d write an app by hand in vanilla HTML, CSS, and JS with no libraries or anything. Within the same hour I was looking at Hacker News and some of it’s reader clients, noting how they all kind of sucked as far as UX…
Everyone hates slow websites. Everyone likes fast websites. I recently worked on a Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) project, which was created to mitigate bloated websites from being at the top of Google results on their mobile web index. I personally think AMP is a bad thing for us but that’s beside the point of this article. The point of this article is that you can get a better user…
This is a collection of notes on the 6 week course I designed for the University of Utah’s continuing education program in the summer of 2017. Go to CodingForRookies.com
Update June 2026 : The demo doesn’t work anymore due to Spotify changing their API, and I can’t be bothered to deal with it. Plus, you should stop using Spotify . I’ve always loved data visualization done well and admired interactive graphs and maps seen on The New York Times and elsewhere. D3.js is a powerful data visualization library in JavaScript written by the former editor of the New York…
“Jack of all trades, master of none – though oftentimes better than master of one.” - Someone The Full Stack Developer Those words are met with controversy in the industry. A lot of developers are quite annoyed with the term. They argue that it isn’t possible to be truly full stack, whatever their definition of “truly” might be. They believe that mastery of a specific skill set within a software…
An age old concept What do Alton Brown, Tim Ferris, Bob Vila, and Ryan Bates all have in common? You guessed it, they all made a small (or large) fortune off teaching the skills of their trade. They weren’t teachers initially, they were just pretty good at what they did, and thought teaching others what they knew could be beneficial to all parties. And it was. Teaching your skills at any level can…
Why I’m writing this This post is an attempt to explain how I got a position as a professional web developer with just over a year of experience programming and a degree in psychology. I’m writing in hopes that it will help anyone else along a similar path, or those who don’t know where to start. This is by no means a surefire plan to get anyone a job in a year or ever. But maybe someone aspiring…
Some may find themselves developing the front end of web applications in .NET and Visual Studio. If that’s you, I’m sorry (at least until the new cross platform open source versions come out). If you use Sass, as hopefully you do if you’re reading this, you will find yourself frustrated by the fact that Web Essentials for VS advertised as being capable of Sass compilation, but actually isn’t. The…
If you’re here for the code and want to skip most of the history and linguistics, click here . The State of Deseret This past weekend I went camping in the San Rafael Swell and became interested in my native state of Utah’s history and unique culture. Evidence of humans is found in Utah for as far back as 12,000 years ago. Various Native American tribes and cultures (Freemont, Puebloan, etc.)…
What is Front Matter? I didn’t know this until just now, but the name comes from book design , where the front matter is just all the stuff before the actual body of the book. This includes the table of contents, title pages, copyright info, etc. It’s essentially all the metadata of the book. Likewise, the YAML front matter common in static-site generators like Middleman is the metadata of the…
Blogging platforms vs. static site generators I had been looking around for a good way to get a portfolio site and blogging platform all in one that suited my tastes. For a short time I looked into platforms such as Ghost , Medium , and Svbtle . I really liked the design, simplicity, and content-focus of those, but as a developer, I wanted something I could customize and design myself with minimal…