Latest version of my personal web site using the Eleventy site generator.
Every year, the City of Crystal, Minnesota, pays dues to participate in the Clean Water MN and Adopt-a-Drain programs. Recently, I was asked to justify these expenses to my manager, the City Engineer and Public Works Director. These programs are vital for our community outreach requirements under the MS4 (Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System) permit process, but it can be difficult to quantify…
The Digital Paradox I just finished deploying a new feature on my website: snow. Digital, gentle, simulated snowfall. This is a strange project, because few things make me feel more physically taxed than the cold reality of winter. I grew up in the Dominican Republic. I know the feeling of humid, embracing air, where my lungs never hurt. But I've lived in Minnesota for over ten years, and every…
I am humbled to share that my first article is now live on Piccalilli . I’ve been a long-time reader of Andy Bell's work, so contributing to the platform is a genuine milestone for me. In this article, I tackle a specific, frustrating issue I ran into while working with the View Transitions API. Read the full article If you are experimenting with view transitions and seeing unexpected flashes or…
I took time off work that morning to be home for a house inspection. Not the fun kind of time off where you do something you've been looking forward to, but the necessary kind where you're managing adult responsibilities that only happen during work hours. The inspection revealed problems I wasn't expecting. Nothing catastrophic, but enough new issues to shift my mental budget calculations—like…
I recently hit a wall optimizing an older Shopify theme. To fix our CLS score, I needed to inject width and height attributes into thousands of specific image tags. The catch? I had to target only the legacy placeholder images that hadn't been fixed yet, ignoring everything else. I needed a surgical solution. I needed VS Code Regex. But like most developers, I only really "know" Regex for about 48…
A few weeks ago, I got the kind of news that should've made me feel great but instead left me with a familiar knot in my stomach. The bids for our 2025 Sewer Rehabilitation Project had come in, and my estimates were high. Way high. I'd estimated $65 per linear foot for the sewer liner work. The winning contractor came in at $42.90. The second-place bid was $51.31. In the project management world,…
Picture this: I'm staring at a stubborn piece of code that won't work, my browser has twelve tabs open, and I'm genuinely stuck. What do I do? I put on my noise-canceling headphones and blast "Psychosocial" by Slipknot. Most productivity advice would tell you that's exactly wrong. Aggressive metal music while trying to solve complex problems? That sounds like a recipe for distraction, not focus.…
After my ADHD diagnosis, the Pomodoro Technique became essential for managing my focus. As someone who spends most of my day in Obsidian , I wanted a timer that lived seamlessly within my note-taking environment without cluttering my workspace. That's how PomoBar was born: a minimalist Pomodoro timer that sits quietly in Obsidian's status bar, ready when I need it but invisible when I don't.…
Acknowledging the Gap I haven't published a blog post in almost a year. Not because I stopped learning or stopped building – quite the opposite, actually. I've been deep in project mode, head down, solving problems and shipping code. Somewhere along the way, I forgot that building without writing is like learning without teaching. You miss half the value. The last year has been about creating…
After eight years away from the Dominican Republic, I returned in winter 2023. Walking through familiar streets in my hometown of Bonao, sitting in Santo Domingo's colonial plazas, and hearing the sounds I'd grown up with felt like rediscovering a country I thought I knew completely. That visit reminded me how much of my homeland's story remains untold to the outside world. These facts come from a…
Logseq is a powerful open-source knowledge management tool that emphasizes bidirectional linking and block-level editing. Sharing your graph publicly can be a great way to showcase your knowledge or collaborate with others. What You'll Build/Achieve You'll publish your Logseq graph as a live website accessible to anyone on the internet using GitHub Pages and automated workflows. Prerequisites…
The main goal of this post was to aid in selecting SSD, and NVMe drives during a Micro Center sale. But I'll try to give an overview of what to look for next time you find yourself in the same position. Storage Technologies MLC V-NAND is the best option. TLC is equivalent to V-NAND, and viceversa. QLC is cheap but a little less reliable. 3D NAND is your basic entry point to SSDs. 3D NAND The most…
Wednesday, July 12th, 2023, was supposed to feature high solar activity, allowing for an incredibly large area of the northern United States to witness the Auroras as long as the light pollution was low enough. Solar activity stayed at normal levels, so only the usual locations were able to see the lights, causing me to cancel my plans. Nevertheless, I wanted to share them here. Light Pollution…
My life took a sharp turn early last year. I am a very private person. You will not find me sharing my personal life on social media. That said, these last 18 months have changed me profoundly, and I feel like I need to write these feelings down. This post's threshold of success is helping one other person navigate difficult times. Burning out is something I had little experience with. A mental…
This post will guide you through unlocking the sidebar width in Firefox. It will let you resize it beyond what is possible by default. We will be setting both the maximum, and the minimum width. You will have a chance to customize these values once at the right step. Why Would Anyone Want to Do This? To enhance the use of the Firefox Side View extension. To compliment the use of one of my Firefox…
Last week, I came across Danny Guo’s Why I Blog post, and it inspired me to write this. The term monkey mind is a Buddhist term meaning: restless, unsettled, incontrollable. The original analogy comes from describing the human mind as being full of drunken monkeys, constantly screeching, fighting, distracting, and creating general mental chaos. I’ll go over what helps me keep the monkeys at bay. I…