Growing up in Denver, you had the choice between two amusement parks: Elitch’s or Lakeside, and they were literally in the same neighborhood. The official name was Elitch Gardens, even though we all just called it “Elitch’s,” including the park itself (“Not to See Elitch’s is Not to See Denver”). I ran across this awesome archival footage that captured the original park in all its glory during its…
Do you like Frappucino®s 1 from Starbucks? Do you not like how expensive they are? Here’s a recipe for a tasty blended coffee treat that costs less than 50¢ to make: 1 cup milk 5 tbsp sugar 1 tbsp instant coffee 1 cup ice Blend and enjoy! Frappuccino® is a registered trademark of Starbucks Corporation. This site is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Starbucks Corporation. ↩︎
We thought AI was going to make life easier, giving us time back by automating away the monotonous work. But just like the Industrial Revolution, factory automation, and robots didn’t lead to giving workers a life of ease and luxury, knowledge work automation through agentic and generative AI is no Caribbean vacation; it tends to leave us with dopamine “crashes” and mental fatigue. Both of those…
I have an awesome new editor for my website. It’s a native macOS SwiftUI app that I can boot up on my Mac and write and edit posts. I don’t know Swift. And I don’t know the SwiftUI API. To me this is the perfect candidate for blind vibe coding. It’s a totally offline, unsupported app that improves my quality of life and inspires me to write, because it feels… well, it just feels good . Collapsible…
On any given September afternoon in the late 1990s, you might find me racing home from school on my bicycle. I was overweight, and not a particularly strong cyclist. The way to my house from Sheridan Green Elementary (which, I learned recently, was demolished and will soon be replaced with a city park ) was mostly flat, until you got to the hill on 112th Place, which didn’t really look much at all…
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve received a gift and meant to say thank you, whether in person, over the phone, or with a note, and completely forgotten. By not making a priority of letting them know their gift was appreciated, I am being ungrateful. This is a sin that can easily slip into habit without notice. Look at the lepers who were healed by Jesus on His way past Samaria in Luke…
I want to write, more but I’m not sure what to write about. My blog is all over the place and lacks a singular focus, because my interests are varied and lack a singular focus. Some ideas I’ve had over the years: Christianity, both theology and the practical outworkings of that theology Programming Music or musical instruments and musicianship Apple products Tasting delicious food and trying new…
I reviewed You Need a Budget by Jesse Mecham on Amazon : While I am a huge fan of the YNAB product, and have been using it actively for several years, I half expected this book to be a thinly veiled advertisement to purchase his tool and convert to a paying customer. Mecham only mentions YNAB in passing as part of the real life examples, and puts a link to it in the appendix. This is not a book…
Adam is a friend of mine learning to program. Every once in a while, he’ll send me a bit of code to look over to learn how he might be able to do it better. The latest one was an exercise involving splitting an array based on the parity of the number, that is to say whether the number is even or odd. Can you check this over for me? Method that takes an array as argument, counts and displays the…
I have a wedding ring in the Pacific Ocean somewhere. No, it wasn’t some dramatic gesture . In fact, the story is not really that interesting. We were in Puerto Vallarta for my brother’s wedding a few years ago, and my wife and I decided to go for an evening swim. I left my wedding ring on because I didn’t think it would fall off. It fell off. I never found it. The little cove in the Pacific where…
Adam Murray, in an interview with The Gospel Coalition : As an image-bearer of God, how does your work reflect some aspect of God’s work? At the hackathon last year, a theology professor gave a talk where he described coding as an extension of Genesis 1–2. First, there was nothing; then, God spoke and made this awesome universe. Similarly, coding is turning ideas—essentially nothing—into reality…
This post was originally published on the Oven Bits Journal , under the titles, “Your Success is Our Success”, and “Being Agile Leads to Results”. It has been reproduced here for posterity. Every client will tell you that they want two things: be on time, and stay within their budget. At the heart of every project, every client also wants a third thing–results. We like to take it one step further…
John Saddington, on his blog : Friendly? Ah, that’s curious to me because I have not always been the nicest nor the friendliest person on the internet. The truth is that I once saw the internet as an opportunity to just shout my own opinion at people instead of seeing it as an opportunity to close the gap between myself and many other individuals. . . . After being treated poorly myself I decided…
Not sure how I missed the whole Telegram thing back in February when WhatsApp went down. While nothing compared to WhatsApp’s 600 million active users, Telegram’s 50 million active users each sending 20 messages a day with no money spent on advertising is nothing to shake a stick at. What intrigues me the most is that it is set up as a non-commercial organization promising to never show ads or…
There are over 650 Google Fonts available for free. But, pairing typefaces isn’t easy and many of those fonts don’t work for typical websites. Part of the 25x52 initiative, this collaborative, ongoing project offers inspiration for using Google’s font library. Passages from Æsop’s Fables set beautifully in web fonts available from Google fonts . There are some great choices available if you can…
Noah Lorang on Signal v. Noise : Any creative endeavor is highly non-linear, but the sharing of it almost always skips a lot of the actual work that goes into it. That’s ok; a clear progression makes for a good story that’s easy to tell. But don’t judge your reality against someone else’s compressed work. It’s ok if it takes you a day to make a cutting board like one that someone made in six…
John Piper : And so the “us” of “O come let us adore him” is the “us” of heaven and earth, singing together. According to Revelation 9:16, there are at least 200 million angels at God’s bidding. Surely at least some of them are assigned to give heed to us as we sing, and do what we say: “Sing choirs of angels, sing in exultation!” If we could only hear! Heaven and earth married in singing to…
Romans 8:5-6 (ESV) : For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. Many people are very careful about what they eat. We are careful to make sure we eat our fruits and…
GitHub pages is awesome. Like, really awesome. But I wanted to try something new that would give me a little more flexibility (e.g. the ability to use Jekyll plugins). So I started looking around for the best way to deploy my static site to S3. Boy, did I ever tumble down a rabbit hole. It seems like everyone’s got their own idea of how it should work , each with their custom one-off scripts that…
Yesterday my coworker Eric asked me to build out some dynamic error pages for the upcoming version of one of our apps. He suggested a certain pattern that we used in a previous application. Being the adventurous soul that I am, I wanted to make sure his way was the best way. After some deep soul google searching, I found out that Eric’s method was considered best practice. It’s described in some…
Dvorak . Not exactly a common name. There are a few famous folks with that name. Antonín Dvořák composed the New World Symphony during a visit to the United States in 1893 (but I can’t hum a single theme from it). There’s also Dusty Dvorak, a gold-medal-winning U.S. volleyball player in the 1984 Summer Olympics (I wasn’t born yet). Some people might think of Ann Dvorak, the American actress from…
Less.app : {Less} extends CSS with variables, nested rules, operators and more. If you’re still building websites without it, you’re an idiot. This app makes it dead simple to use {Less} by automatically compiling *.less files into standard CSS. Using it to precompile the styles for this very site. Update: NOPE.
I owe every accomplishment I have ever achieved to three things my mom instilled in me from a young age. She was relentless, frustrating at times, but looking back I know it was out of a deep love for me and my future well-being. Always do your best Most of the time my grades were good. But I never got in trouble for bad grades, unless they were a result of not trying. Every time I brought home a…
My wife and I made “Quick & Easy Gumbo” for an event at our church this evening. I know it’s not “real” gumbo, but let me tell ya, it’s pretty tasty. We modified the recipe in a couple ways, and learned a couple things in the process about how we should have adjusted for those changes. First, we used hot breakfast sausage. The flavor on this stuff is amazing, but I think it must have been a little…
Valentine’s day was a few days ago, and since I’m still in the mood, I am going to declare my love for the cloud. I love that at Balcom Agency , we host all of our websites in the cloud. What advantage does this have, both for us as developers and for our clients? Backups – Nothing eases the mind of a web developer more than knowing there are recent backups available in case of a disaster. Our…
Brett asked this question on the Heroku mailing list: I want to let users purchase custom domain names to access my app on Heroku. When the purchase transaction takes place, I’d like to add the custom domain to my app in real time. I thought of using the Heroku gem/command line tool from within the app, analogous to the command-line expression: heroku domains:add www.example.com . Is this…
I’ve been using Ruby full-time+ for the last few weeks, working on projects at work and then personal projects when I get home. There are a few things I’ve learned about Ruby that surprised me. Most of these were discovered when, going out on a limb, I tried something completely random to see if it worked–and it did! On one of my projects, when initializing the application, I needed to be able to…