JavaScript software development tips, strategies for salary negotiation, and other helpful advice for navigating software as a career.
Fishers, a nearby city in Indiana, is considering a ban on new rental properties beyond 10% in each subdivision. According to one of my city’s council-members , residents in Carmel are also asking for a similar policy. Frankly I'm disturbed at this idea and I emailed them to say as much. If the goal of such a policy is to alleviate our housing affordability crisis, then it will be ineffective at…
One of my goals for 2024 was to "Get a small win with urbanist advocacy”. Throughout 2023 and 2024 I had been meeting with a small group of local bicycle and pedestrian advocates here in Carmel. One of our big ideas, inspired by a high school project by local Riley Choe, was building a new multi-use path in the center of Carmel, connecting to the existing (and amazing) Monon Trail. I’m happy to…
Taking inspiration from Ryan Boone , the following is a list of 2024 failures and accomplishments, and goals for 2025. 2024 Goals I only had two goals for last year , but they were both pretty big. Like most people who set New Years resolutions, I was really focused on them to start the year, but completely lost steam after a few months. I’m forgiving myself for that though, because I was dealing…
I tend to sporadically publish blog posts. I'll do a burst of content for a few months, then kind of sputter out for awhile (sometimes years). Because of this inconsistent schedule, it makes more sense to group my blog posts by year. That makes it more obvious that two consecutive blog posts might be separated by a long break. Since I want the newest content at the top, I want the years reverse…
The big event from last year was moving to Carmel, Indiana from Washington state. It was a huge cross-country move that sucked up a lot of my time and energy. But I’m happy we made the move. Since then I bought a cargo bike that I use daily, for rides to school, groceries, and other errands. I’m working with other local advocates to bring more urbanism to our suburban city. I’m not sure what 2024…
Why inline SVGs? On the homepage of this webite, I use SVG icons for the links to my other profiles: GitHub, LinkedIn, Flickr, and Twitter. Why not use GIFs, PNGs, or JPEGs for those? Because SVGs are light in size, easy to style with CSS, and can be included as code. If you inline SVGs as code within your HTML, then browsers don't need to download a separate asset, and you don't have to store…
Carmel, the city where I now live, has a housing affordability problem. This is not unique to Carmel, but how we got here is interesting. Carmel is a suburb of Indianapolis and like most suburbs, is mostly single family houses. However it has earned numerous awards and glowing press for it's walkable and bikeable core. Unlike other cities, this wasn't accomplished by enabling organic growth…
The following is an open letter to city council members for Carmel, Indiana. Dear Council Members Ayers, Worrel, Finkam, Rider, Hannon, and Nelson, On Friday August 18th a pregnant woman was struck by a vehicle at the Main Street and Monon Boulevard intersection . As a nearby resident, I use the crosswalk at that intersection, on foot and on bike, on a daily basis. I take my daughter to school (by…
Now that I'm publishing on a regular schedule, I need a way to create draft posts that can be merged into my main branch without showing up on my production website, as well as scheduling posts to be published at a future date. Thankfully, after a little searching, I discovered that the official docs have a quick tip on doing just that. Or at least there's example code for how to handle drafts and…
When you create a collection with Eleventy, you start with a tag. For my blog posts, I chose the tag "posts". The problem with this is that whenever I want to display all the tags for a post, it also includes "posts", which I don't like. This is a bit of code architecture that I didn’t want to expose to my readers. Probably I could do something globally to alter the tag list in my collection…