andyvanee

When Google announced that Reader was to be no more, I, like many other geeks took things into my own hands. I was, until recently, a daily user of Reader. There are only a handful of RSS feeds that I follow, but I like them for the very fact that they are not Rich content or an Immersive Experience. ...

…for a number of reasons. One reason, which is often addressed, is the challenge of effectively communicating your ideas. This is partly technical, but has more to do with how effectively you communicate in any manner. The benefits of learning to write effectively, whether it be blogging or public speaking or whatever, will transform other parts of your life as well. So they tell me. ...

In an effort to make the static site workflow a little less manual, I’ve created a little web-service to automate things a bit. Here’s how it works: Edit posts/pages/layouts etc with prose.io Github web-hook hits my service, triggering a build. The build stage looks like this: ...

This post caught my eye: Why you need a home lab to keep your job. Your boss won't pay for training, so your partner has to put up with servers at home What intrigued me, as a web developer, was not setting up servers with the latest and greatest hardware. It was the question of what exactly the ‘Home Lab’ looks like for a web developer. I have a number of things cooking in my home lab but I’m thinking I really should have more. These are non-paying projects, built for fun or necessity or just to develop my skills with tools I don’t use at work. Here’s a rundown of a couple of them: ...

I’ve been learning Haskell. It’s been a very interesting experience to learn to think in the Haskell way, but I have been unsure whether it will actually have any practical benefit in my day to day work. ...

I have a feeling that the current age could be described as the dawn of the open-source model. It’s not just software that can benefit from a workflow that is distributed, versioned and collaborative. And it’s not only “open” products that benefit from these tools. Here’s a great example of this at work in the latest Mars rover: ...

There seems to be certain mystique surrounding declarative programming and how it applies to the real world. There are not many technologies in the average web programmer toolkit that are truly declarative. ...

Librarians Helping Their Communities with Personal Digital Archiving ...

I’ve moved my blog over to Github Pages, and it’s working out pretty well so far. I’m using Jekyll to generate it, which works awesome for a simple blog like this. ...