Technology ⁽⁷⁾

One this year's projects has been moving the (eight) websites I shepherd for various projects and community organizations from Wordpress to static HTML. I tried a bunch and settled on Hugo and Publii.  I used Hugo for several simple sites. It's good for some things but it's really only suitable for coders and the image handling is a massive headache.  Publii is extremely easy to use and works very well.  Using software that is both mature and completely free of…

I am currently migrating my personal website from Wordpress to Publii. Here are a few observations on Publii, from my experiences to date. I also wrote some more general thoughts about moving to static HTML. At a high level, this is the process I am using to move this website from Wordpress to Publii. Wordpress export Posts and page content using default WP Tools / Export Download media library using plugin Export Media Library(?) Also download a zip of the…

Every time I set up a new laptop for myself or an employee, I go through a brief "Windows or Linux?" tradeoff analysis. It's never an easy choice. All of our development work is platform-independent, using broadly available open-source tools like java, node, postgresql, QGIS. Everything that's deployed to a server is Linux (usually Ubunutu). On the other hand, the US business world runs almost exclusively on Microsoft. For compatibility sake, Windows is my daily driver so that I can…

There's a common pattern underpinning technology hype cycles, that is basically a bunch of large companies saying "New Shiny Thing will reduce our costs and improve customer experience!" People get very excited about some new and compelling technology then everybody scrambles to figure out how to align it with their business. At the moment, it's "AI" or more specifically a small subset of Artificial Intelligence called Large Language Models (LLMs) which do a very good job of sounding like people…

You're fresh out of college or code school, and you want to market your tech skills. How exactly do you get those first gigs? Here are some tips based on my experience in the field. Be honest about your capabilities. Some people will say "fake it till you make it" but that doesn't work for me and I'm no good at it anyway. I'd rather work with someone who knows their limitations than someone who thinks they know everything, and…

I decided to add a little spice to a web demo that happens to fall on Halloween. Thanks to Eric Grange over at DelphiTools, it was super easy. I updated his script slightly, to allow control over when the bats appear (and how many there are). You can include my js file directly, or download here, or clone from the github repo. To use it, follow these steps: First - Include the script in your header. This line uses my…

I've been involved with web-facing software development since 1998. I work primarily in the aviation industry with systems and software engineering, geospatial data, integration, prototyping, and analysis. My day-to-day work includes a variety of open source tools including NodeJS, Leaflet, jQuery, PostgreSQL, Geoserver. I spend a lot of time with languages such as java, javascript, and SQL. Problem spaces include integration of aviation new entrants (AAM, UAM, UAS), capacity & demand modeling, traffic flows, human factors, and communications. My full…