26 Jan 2016
Blacklight is a discovery layer intended for library catalog records, which is great. Hydra also uses Blacklight as its discovery layer. The foundation of Blacklight is built upon Rails and SOLR. Plus Bootstrap for style and Devise for user authentication. And the big bonus on top is easy MARC ingest to suit librarians. But what if you don’t have MARC records? After fussing around with getting SOLR to appreciate my beautiful, custom non-MARC data, I...
Read more
02 Jan 2016
I’m not trying to act like I don’t care about git commit logs and streaks, because I do. In a greedy, childish way, I do and I will continue to stare deep into the soft green blocks of a Github streak. I even sit briefly-moody knowing that a job change in this year removed so many little boxes from the front half of this graph. Blogging your resolutions and goals is a good way to...
Read more
28 Nov 2015
For this year’s hackday, I brought ffmprovisr to the table. This was an app I made over a year ago that hadn’t been given enough attention, primarily due to lack of time. My fumbling pitch went something like this: “I think it’d be fun to combine and continue to build up these two projects into something better because ffmpeg continues to live on as a mysterious but necessary component of a/v archival practice. This project...
Read more
10 Nov 2015
I’ve been kinda bad at blogging. I have a new job and some old jobs and lots of things that keep me from introspecting on code and archives. Fortunately I have great friends, and one of those friends is Kathryn Gronsbell, who reached out to me as an emerging developer (whether she thinks so or not) and wanted to write a guest blog post! As for me, a person who has very recently had to...
Read more
30 Jun 2015
Note: I wrote this up and added it to the !!Con github README but CC’ing it here for ~outreach~ purposes! !!Con had a live stenographer for live closed captioning of all talks, and follow-up transcripts of all talks. AMAZING! The only conference I’ve seen rivaling this level of inclusivity was Virginia Tech’s Gender, Bodies, and Technology conference which offered live signing for all sessions not segmented into tracks. Also amazing. 2014 !!Con’s talks are all...
Read more
30 May 2015
Hi! I haven’t updated this blog since February. What gives?! I don’t want you to think I’ve given up on my dear friend Marleigh. She applied to Ada Developers Academy and was accepted, so naturally I let them take the reigns in her tech education, and we now send each other Star Trek gifs using more direct channels. What else? I… continued involvement with MediaConch. got involved with XFR Collective. gave two talks at Personal...
Read more
03 Feb 2015
Okay! Last time we talked about the magic of rails generate and the structure that gets created when you make a new Rails project. I gave you a soft warning to pay close attention to the app/ folder with the foreboding “Just remember the MVC”… Now let’s talk about the MVC. I’m not the only person to use this analogy, but here it goes and I know you’ll be able to relate to it. The...
Read more
24 Jan 2015
Rails comes with a lot of magic. When I was learning Ruby and Ruby on Rails, I was taught Ruby first, moved up slowly, and then was shown that all the things I did the hard way could be done by typing “rails generate” (or even just “rails g”!). I think the way I learned was good, but listen — we don’t have time for that right now, so we are just going to throw...
Read more
18 Jan 2015
When you’re making your first app, it’s hard to think about scope because it’s hard to know what is and isn’t possible. Some things that seem easy are hard, and vice versa. Marleigh mentioned an idea to me and fortunately it happened to be exactly the right size for a first-app: complex enough to cover all the concepts you need to be a great junior developer but simple enough to be able to tackle as...
Read more
11 Jan 2015
Disclaimer: I love this part. I love setting up environments, I love debugging problems on the command line*, and I love working on server-side problems. Ever since I was a kid. Weird, right? Most people don’t feel that way (or lacked the opportunity). And it’s hella intimidating to start your coding journey by having to stare at a huge black screen* that you don’t understand. I also used DOS when I started using computers, so...
Read more
11 Jan 2015
Happy new year. I have a friend who wants to learn how to code. She has an app in mind that she wants to create. One of my goals for the new year is to write more technical blog posts. We also live pretty far apart — I live in New York and she lives in my home state of South Carolina (at least, for now). I think one of the best ways to help...
Read more
27 Dec 2014
0. Be a better developer. Definitely this. This was my goal in 2014 and it’ll continue to be my #1 goal in 2015. In 2013, I had the ambiguous resolution of “learn to code.” Or “learn to code more.” In 2014, with help, I got the fundamentals down, enough to be employed full-time as a developer. 2015 is where I can continue to improve my skills and put this knowledge to good use. Which brings...
Read more
19 Dec 2014
I’m going to break this blog post up into three Cs. Cash, Confidence, Comrades. Not in that order. I’m going to rank them in order of importance/significance. Confidence I’ve been thinking about confidence a lot over the past several months. When I look back on my time spent at Flatiron, I felt like the program overall was an immensely valuable experience in being able to learn so much in such a short period of time,...
Read more
08 Nov 2014
I had a great time at Fog Creek getting mentorship from the Trello team but haven’t had time to sit down and put it all into words. Fortunately, they say a picture is worth a thousand words. Because this is a vaguely code-focused blog, I must add that one command is worth a thousand seconds screwing around with Photoshop. With ImageMagick, I just ran convert -delay 20 -loop 0 image*.jpeg fellowship.gif in each folder of...
Read more
04 Nov 2014
A month ago, I was (lightly, …I think) called out for bailing on speaking about QCTools for the Association of Moving Image Archivists conference. Nevermind the bait-and-switch last-minute-surprise-you’re-speaking scenario I had landed myself in and that I really really did want to see my pals give a talk on BitTorrent and private tracker communities as archives, I did still feel a twinge of guilt for dropping out last minute. Sorry, guys. The BitTorrent panel was...
Read more
