Could I build a reliable, open home automation system?

OneNote isn’t my favorite tool, but it’s enough to build a powerful glossary.

Once established, native plants thrive without much attention, unlike lawn care that requires fertilizers, mowing, watering, pesticides and worse.

Google makes it hard, but you can export your Saved Places.

Google Maps is really an ad network. It should be a temporary stopping point for personal mapping information. It can change or go away at any time.

Change is hard. Don’t be Carmy.

ChatAIs are designed to be convincing and to respond in human-like prose. So what happens when they are wrong?

The story of the Catholic resistance to Nazism.

How did the Medicis lead Florence to be the center of innovation?

Three steps to debug Front Matter CMS dashboard article dashboard images.

The pending shutdown of Forestry.io had me looking for an alternative headless CMS. Front Matter runs locally, and was the perfect solution for my needs.

We have no choice but to reinvent ourselves.

Martin’s book is both a code of conduct for professional developers and a history of computing technology.

A great bug report can be as short as a tweet.

Master concepts, vocabulary, syntax and more, easily, given time.

Clarify complex Notion apps with diagrams featuring ‘just enough’ ER notation to get it done.

Even Yoda had a to-do list.

Using formulas and an override, you can easily record the date a task was completed.

Four ideas, learned through experience, on how to build better voice-first apps.

Modern websites help businesses and startups learn from the marketplace. They help companies make a sustained impact, through cycles of continuous innovation.

The web is migrating from page-based to component-based development. What are they?

The application architecture of legacy CMSes creates challenges.

If you hang around technology folks long enough, you’ll eventually hear about headless, which makes me think of chickens. In fact, it’s an architecture design pattern that helps businesses handle new problems.

What if there were a magic wand that could increase double your site conversions? There is: it’s called performance, and it’s typically ignored. Here’s how to change that.

More than 200 million customer records were stolen in the largest data breach in history. What’s worse, the hack could have been avoided.

Normally, we should always present information in easily consumable ways. But sometimes, you’ve got to stop the train. See when disruptive design helps users, and how.

Edge cases embody what a software system can and cannot do—and what it can’t do well and for whom. Improve your business by exploring them well.

When designing a voice-first experience, developers must create guard rails around all the many unexpected edge cases.

Shape Up is an excellent read for software teams who are looking to improve their development practices. It’s not capital-A-Agile, nor kanban, nor pair nor agile nor a mashup of methodologies: instead, it’s an organic practice developed at Basecamp over the years to address their specific needs as a software team dedicated to the development, maintenance, support, and growth of SAAS digital products. I particularly liked how the book addressed both “Truths” in software development, and the apparatus they developed to address the Truths.

A rollercoaster recounting of the impact of what is now called the Columbian Exchange: globalization V1.0

I’ve reached a frustrating plateau in my study of Italian recently and decided to embark on a series of deep dives on diction, translation, and grammar. Any study of diction will inevitably start with the International Phonetic Alphabet, the IPA — the primary system of phonetic notation. Fortunately, Italian phonology has a much smaller subset of the full sounds the IPA represents, but still represents a significant body of work to study, especially considering the notation.

With a simple configuration change, it’s easy to develop modules locally, without a lot of git pulls and pushes

I’ve used — and maybe misused — Ulysses as my primary writing app for years. I finally have an organizational system to support what I want it to do.

Develop master libraries of reusable, read-only resources shared across multiple projects through easy-to-use Hugo modules.

When I first encountered Hugo modules, I didn’t really understand their value. As I worked on more and more Hugo projects, I started to feel the pain of typical git submodules. I started to read, and re-read documentation both at Hugo and Go, trying to wrap my mind around modules. I also read lots of questions, problems, and approaches in the Hugo Discourse space. Thanks to a lot of experimentation and tests, and time, they became clear to me—and very, very elegant.

Scheduled Hugo builds—on an hourly or daily basis—can be handled within GitLab’s CI/CD pipeline for free, without an external third-party dependency.

Front Matter Templates make it straightforward to develop modular content models that govern both content structure and content behaviors. FMT sub-components enable an Atomic Design approach to modeling, ensuring consistency while reducing effort.

Everyone—business owners and product managers alike—should use automated site audit tools to validate and improve their websites and web applications.

The primary goal of the project kickoff is to establish a tone of trust for the working team—as well as get out of the way all the initial logistics of today’s collaborative work environment.