File Paths in Node

How Path Resolution Can Be Confusing

 Posted on June 9, 2018  |  4 minutes  |  Chase Sawyer

This week I had an interesting discussion with another new developer who was getting started working on an Express-based project and was frustrated by their static files working one day, and seemingly without provocation, not working the next. I knew from experiencing the same feeling when dealing with static files both in Django and Express that a static file loading problem is difficult to resolve, and how often the problem is often a simple one that is nonetheless opaque to a new developer unfamiliar with file systems and path resolution. [Read More]
post  blog  express  javascript  node  filesystem  debugging 

Code Editors vs. Word Processors

Why I think code editors are so much better

 Posted on June 6, 2018  (Last modified on June 7, 2018)  |  2 minutes  |  Chase Sawyer

Word processors are great for creating documents with a lot of rich formatting, but all that stuff can be a huge distraction. Code editors on the other hand are amazingly good for writing - the writing where the only thing that actually matters is the content, and not the format. While it's probably been hashed out and written about a lot by other people, the one thing, the killer aspect of it for me, is the ability to scroll the page down, so that whenever you want, you can always return to that feeling of having a blank canvas to write upon. [Read More]
post  blog  nonesense 

New Free Code Camp Cert

Certified Fresh

 Posted on June 5, 2018  (Last modified on June 7, 2018)  |  3 minutes  |  Chase Sawyer

I got my back-end (now API and Microservice) cert today from Free Code Camp! https://www.freecodecamp.org/certification/shadowimmage/apis-and-microservices Hooray! It's been a year since I started working through the Free Code Camp curriculum, and it feels good to finally have finished the API work. I feel like I have a pretty solid grasp now on how to build and arrange an API, which I hope will help me in the future when I try to do more API work. [Read More]
post  blog  update  certificate 

Logo Design

Designing and implementing a new logo

 Posted on May 18, 2018  (Last modified on May 19, 2018)  |  3 minutes  |  Chase Sawyer

I spent my sick day today designing a new logo for the site using Inkscape. I knew that it had to be something that was unique, so I went online looking around for resources on designing and producing a logo. I know that SVGs are great, because you will never have scaling issues - if you need a larger version, you can simply export it at higher resolution. Or lower. Or whatever. [Read More]
post  hugo  update 

Hugo Gotchas

 Posted on May 10, 2018  (Last modified on January 20, 2020)  |  3 minutes  |  Chase Sawyer

Gotchas In order of the issue being found: Is Strange (Hugo) (Template Logic) Hugo templates use strange logic - for conditional statements, Hugo uses Polish or prefix notation for the operators. This meas that instead of writing if this and that, you have to write if and this that. For more complex arrangements of logical conditions, say for a situation in which you need to check three conditions, you have to write it as: if and (first) ( and (second) (third)) which, in a infix notation style, would have been written if first and second and third. [Read More]
post  fyi  note  help 

New Site Structure

 Posted on May 9, 2018  (Last modified on June 15, 2019)  |  2 minutes  |  Chase Sawyer

I took some time this week to look into all the code that I've been collecting and producing over the last year or more and began to assess where everything was being stored and hosted. Since I build a lot of demos and try out new technologies on a pretty consistent (if not sporadic) basis, this has led me to a state where I have several projects hosted on Heroku, on AWS, and offline. [Read More]
post  update 

New Static Site with Hugo

 Posted on May 9, 2018  |  2 minutes  |  Chase Sawyer

Built a new site, leaving Jekyll for Hugo, for my github.io page. Changes Moved all my old Jekyll files to a new subdirectory in order to maintain access to the old code and posts, and then transition all the content over to the main Hugo site as settings come together. One major advantage of Hugo is that the build process is super fast, so I've been looking at how to integrate CircleCI with Hugo builds. [Read More]
post  Hugo  update