Recent articles in Tech
Cross-browser Styling for Placeholders
October 17, 2019 •2 min readStyling input placeholder text seems like something that should be pretty simple and straightforward, but there are a couple of gotchas to be aware of. To style placeholder text for different browsers, you'll need to use different pseudo classes.
Improving the Accessibility of a Travel Budgeting React App
July 17, 2019 •6 min readToday I worked on improving the accessibility of the travel budget planning React app I have been building. There are two main pages in the app that I am using to demonstrate the issues and changes. This is not a comprehensive list of issues you may run into, but if any of these apply to your current or future project, I hope this post will be helpful.
Lessons from a Weekend of Building a React / Node App
July 16, 2019 •7 min readThis past weekend I spent hours building a travel budget planner app in React and Node and deploying to Heroku, and learned a lot in the process. These are some of the lessons I learned that may be helpful to my future selft or to others undertaking such an end-to-end task for the first time.
Retrospective: How I spent hours of debugging code for a one-word bug
April 23, 2019 •3 min readA career in this field is made up of many days like this -- where finding a bug is where the challenge lies, not the fix itself. The fix was simple but the real work was in finding it.
Companies Struggling with Employee Retention: Stop Blaming Job-Hoppers and Lack of Loyalty
March 6, 2019 •4 min readIt always seems to me that there is this antagonistic relationship between employers and employees: employers want to deliver less and get more out of their workers, and well, employees want more than they are getting, especially when they have other options. If there are so many advantages to employee retention, why do companies skimp on fixing the issues on their end instead of blaming the workforce?
Responsive, Scrollable, Non-Transparent Tables With Shadows Using CSS and Javascript
March 1, 2019 •7 min readThere are a lot of thoughts out there on how data tables should, or could, be handled to work responsively across mobile devices. I needed something simple that could be applied to most tables throughout the site and be done with it. No new development should have to be done after the initial development, making it easy for authors to make their tables responsive in the CMS.
Why I Knit: Similarities Between Knitting and Coding
January 11, 2019 •4 min readI knit for the joy of it: the meditative, repetitive counting, the beauty of a pattern emerging slowly, stitch after stitch, the excitement of casting on and the high of binding off, donning a new piece for the first time that I created over hours of work... But deeper than that, I believe I gravitated toward knitting above other crafts specifically because it is a lot like coding.
#100DaysOfCode: Days 1-7
November 8, 2018 •8 min readMy #100DaysOfCode Log - Days 1-7. Follow my ReactJS learning journey. I have been focused on learning React the past couple of months, taking a Udemy React course to learn the concepts and start writing code. Now that I have finished the course, I am committing to 100 Days of Code to get practice in React and build my React portfolio.
Committing to Process Goals to Accomplish More with Less Stress
CraftsTechTravelFitness & HealthPersonal Development
September 7, 2018 •6 min readThere are countless articles and books written about setting goals, timelines, and tasks. Something I have found to be effective for large goals that span weeks, months, or years, is to focus on setting "process goals", or goals that are more focused on getting something done, and moving forward, rather than on the end result.
Getting Started with Snapshot Testing Using Jest + Enzyme + GatsbyJS
September 3, 2018 •8 min readIn this post, I wanted to go through getting started with snapshot testing using Jest in a simple GatsbyJS blog. There is a lot more to learn than in these simple examples, but this should be helpful in getting your feet wet with a real-world example instead of the simplistic examples found in the docs.
Thoughts on Building My First Gatsby + Contentful + Netlify Blog
August 20, 2018 •6 min readFriday evening I decided to jump into GatsbyJS, using Contentful as a headless CMS. After spending more of my Friday night than I was planning to from excitement, here are my thoughts.
