I started learning Rust this week. I have just a few impressions ankle deep into the new (to me) language.

I took sometime to dust off my Raspberry Pi and turned it into a humidistat for my crawlspace.

The Open-Closed Principle is an important concept to understand when writing software. In this article, I show how we can apply it to a very simple example.

It’s 2020, and I find myself 12 years into my career, as a Senior Software Engineer, trying to figure out what’s next. I found an article on Hacker News, by Swizec Teller, entitled “Why senior engineers get nothing done”. It articulated very well my experience moving up from and entry level engineer to an incredibly experienced senior engineer. The main idea is as you move up the experience ladders in software engineering, you spend an increasing amount of your time assisting others, collaborating, and coordinating.

If you remember my story on my first two contributions to open source, I had begun implementing some enhancements in Crawler-Commons that would support an enhancement in the StormCrawler project. My changes to Crawler-Commons were accepted, merged, and a new version of the library, 1.1, was published with my enhancements (amongst many things). Now that the library was published, the dependency on it, in StormCrawler, was updated to use the latest release and I am now able to finish the enhancement in StormCrawler.

I made my first two open source code contributions to other projects this month. I’ve put a bunch of my own creations into open source, but up until now, I’ve never contributed to other projects. It’s something that I’ve been striving to do since 2017. I’ve used open source libraries and frameworks to build software as a full-time software engineer and as part of my side projects. So I thought it was about time I give back. I’m 15 years into my software development career and have now made two contributions to other projects.

I’m Black in America. It’s been a lot of emotions in these past few weeks. They are the same emotions that I’ve really been going through since I’ve been on social media, reading posts, and watching videos of Black people (most recently, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd) tragically dying unjustly at the hands of law enforcement and racist invididuals with the perpetrators rarely experiencing proper consequences. It’s been a simmering anger, sadness, and anxiety for years. These emotions are also interwoven into other aspects of my life, like my personal experiences of being Black in America, in the workforce, and as a father.

Lighthouse is a useful tool that can evaluate the performance, accessibility, and the use of web development best practices on our websites and in our web apps. Combining it with Puppeteer enables you to really integrate and automate Lighthouse analysis.

This is part 2 of my journey with Gulp. I’ve created a script that uses Puppeteer and some HTML, to generate feature images for website posts.

Lets get started with Gulp. My goal is to write some automation for generating social media feature posts. Part 1 covers getting started with Gulp.