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.

Time to checkout a new browser automation library for Nodejs with support for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Webkit browsers.

There are multiple ways to run Puppeteer apps in production. You can run it on your own set of servers or in a serverless environment like Google Cloud Functions of AWS Lambdas. Another option is Heroku. Let’s walk through how I setup a Slackbot to run on Heroku’s cloud.

A quick walkthrough on setting up a GitHub Action to build and deploy your Hugo generated, static HTML website.

In this Puppeteer Experiment (a new thing!), I combine a Puppeteer powered web crawler with some #MachineLearning to crawl a pet shelter’s website for all of the adorable dog pictures. I call it, the Puppyteer Crawler (alternate title: The Puppeteer Collar). 🐶

How to take all of your Markdown and generate good looking PDFs from it.