Dev Snippets & Keyboard Shotcuts

this one's for me

Current Kids Book Hits At My House

I’m currently sitting at the highest library check-out count of my whole life: 22, some of which are a couple random nonfictions for myself I was hoping had many more pictures than they do (looking at you especially, “Unsuitable: A History of Lesbian Fashion”), and a couple poetry books

Looking Back on 2025

I can do hard things.

Oddly Specific Kids Book Reviews

In this post I will be sharing a few short reviews on children's books (board or picture books) that I've read with my kids lately. Both kids are under 4, so we're talking about books for the preschool, toddler, and infant audience specifically. My

French or English school for our kids? A case study in choosing community

This week my household attended an open house event for the French public elementary school we are considering enrolling our child in to start Junior Kindergarten next fall. Ottawa has four separate school boards covering the same geographic area, that are each managed entirely separately: French secular, English secular, French

Simple Needs, Hard to Satisfy

My current immigration status is: saw a really pretty cloudy, still bright sky over a cornfield while riding my bike here in Ottawa, and cried. For a while in the last year we've been in Canada, I kept having a dream that we had to return to Lincoln

Migrating a Rails app from Webpacker to jsbundling-rails with Webpack

Recently at work I undertook a project to migrate a client's decade-old Rails app from using Webpacker to compile & bundle frontend assets, to using jsbundling-rails with Webpack. The app is big and fairly complex, and the project ended up taking much longer than I had originally anticipated.

Really Big Bike Trailers

First posted: January 14, 2024 Updated 2025-09-02: Added Wike, Burley Hopper, Specialty Cargo Add-ons section I can haul a lot of stuff on my cargo bikes (one front bucket style, one midtail; both electric), but I'm always interested in ways to haul even more when necessary. In particular,

Toothpaste Should Not Burn, Actually

Recently at work, our weekly company Talko Tuesday meeting once again became Talko Toothsday when the conversation turned to teeth and dental care. I don't entirely know why this topic even comes up so much in this particular workplace, and over time I've made a show

What Makes These Cities Feel Like Themselves

I just read a friend's post about the unique aspects that makes certain cities feel like uniquely that city, and I wanted to write down a few things that come to mind for me for cities I'm familiar with. Like Comfect/The Quad Urbanist says in

One Year in Canada

We've now been living in Ottawa for a full year. Annual events that were happening last May when we came to visit before moving have happened again, and ones that happened shortly after we first arrived to live here are happening again, too. Summer flew by somehow; I&

Hosting your Static Site on Cloudflare: Tips & Tricks

Over the last year or so I've been moving many of my static site projects (including this site) to the free tier of Cloudflare hosting, from their former homes at Netlify. Why Cloudflare I've been pretty happy with Cloudflare, and it's what I often

consuming-less

Ways to Reduce Consumerism

Over the last few years I've been thinking more and more about how consumerism affects my life, and, finding the effects are mostly not great, thinking about what I can do to resist it. By consumerism, I mean all the societal and cultural forces (from government policy to

parenting

Experiences Treating Cradle Cap in my Newborn

Fair warning, what follows is somewhat gross. Hopefully it is at least somewhat entertaining though, and will give you a little snapshot of the everyday trials of parenting a baby, and if you have a flaky-head baby of your own you're responsible for, maybe it will help you.

ruby-on-rails

Frontend Assets in Ruby on Rails Through the Years

As a Ruby on Rails developer at a consulting agency who works with a wide variety of legacy apps, there have been many times where I need to change the JavaScript or CSS in use on the site and have to start by figuring out where those assets are currently

Migrating a a Rails Project from rails-ujs to Turbo

Recently I was helping update an app built in Ruby on Rails. It's an internal tool, so has been sitting for a while, running along happily on somewhat outdated tech. It was updated to Rails 7 already, and is already using jsbundling-rails for JavaScript, but a lot of

preparedness

My Preparedness Library

Recently I've seen people talking about various devices full of offline-accessible info that are marketed to people who are worrying about the end of the world. These things like the "Prepper Disk" have been around a long time, but usually you only hear about them in

parenting

Big Sister as Gender

At a play group we attended recently for queer families with little kids, we were asked to fill out a new form for participant tracking by the host organization. Beyond some basic demographic questions you've probably been asked before, one question asked: how does your child describe their

recommendations

Things I've Been Enjoying Lately

Enjoying: Games and Media I recently received my new copy of The Encyclopedia of Radical Helping, and it's so delightful. I wish I had the budget to gift it to all my most caring friends who are part of movement & activism spaces - the two I have

canada

Logistical Tips for Moving from the US to Canada

Say you've got the visa or work permit (no small feat), and you're ready to embark on a move from the US to Canada. The rest should be easy, right? HA HA HA no, you fool. Pretty much every step of the process of moving, not

canada

Healthcare in Canada for Newcomers

My family arrived in Canada as new permanent residents towards the end of this past summer, having moved from Nebraska in the US. We knew coming here that Ontario (and elsewhere in Canada, but I'm most familiar with Ontario & that's where we live now) is

community

HAM Radio for Community Preparedness

Over the last several years in the activist and community circles I've been in, people have talked occasionally about getting licensed as amateur or "HAM" radio operators so we would have an alternate means of connecting to one another in an emergency situation when cell or

eleventy

Tips for Running 11ty on Cloudflare Pages

This week I designed & built a new 11ty site to support an advocacy effort among primarily Canadian zine creators opting out of a major Canadian zine festival due to the founder's genocide denial. It's called Can't Zine. This is the first Eleventy site

recommendations

Fallen London: A web-based game you should try

This summer I started playing a web-based, fairly casual game called Fallen London. I think you should play it, too (not least because I need more friends to help me reduce my menaces when I've done too many dangerous or scandalous deeds) and here's why! You