I have spent much of my free time the last 12 days working on a project for the 10k Apart challenge. 10k Apart is a challenge to make a compelling progressively enhanced, accessible site with 10 KB or less of initial payload per page (more can be lazy-loaded). I decided to build an implementation of Conway’s Game of Life, which I had wanted to do since going to a Code Retreat a while back.
Continue reading post "10k Apart"development posts page 4
Figuring things out with this phonegap stuff. I will have to post some of what I’ve learned when I have more time. We’re just about to the point that we can submit the app and then make the rest of the changes we have left client side. I’ve never done the submission process. It looks a bit confusing with signing things with certificates / keys and using the clients’ developer accounts. Hopefully it won’t prove too difficult. I remember it taking a while for the iOS store at least and know we had some problems with rejections where we had to resubmit several times. Hopefully we don’t run into that now, especially since we’re on tight deadlines as is.
Struggling with PhoneGap:
- had trouble with geolocation on iOS
- wasn’t able to get cordova-icon or cordova-splash to work, or ‘config.xml’ icon configuration, so I had to manually put icons in place for now
- struggled getting a coworker’s build working
Tomorrow, I get to work on the app submission part for the first time. Sounds like it will be a challenge itself. Wishing that PWA‘s had better support.
exercism.io meetup
Went to an Akron Code Club meetup this evening. Started working through code exercises from exercism.io. Seems pretty cool. Uses a simple command line utility to load and submit solutions, then the site has a list of other peoples’ submissions where you can view and comment on them. I have tossed my progress on GitHub.
GiveCamp 2016 done
GiveCamp 2016 is over. Another successful year. The new Cleveland Garlic Festival site is live. I didn’t do much on the site the final day besides for fix some URLs and move some files to help with the launch. I did break away to help another team fix some issues with image sliders on the homepage. Not just any team, but one doing some updates to the Cleveland GiveCamp website. I don’t believe those changes are live yet though. During this, I got to work a little while with my cousin’s friend Dara for the first time.
As usual this year, I recognized a number of people from previous years. My project manager was a project manager from a couple years ago. I talked to several of the people I’ve worked with in the past and have seen multiple years. There is definitely a networking aspect to the event. Some of the people I see at meetups and other events.
Continue reading post "GiveCamp 2016 done"GiveCamp 2016 day 2
Day 2 of GiveCamp is complete. My team is in quite good shape. We shed one member early on. I too left to be re-purposed, but that didn’t last long. I briefly helped one team determine that, after my attempt to help them hack a plugin, it was time to jump ship to another. They didn’t need my further assistance, and the organizers couldn’t find another place for me, so I went back to my original team. Another of our members went home early. Even at a relaxed pace and searching for things to do, we were able to complete their nice-to-haves and improve some things from their quick-setup state. Tomorrow should be easy.
The event of the day more present on my mind at the moment is that my tent pole broke. When I first lay down in it, I saw the pole going at a weird angle. I got out and pulled the fly partly off to find the pole split and rather sharp. The tent was standing alright, but, not wanting the pole to poke through the fly, I attempted to fix it. I spent like an hour between working on and thinking of a field repair. In the end, nothing really got the broken pieces to stay together when the pole was arched. Now I lay in a slightly tilted, wonky tent, tired My tent is a Eureka Midori, and this is the second Eureka I’ve had the pole break on. Neither had I used very many times, maybe a handful each. Disappointing.
Givecamp 2016 day 1
First day of GiveCamp 2016. Working on the Cleveland Garlic Festival website. Seems like it’s going to be another relatively easy one, as I think the last few have been. We are rebuilding the site to run on WordPress and be responsive, plus other general improvements as we go. I’m on a team of four plus one organization representative. Things are going smoothly.
Stir Trek 2016 talk videos
I’m glad that Stir Trek has released videos of its 2016 talks, since I didn’t luck out in getting a ticket this year like I had last year. At least I will (hopefully) be much less tired watching them than when I drove down to Columbus early morning last year. Of course, the videos are good to have even for people who went: These multitrack conferences always seem to have multiple good talks at the same time, including at least one slot with multiple “must see” ones.
Self-signed certificate for testing
In playing with service workers, I set up a self-signed SSL certificate for my local development environment. I used instructions from debian.org. It was very simple, since I didn’t need the security involved with a real operating site. Creating the certs took a single command:
openssl req -new -x509 -days 365 -nodes -out /path/to/server/config/certs/sitename.pem -keyout /path/to/server/config/certs/sitename.key
You then just need to set things up in the server configuration (Apache in my case). mod_ssl must be installed and enabled, which looks something like:
I got PHP 7 working locally finally. It worked for CLI just fine when I first installed it soon after its initial release, but it wasn’t working with Apache. I’ve been upgrading every once in a while and finally, today, it worked. Now I just have to wait until Dreamhost supports it until I can start playing with it for my own site. At work, though, I’m still stuck back in PHP 5.3 land because of needing to support some old sites.