Posts

Say we’re down about the lack of sunshine in our city and we really want to know what the sunniest cities in the world are. The data we’re looking at is the Wikipedia article titled List of cities by sunshine duration. The general process we follow is 1.) extract the data, 2.) apply various transformations until it’s in the format we want it to be in, then 3.) load into whatever application we want for convenient viewing. As you can imagine, there are many ways to carry out this process, but we’re piping together command line utilities here. ...

It’s not commonly part of the story, but while at the three bears house, Goldilocks tried to make a website. First she logged on to Papa bear’s computer. Papa bear makes websites the old school way with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It was a simple way to build, but seemed to fall apart when a website needed a lot of interactivity and had to do lots of fetching from JSON APIs to dynamically show new content in response to user interactions. ...

This is a presentation I gave to a local meetup group about the “death” of single page apps. As I have worked on single page apps for 10 years, this topic is relevant to me and the work I will do in the future. The topic was inspired by a tweet from a prominent developer. In this presentation, I discussed the challenges of single page apps, and how the front end development culture has changed in the 10 years I’ve been working in this space. I also shared my thoughts on the future of web development, and how HTMX can give us many of the benefits of SPAs while being much simpler to build with. ...

This is a contest entry to Stats NZ for data visualisation of transport commuter data back in 2020. It uses Mapbox and React to display commuter travel habits. The data included where they generally travel for work, from where, and what mode of transport they use. The project was part of a larger government program of “mode shift” to encourage people to use alternative modes of transport. I won honorable mention for the parallel axis chart that revealed an important insight in the commuter data. The chart revealed where alternative modes of transport were being used the most. ...

This is a simple static website with recipes I’ve collected over some years. I find it useful to refer back to a favorite recipe without having to go through the trouble of bookmarks or finding websites again. I use a markdown editor to take down the essentials from the recipe website. You might notice a Rakefile with a build task. It copies the text I’ve written to this project, adding some metadata. ...