Want to use Python on AWS Lambda? Lambda currently only supports JavaScript via Node, but that shouldn’t stop you from trying.

A year and a half ago, I spent a week making an HTML5 game called Dave Likes Pizza, despite knowing next to nothing about web development. Not surprisingly, the final product was an abomination of web practices. My coup de grâce was a file of build instructions containing such gems as “use a JavaScript minifier on the contents of the src/ directory” and “copy the following file structure to the remote host.” Even now these lines make me shudder.

In a previous post I waxed poetic about the potential of AWS Lambda. Now it’s time to actually use it.

A little under a week ago, I broke the chain.

To quote Joe MacMillan from Halt and Catch Fire, “The computer’s not The Thing. It’s the thing that gets us to The Thing.”

I sense another Thing approaching.

I can’t speak for every college in the world when I say that a computer science curriculum, and by extension academia in general, leaves one sorely unprepared for the workplace.

Every once in a while I tinker with my website to “improve” it. In the last such attempt at improvement I decided to tackle decent favicon support. Up until then I had been using a base64-encoded 16x16 transparent image, since it saved a request and worked fine for the most part, but UX was severely lacking in things like mobile bookmarks and home screen tiles.

For a while now users of GitHub have been able to include emoji pretty much anywhere. The problem? There are nearly 1000 to choose from, so which ones are actually useful for commits?

SVG images are pretty awesome. However, just like anything else on the web they should be optimized for size and displayability, and that’s when things get decidedly less awesome.

But fear not! After reading this post, you’ll be an SVG-optimizing wizard!

I made this thing called strap. It’s pretty kewl. This is a post about why it was made, how it was made, and what you can do with it.

While making this blog, one of the things I had to do was figure out a way to represent post timestamps. These are used not only for sorting and filtering posts by date, but to display the date a post was written in a pretty, human-readable format.

Note: This post was adapted from an assignment I had to do for a Systems Design course at college. We were tasked with writing about what we thought were the world’s worst and best designs. Here are my picks.

The blog you’re reading right now was configured 100% entirely by yours truly. I say configured rather than some other verb (like programmed or built) because a ridiculous amount of the work involved configuration — of Node packages, of Bower, of Gulp, of JavaScript requirements, of Less…the list goes on and on.

I started programming always thinking I’d eventually have one of those programming jobs. You know, one where you’re stuck in a little cube on some floor in some building with a big shiny metal sign outside that also occasionally makes the evening news.

Big dreams for a twelve-year-old.

It’s strange how often I find myself in situations where I have to do stupid things that push the boundaries of whatever languages I am working with. Recently I’ve been doing a lot of Python development, so naturally I’ve also been getting myself into a lot of import trouble.

I’m finally making the move from my old blog hosted on WordPress to this snazzy new Octopress. A few of the reasons why:

• Hosted on GitHub and backed by Git (yay!)
• Markdown for everything
• Shifting focus from game development to more general software development

Hopefully this is the start of something good.