Automate Slack Status with IFTTT
Recently I came across the need to automatically update my status in Slack. I have class Monday and Tuesday afternoons/evenings which requires me to leave work a little early. As I’m often rushed, I don’t always remember to set my status. This has, at times, left my team waiting on a response to a message I won’t see for a few hours. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Luckily, using Slack’s legacy tokens and following the guidance of Made by Munsters I was able to use IFTTT to quickly automate the updating of my Slack status. Read more...
Hugo Site on S3 and CloudFront
For a very long time I’ve hosted this site at Nearly Free Speech. I’ve been happy at Nearly Free Speech, but with the launch of LectServe and other IoT and Serverless projects of mine on the AWS stack, it made logistical and financial sense to consolidate on Amazon. Moving my Hugo site to Amazon was a fairly simple affair. First I setup a simple S3 bucket to drop my Hugo generated files to. Read more...
Automated *Pretty* Tweets to DayOne
I’ve been using DayOne as my journal since 2014. Very early on, I realized that a good part of my daily journaling was actually done on Twitter. Over the years I’ve used IFTTT to import my tweets, but the fact that that system didn’t include images or quoted tweets removed a lot of important context. I wanted something nicer that showed the full Twitter card with graphics, etc. DayOne’s recent release of activity feeds seemed to be a good solution, but it, too, lost a lot of context and was very manual. Read more...
Antenna Television: My East Nashville Setup
Back in May my Comcast — DBA “Xfinity” because that totally makes me forget they’re Comcast — bill went up to $150. We were paying $110 which was already more than I thought I should pay for data-capped mid-range broadband and some television, but that extra $40 pushed me over the edge. Mentally, $150 is a lot closer to $200 than I felt comfortable with. In East Nashville, AT&T offers uncapped gigabit fiber to the home for only $80. Read more...
Daddy Status Page
A common problem for my wife and daughter since I started working from home more and more was knowing when I was on a conference call. My office has a glass door and the hallway behind it leads upstairs and to the master bedroom, so my family — understandably — likes to know if they’ll be on camera or not when they walk past. It’s also handy for them to know when they can ask me a question verbally rather than having to send me a text message from the room next door. Read more...
Archiving my Website with Workflow & Hazel
I really enjoy automating things using Workflow, Hazel, shell scripts, or just about anything else. Last night I got the idea that it would be cool to have a graphical archive of each post to my website as it appeared the day it was posted. Over time I’ll have a visual history of how my website has changed and, who knows, might make a little coffee table book or something. Read more...
Mermaid CLI via Whalebrew
As I noted in my quick review, I love Whalebrew. Whalebrew has allowed me to use several tools I was too afraid of before in my day-to-day workflow. The biggest of these tools is Mermaid. I’ve been using Mermaid for years to make quick and simple Gantt charts and other diagrams. Up to now, however, my workflow has involved saving my Mermaid file in a text document and copying and pasting the text into the online Mermaid generator when I need a new image. Read more...
Review: Whalebrew
It seems that each and every day there is a cool command line tool to try out to help automate or generally improve some part of my day-to-day. The problem with many of these tools, however, is that they require all sorts of dependencies (Ruby, Python, Node.js) each of which have their own package managers and sub-dependencies. Homebrew solves this for many things, but they are pretty picky about what they allow in, so more often than not, I’m left trying to decide if I risk messing up my machine by installing a web of dependencies or skip giving the tool a try. Read more...
Sublime Notes on iOS via Editorial
Switching to plain-text notes using the Sublime Note package was a huge boon to my daily productivity. Not only was Sublime Text more stable than the previous alternatives, it used less memory, was easier to search thanks to Alfred/Spotlight, and — when paired with Dropbox — synched quickly across all of my devices. My only problem was my inability to easily edit notes on my iPad. Yes, I could take my MacBook Air with me from meeting to meeting, but thanks to my Microsoft Universal Keyboard I was now too spoiled by my small and light iPad mini + keyboard setup. Read more...
Sublime Notes Template Snippet
Several months ago I followed the lead of my friend Jon Boulineau and switched from Evernote/Simplenote/OneNote for my note taking needs, to Sublime Text using the Sublime Note package. Sublime Text uses significantly less system resources than the alternatives and is incredibly stable at all times. Further, when synched via Dropbox, all of my super-small, plain-text note files are instantly available on all of my devices — mobile and otherwise. Read more...
Alfred 3 Firefox URL Copy
I’ve been an Alfred user for many years, but until I moved to LifeWay, I’d never had the opportunity to use a Macintosh — and thus Alfred — as part of my daily work. For me, Alfred was always about quick launching applications, doing quick calculations, and checking the spelling and definition of words. Thanks to my daily use at LifeWay and the guidance of the Mac Power Users, I’ve upped my Alfred game significantly over the last several months. Read more...
Career Growth Through Upward Empathy
It’s been three and a half years since I closed Sublime Text and entered the world of Outlook and PowerPoint. In a lot of ways management has been what I thought it would be. There are poltics. There are constant temptations to compromise for my benefit over the developers on my teams. There are boring budgeting and strategy meetings. There are e-mails. So. Many. E-mails. Overall, however, management has, for me, been exactly what I set out for it to be at the beginning. Read more...
Cross Functional Teams
Development teams are a lot like a church congregation. A congregation is a community of people with special skills and jobs. You have pastors, preachers, choir directors, ushers, worship leaders, organists, etc. It takes everyone working together doing their special jobs to make a worship service happen. Development teams are also a community of people with special skills and jobs. You’ve got developers that specialize on certain parts of the stack, people who do different types of testing, people who have specialties in breaking down and managing the work of developing software, etc. Read more...
LectServe: An Online Lectionary
Back in late February of this year the Liturgy and Common Worship Task Force of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) released an initial version of a lectionary for the upcoming ACNA Book of Common Prayer (BCP). As an Anglican seminarian, I was, naturally, very intrigued by the new lectionary. Though my parish doesn’t — yet? — use the new lectionary, looking at the PDF document released by the Task Force made me immediately clear that anyone wanting to use the new lectionary would need something more. Read more...
My iOS Home Screen Review
Towards the end of episode 95 of Analog(ue) Casey and Myke give each other’s iOS home screens a review. In that spirit, I thought it would be fun to go through the icons on my home screen giving an explanation for each one. Home Screen iOS Stock Clock Honestly, I’m not entirely certain why this is still here. Prior to getting my beloved Pebble Time my phone was my alarm clock so this app was critical to my daily life. Read more...
