When I first started a personal site years ago I maintained a blog post full of little snippets / tricks I picked up along my journey of learning to program. Today I had an idea for one to add to that list but that post had since died, as it was not rolled over in between several iterations of my site. Here are my thoughts on why write about snippets and a technical demo of how I brought the snippets back to life, added a bunch more, and the new snippets section of my site.

Project: Climbing Grade Conversion Tool Site: climbinggrades.xyz Repo: github Pics: desktop screenshot The App After a recent trip to Arco, Italy climbing with friends I realized I’m missing a familiarly with the different grades in use throughout Europe and the world. As climbing continues to take me to new places I wanted something I could reference so I built climbinggrades.xyz. Its a little web app to convert between the difficulty grades.

“Hacking health” in Zurich, this weekend I attended a health” in Zurich. I attended a hackathon focused on innovation in the health care sector. Getting outside Munich for reasons other than mountaineering or tourism, what a concept! The event opened me up to exploring the wonderful city if Zurich with friends, go to my first European hackathon, and learning a bit of Go lang. Zurich, similar to Munich, feels like a really big village.

Project: Scanning for Meaning Site: scanning-for-meaning.travisshears.xyz Repo: gitlab Pics: menus collapsed menus expanded full-screen Revive Excited to bring my little over a year old art project, Scanning for Meaning, back to life today. The project comes out of this cyberpunk dream of living with these pixel waterfalls. Putting this project on a large screen and just letting the colors wash over the room excites me. It’s also an experiments in the “web app” as an medium for artistic expression leveraging the frontend development I was doing at the time.

Educational twitter bot that tweets about WWII era military cooking. Twitter account: @ArmyCookBot1 twitter account on launch day Army cooking bot like most of my projects came out of a mixture of artistic vision and ich to explore a new technology. I find twitter bots a compelling form of communication. This haze around what content is human authored, machine, or a combination of the two is a fun playground.

Dotfiles, sharing your Unix environment preferences since the dawn of personal computing. This week I was going through my dotfiles repo and cleaning up when I learned a few things. Ended up completely restructuring my repo and rewriting my sync script. Repo: https://gitlab.com/BTBTravis/dotfiles/tree/master Sync Script: https://gitlab.com/BTBTravis/dotfiles/blob/master/write.sh 120k dotfile repos on github One of the problems I faced how to split between mac and linux. I started with a separate branch for mac but after a while that became a complete mess as the sync script diverged.

How to install npm packages directly from a gitlab, (or any other git host) The problem With so many Javascript/Purescript/Elms side projects going, all with diverse build/bundling setups, getting them somewhere presentable like my personal site is a challenge. I’ve iterated over several solutions over the past few years and today I’m excited to share a new one, node modules! This solution builds on what I learned in previous attempts and continues to streamline my personal site continuous integration and deployment.

Apparently pijul is the nerd’s nerd version control so natrally I had to try it out. I was attracted by the associative nature of the patches and the more pure implmentation of patch theory then the likes of git. Not wanting to install rust on my mac I came up with this docker workflow. I think the concept carries into trying many things out locally from dev tools to server side applications.