Coder Found

Maze generator Update

I wrote a maze generator in a previous post but the output of the script was pretty horrible.  It would simply output a grid array of numbers defining it's path.  Not useful for humans. I'm going to try this again using the p5js library.

development

Layout Considerations

I've been struggling to develop some simple, reusable layout components that I can replace bootstrap with.  I generally don't have complex layouts in my projects and bootstrap has always felt like overkill. On top of that, I don't like having 10 miles of classes on my HTML elements. That's when

UX

Button Component Design

Buttons seem like a very simple thing to implement. They are action driven. Push a button to compose an email. Push a button to delete some spam. This simplicity is excellent but belies a problem.

quarantine

Cyrptography fun

Quarantine sucks. I was bored so I wrote a code generator for my kids so that I could give them secret codes around the house.

python

Maze Generator

Before you write a maze runner you have to write a maze generator. Using the recursive backtracking approach I'll create a simple text maze. Phase one of any maze implementation is defining a single cell in our maze.

maker-fest-2019

Weather App 2019

We're going to make a forecast webpage.  It will display weather information for a city of your choice.  Here are some links to resources that you'll need for completing our project. Remember, be creative! HTML!Because it's a website... Make a file called index.html and put this inside.<

python

Water Jug Problem in Python

The Problem:You have 2 water jugs of varying capacity A and B. You can fill a jug, empty a jug, or transfer the contents to the other.  When you transfer from A -> B all the content of A will be poured into B up to the capacity

python

Python 101

Here's a list of resources I'm using for a presentation I'll be giving soon. I am honoured to have the opportunity to teach this class at my local library (picnet.org) in the coming months. Resourcesrepl.itvscode (vscodium if you love open source)pyCharmpippythonpython 101 - slidesPresentation Toolsslides.comrevealjs (node

machine learning

Machine learning for fun

I recently completed the machine learning course at Udacity and now I'm energized and want to try it out. I've been trying to think up appropriately interesting projects. Here are a few of my ideas. I'll update you on future with what I end up doing. I play D&

Library

Library Maker Spaces

I've always been a bit of a tinkerer.  It started with lego, and evolved eventually into my love of software development.  Along the way I played with lego mindstorm, raspberry pi, 3d printing, CNC milling and a bunch of minor oddities in between. My tinkering was born of luck.  I

Accessibility

Accessibility testing and automation and linting. Oh my.

Thoughts and Practices on accessibility and automated testing.

Accessibility

Using links and buttons correctly

You want to make something clickable on your website. Should you use a button or a link?  Does it matter?  I think it does. There are 2 major use cases for click interactivity on a website.  It's either navigation or user interaction.  You click an element to go somewhere or

development

Common Localization Problem and how to fix it.

I've worked on a web application that operates in 11 languages as of writing this article which has exposed me to numerous problems that relate to localization.  I'm using the handlebars implementation of Formatjs in my examples. I've also used their React implementation. DRYing up our localizations.As developers, we

Accessibility

Using soft-hyphenation and truncation to deal with text-zoom.

For users with low vision, text-zoom is a very valuable tool.  Unlike the browsers default zoom, which scales all content on the page, text-zoom does exactly what the name suggests.  It only increases font size.  This means users aren't forced to scroll excessively to get around image content on your

productivity

Local Development

I'm in a constant battle to make my development environment as simple and fast as possible. To that end I've got a few recommendations and tools that I use to make life easy.

Hello World

This will be the first in a series of blog posts talking about code and the life of a coder.  I'm a regular guy. I've been building websites for just over a decade now and I've seen some things.  I've learnt from my mistakes. I've made new mistakes. I've been