Another Rodeo

Building DSCovery
How I built DSCovery, the civic tech jobs aggregator, and lessons learned.
Tagged: Web Things.
Last rodeo: 18 November 2024
Backpacks
How are you carrying your load?
Tagged: Writing.
Last rodeo: 15 November 2024
Skipped teeth and blockchains
Down a different blockchain rabbit hole.
Tagged: Writing.
Last rodeo: 24 October 2024
Engineering velocity: Part 2
Your team seems slower... Here's what to do about it.
Tagged: Writing.
Last rodeo: 22 October 2024
Engineering velocity
Why is my engineering team so much slower than they used to be?
Tagged: Writing.
Last rodeo: 17 October 2024
Road King
Bringing a 1948 cruiser bicycle into the 21st century.
Tagged: Bikes.
Last rodeo: 16 October 2024
Another one?
Another bedraggled classic cruiser finds its way to my house.
Tagged: Bikes.
Last rodeo: 16 October 2024
Tasks
Herculean tasks, Sisyphean tasks, what else have ya got?
Tagged: Writing.
Last rodeo: 4 September 2024
Trek 2100
What? A carbon fiber bike? In this house? Well, sort of...
Tagged: Bikes.
Last rodeo: 18 July 2024
DSCovery
Building an aggregator for jobs in civic tech.
Tagged: Web Things.
Last rodeo: 1 July 2024
We’ve got to make the damn websites work
Is it the most transformative thing we can do on the web in 2024?
Tagged: Writing.
Last rodeo: 16 April 2024
On values
What we care about costs us.
Tagged: Writing.
Last rodeo: 8 April 2024
About this site
We're doing it live! Whatever this site becomes, we're gonna build it out in the open so everybody can see all the half-baked ideas and dead ends.
Tagged: Web Things.
Last rodeo: 7 April 2024
The handcycle
An interesting journey into making bicycling more accessible.
Tagged: Bikes.
Last rodeo: 28 March 2024
11ty Linkrolls
How to build an old-fashioned linkroll for the 11ty static site generator.
Tagged: Web Things.
Last rodeo: 13 March 2024
AI is boring and stupid and maybe that's OK
Sometimes boring and stupid is still really useful.
Tagged: Writing.
Last rodeo: 11 March 2024
So you don't want to be a manager
Straight talk to a senior engineer wanting to stay on an IC track.
Tagged: Writing.
Last rodeo: 7 March 2024
Know your (documentation) audience
Why nobody likes your docs and your Single Source of Truth isn't working
Tagged: Writing.
Last rodeo: 1 March 2024
Quicksand meetings
Managers: Avoid these sinking meetings so your teams don't feel stuck.
Tagged: Writing.
Last rodeo: 19 February 2024
The Five Conditions for (Organizational) Improvement
Understanding why organizations get stuck and won't change
Tagged: Writing.
Last rodeo: 19 February 2024
Deploying
A running list of the questions I have to remember to ask myself when deploying a new app to a new environment.
Tagged: Web Things.
Last rodeo: 13 February 2024
Markitup (v2)
Bringing an old favorite jQuery library into the modern era. And some musings on ChatGPT.
Tagged: Web Things.
Last rodeo: 8 February 2024
Not funny, Dad
The end result of a fascination with obscure government data sources and dad jokes.
Tagged: Web Things.
Last rodeo: 27 January 2024
Pear
Comparing text from two documents easily, with no sign-up or data sharing.
Tagged: Web Things.
Last rodeo: 10 January 2024
The giant list of questions to ask employers
Do you get sytmied when you're asked if you have any questions in an inteview? Have we got a list for you.
Tagged: Web Things.
Last rodeo: 7 January 2024
The Luxus folding bike restoration
For some inexplicable reason, I wanted a vintage folding bike.
Tagged: Bikes.
Last rodeo: 16 September 2023
Maturity Model Generator
Need a maturity model? Just enjoy a silly joke? Either way, we've got you covered.
Tagged: Web Things.
Last rodeo: 8 August 2023
The electric Schwinn
My e-bike conversion on a 50-year-old Schwinn.
Tagged: Bikes.
Last rodeo: 2 March 2023
Making wine cork handlebar plugs
Want something different for your handlebars? How about a wine cork bar end? They're easy to make.
Tagged: .
Last rodeo: 22 February 2023
Trek 520
A great bike, with a few caveats
Tagged: Bikes.
Last rodeo: 18 July 2022
Peugeot mixte restoration
Parlez-vous français?
Tagged: Bikes.
Last rodeo: 23 July 2021
Making a smart vintage camper
My attempt to bring modern tech to a very old camper.
Tagged: The Camper.
Last rodeo: 7 May 2021
The bedraggled Raleigh
A bound-for-the-dumpster Raleigh Sports gets a new lease on life.
Tagged: Bikes.
Last rodeo: 23 August 2020
1971 Eco fiberglass camper restoration
Trying to put an egg (camper) back together again.
Tagged: The Camper.
Last rodeo: 7 January 2020

Currently enjoying

Enhancing the customer-centricity of GSA websites – Digital.gov

An overview of GSA’s website evaluation process, which combines qualitative and quantitative data to assess website management and performance.
Asynchronous Work Is Hugely Misunderstood — Remote Work Prep

What if I told you there was a work approach that allowed you to have fewer meetings, solved your time zone issues, and allowed you to get more done uninterrupted? This is the magic of asynchronous work.
The Tech Talent Toolkit: How to attract and nurture a digital team in government | by U.S. Digital Response | Aug, 2024 | Medium

By using USDR’s Talent Toolkit, you can better hire and retain top tech talent within your government team, even when they’ve joined from outside government. By: Keith Wilson Let’s be honest: hiring…
Stop Trying to Follow Your Passion

“Follow your passion” is Latin for “Prepare to be exploited.”
Delivering healthy public services
Overcoming the gap between "delivery" and service impact.
The Rands Test – Rands in Repose
A simple test of team health
Steve Albini Shows That Punk Rock Ethics Are Good Business | Psychology Today

“If you start from the premise of refusing to be an asshole, then a lot of other decisions kind of make themselves.” — Steve Albini
Simplicity is An Advantage but Sadly Complexity Sells Better

Pushing back on the cult of complexity.
Permission, forgiveness and workplace adulting — Audree Fletcher

The amazing Grace Hopper once said “it’s better to get forgiveness than permission”.

And I’ve seen plenty of leaders try to cultivate this philosophy among their teams - often feeling frustrated and wanting them to just crack on with what needs to be done instead of seeking permission and waiting for approval. And I feel it’s an admirable ambition in big bureaucracies with traditions of defensive permission-seeking (aka ass-covering).
Using a data journey map to improve your DevEx practice

The good folks at Nava with some practical tips for improving DevEx practice with a data-focused journey map.
Authenticated Attributes: An Alternative to Deepfake Detection
An interesting approach to establishing the source and history of digital media.
Models All The Way Down
A great look at "seeing like an AI model" that touches on a11y, SEO and many other topics.
The Market for Lemons - Infrequently Noted

New web services are being built to a self-defeatingly low UX and performance standard, and existing experiences are now pervasively re-developed on unspeakably slow, JS-taxed stacks. At a business level, this is a disaster, raising the question: why are new teams buying into stacks that have failed so often before?
The one about the web developer job market – Baldur Bjarnason
I truly hope it's not this bad but have little evidence to show otherwise.

We have the worst job environment for tech in over two decades and that’s with the “AI” bubble in full force. If that bubble pops hard before the job market recovers, the repercussions to the tech industry will likely eclipse the dot-com crash.
A Dao of Web Design – A List Apart
From a long, long time ago, and still relevant...

Web designers often bemoan the malleable nature of the web, which seems to defy our efforts at strict control over layout and typography. But maybe the problem is not the web. Maybe the problem is us.