Actual Content!

It's been a while since I posted here!

Actually, I posted here about a week ago about some of the things I was working on with Nova, but I wrote it in a bit of a rush, and I hated that blog post. It was disorganized and the content didn't really relate to the title at all, so I deleted it.

Since then, this week and a goodly chunk of last week have been all about producing content for this here website.

Projects

I've finally put some flesh on the projects section. At the moment, this is limited to this here website and Nova. I felt like I was spending enough time on Nova that they deserved the 'project' status. I [externalized all her various instructions into a GitHub repo][]. When I get back to actually working on it, I'll likely add a page for my GMail Tools AppsScript project.

Each section features a quick overview, relevant links, challenges faced, and a more detailed summary of details.

Bio

I've added a new Bio section. I considered just mirroring my LinkedIn bio here, but it seemed like an opportunity to go into a bit more depth and add a bit of color to the picture of who I am. The rest of the site is pretty business-like. If someone wants the briefer synopsis, they still have the overview page and the LinkedIn profile they can go to.

New Components

I've written a handful of very simple React components during this work. I kind of thought they'd be just use-once components, so I've just defined them in place, but in retrospect, I think they probably have some utility outside the bio section. For now, I've left them where they are, but I've scheduled some work on my backlog to move them into the appropriate location and write tests and stories for them. There'll likely be a round of refinement as well, since they're pretty basic at the moment.

The new components do roughly two things:

• Make use of the CSS float property to float a section of content which allows more interesting layouts with very little additional overhead
• Generate a delimited set of links within an MDX document. In place, allowing a set of links to be defined in the frontmatter header

New Component Demos

Other Things

I've added a good bit of capability to Nova. She can now submit Jira tickets for me, as well as PR reviews. It's so much easier now to capture an idea that happens in flow without leaving the flow. And I've added a build stage that generates a map of my repository (using the command-line utility tree) which Nova can use to infer the locations of files in my repository, which really has streamlined getting Nova on the same page as me when discussing a set of changes to a file.

Coming Soon

New Content

• Katas page
• Update footer and Navbar
• Gmail Tools project page

Catching up

• Need to flesh out the test suite, now that it's all automated, then bump up coverage limits
• Fix up my Logo component so it's scalable (you can see a place where it ought to scale, but doesn't on the project overview page for this website)
• Add styleguide, linting, Git hooks, prose checking, all that stuff. Probably lower priority than content and getting more aggressive about job-hunting at this stage.

New features

I think I'm going to add a menu for selecting a preview environment, and a visual indicator that lets you know when you're in a preview environment. Haven't really figured out how I'm going to go about that yet, but it does give me a meaningful interaction with an API, which is something I wanted to add here.

Putting Lipstick on a Pig

I've got a little section of images and videos from my various hobbies in the bio section. It's currently just a CSS flex-box, and it looks attrocious. I think I'm going to change that to a carousel, which is probably going to finally force me to commit to one component library or another. There'll be some research to do there, and I'm glad I've got Nova to help me do it.

Nova

I've got a few tickets in to do some refinements on Nova. At the moment, I have to continually remind her of my Jira project key, and the format she's supposed to use to submit requests. A few other things that rub a bit.

Lots to do. I doubt I'll get through all of it in the next couple weeks, but we'll see how far I do get. Stay tuned.

The set of components I created for my 'bio' section