Blog

I registered waylonwalker.com and started making content for it in 2017 after a big industry downturn in 2016 that left me scared for what would happen if I were laid off. The company I was working for at the time did it’s first major downsizing in history sending many really good engineers out to look for new opportunities in a world flooded with many in the same situation. This was very similar to what happened to the tech industry in 2024.

This was very similar to what happened to the tech industry in 2024.

See Waylon Walker for more about me.

...

Today I set up some sick wikilink hover effects using tailwind see A Case For Tailwindcss. When you hover over them they show an image preview of the link that you are going to. I cant find where I have seen this but it comes from some docs sites.

I’ll finish this article later, just excited to see it up.

This post is a work in progress.

Markata is the static site generator that I created to build my website about this site. I built it for me and I enjoy using it. I know everying it can do and I can extend it to do more easily. I have set it up for some friends to also use it and am proud that it helps them publish their content.

It’s a meme to create your own static site generator to make your website. Yes its funny, I don’t recommend it if your not ready for the level of work that comes with it, but at the end of the day it’s very...

...

My linked in work history is empty. I made up a position about content developer that tracks how long I’ve been blogging. I think i did this because LinkedIn requires it. Either way this is public knowledge and fine sharing.

If you have taken any security class for your job seriously you have already been told not to share your work with most companies to the public, this is private information that only opens you up for social engineering attacks against that company.

I care about the security of these companies I work for and their reputation, so I refuse to publically share it.

...

Your linkedin link sits at the top of your resume, its one of the first things I see when I open your resume, but yet it gives me no more information that the damn resume you sent me.

Save that space on your resume for something useful.

Fine if you want it on your resume make it actually useful for someone reading your resume.

...

Inspired by Adam Savage and his One Day builds on youtube. I often build things, and want to make them generally useful for others and over configure out of the gate. This project is purely for me inspired by a need I have.

This post will not directly show how to make a weather app, but document the process that I went through to make mine. It will show the tools that I used to make it, and the final result.

It often goes in our house ask dad while he is busy and he will probably just say yes without thinking much. This happens a lot when kids ask to go outside. I think sure, go for it, you will figure it out. Then my wife walks in and asks where they are, followed by, did you even check the weather, its -11 degrees outside right now.

...

I have several feeds that you can consume my content with. Many posts will cross between them, so if you would like to follow a certain stream of content in your rss reader thats what this is for. This one might feel like it has some extra noise with multiple posts per day, including starts, and instagram style posts, for a bit less look at the [[ main ]] feed.

This is a feed of everything that I have published on my site to date including Posts tagged: blog, [[ til ]], Apr 2, 2024 1 min read

These are generally my thoughts on a web page or some sort of url, except a rare few don’t have a link. These are dual published off of my thoughts.waylonwalker.com site. It’s a fully dynamically rendered site 2000’s style. Posts are stored in a database and instantly available. Almost all of the posts were written in a small <textarea> field within a chrome extension that I built for it.

These posts are intended to in two ways. One, link building for the author. I hope that I give the people helping me out along the way just a little bit of a boost. Two, they serve as a permanant commented bookmark for me to search, and come back to later when I have forgotten where I have seen something.

...

I stumbled into kubernetes December 2023 when I was looking for a better way to self host applications. I was looking for something that didn’t require logging into a server and building and deploying like a cave man. I wanted a smoother experience than docker compose was giving me.

https://waylonwalker.com/looking-for-a-heroku-replacement/

This post turned into a list of tools that I have adopted into my k8s workflow, and plan to keep. enjoy.

...

A poc is not a product. I started focais, not in a rush, but as something that I already had a POC for and thought it would be easy. I wanted to build tools to make creating blog posts like this one easier. I stared with shots a tool that takes screenshots of websites.

For the poc, I made a single fastapi endpoint that takes a url and returns a screenshot of the page. It converts the url into a key that I can lookup to see if I have the shot, if I don’t I go get it. With the open source libraries out there, this is not too hard of a task.

But this wasn’t enough

...

Your browser does not support the audio element.

Theo’s response puts a lot of my feelings about unit testing into words. Many of us have grown up in this world preaching unit testing. We often hear these statements “Everything must be unit tested, tests make code more maintainable.” In reality when we are not writing complex low level code unit tests are probably the wrong approach.

...

Your browser does not support the audio element.

I’ve long hosted my personal blog as a static site on waylonwalker.com. It’s all markdown, converted to html, and shipped as is. It’s been great, I’ve moved it from GitHub Pages, to Netlify, tried Vercel for a minute, and have landed on Cloudflare Pages. Each migration has not really been that hard, it’s just pointing ci to a different host after the site has built.

Now the part that I have struggled with is how to cheaply host a server rendered application that can just live on forever without me paying for it. This is a harder problem as it costs more to keep servers spinning, memory, and disk all ready for you to use at a moments notice.

...

Serious question.

But, why. It’s the most loved db, right? Right? Maybe it’s time to rethink it.

Don’t get me wrong, if I need a relational db as a service, PostgreSQL is going to be my first choice, but why do I need to run a separate application for it?

...

I was watching @theprimeagen recently and I think he sold me on using tailwindcss. The thing about tailwind is that it is not a big component library, it’s a set of css classes mapped to a few (usually one) style.

All css classes are shitty, so you might as well use someone else’s shitty css classes on all your projects rather than thinking you’re being smart with a new set of classes that you will hate in 6 months when you come back to the project. roughly quoted from memory of @theprimeagen

So unlike big component libraries like tailwind, it comes with a cli that that it uses to create the final css file. It is able to treeshake out all the tailwind classes that you are not using and only ship the ones that you are using.

...

It’s so easy to get out of rhythm, get busy, and drop the ball on some things that you really want to do or should do. This blog is a good example. I took some time off for some family reasons, but have taken a long time to get back to it simply because I am out of rhythm. As I am trying to get back into the rhythm there is some tooling that I have set up for it that I completely forgot about that feel good to use again.

Simple Repetitive Tasks that I have to do often can just feel soul crushing, and one main thing that got me interested in programming.

AI tools are becoming more and more useful at solving these problems. For instance code generation tools like co-pilot or codeium are really good at boilerplate and pattern repetition. Things that used to be a few vim macros is now just banging on tab.

...

Playing minecraft with Wyatt today he started a server all on his own and had me join. All vanilla, only one rule, underground bases.

I spawned into the server and it was already night time. I gathered up some wood on my way down a tree, and was attacked by zombies before I could get any tools, so I ran up another tree and crafted a crafting table.

Now to follow the rules, it’s time to head underground to build my base.

...

Life comes in waves, and sometimes you need to set down some of your projects to focus on others. For the first part of 2023 I’ve really had a lot of family stuff to focus on, we also are pretty new homeowners and are still trying to get our new to us house cleaned up and modernized.

You can see in my growing list of repos that I have poked around on quite a few side projects over the past few months. This has been quite relaxng to me, mostly things that I use to learn from, but also a lot that are tools and things I use that bring me joy.

I haven’t wrote about it at all yet, but I have really been starting to lean into pydantic on all of these side projects. I have really been enjoying the type system. A good friend

...

The following is a playthrough of Star Wars Text Adventure with a 10 yr old.The following is a playthrough of StarThe following is a playthrough of Star

I was reading about pydantic-singledispatch from Giddeon’s blog and found it very intersting. I’m getting ready to implement pydantic on my static site generator markata, and I think there are so uses for this idea, so I want to try it out.

Let’s set up some pydantic settings. We will need separate Models for each environment that we want to support for this to work. The whole idea is to use functools.singledispatch and type hints to provide unique execution for each environment. We might want something like a path_prefix in prod for environments like GithubPages that deploy to /<name-of-repo> while keeping the root at / in dev.

...

This is my first time journaling a Minecraft hardcore world, my son Wyatt is also documenting his journey in a survival world on wyattbubbylee.com.

init

I logged into a brand new hardcore world. I was welcomed by a great Acacia biome spawn full of resources. I quickly cut my first tree, crafted an axe and set out to find my first sheep. I was able to find enough sheep for a bed, several cows and pigs.

...