WebAssembly is byte code for the web. It is an open standard that has been implemented by all of the major browsers (FireFox, Chrome, Safari, Edge). It has also been implemented as a compilation target for a number of programing languages. Which may have you asking, if I want to build something in WebAssembly what language should I use?

My fiancé and I have been going for hikes every weekend since we haven’t been going anywhere else because of “you know what”. After one very hot and sweaty hike, I decided to get us a couple hydration packs. Hydration packs are basically a small backpack that holds a bag of water with a hose attached, so you can drink on the go.

TL;DR; You can find the live demo here.

For a personal project, I needed a way to display an average star rating. There are a lot of ways to do this, but I thought this was a clever way to achive the look I wanted. I’m not sure if anyone else has done it this way. If someone has, I haven’t seen an example of it before.

Back in January I signed up to two different robo advisors, so I could compare them and see which one worked better for me and if they did better than my traditional brokerage account. If you are not familiar with the concept of a robo advisor they are brokerages where, instead of picking stocks and funds yourself or with the help of a financial advisor, you select a level of risk and an algorithm selects a set of financial assets for you. The algorithm can also automatically re-balance your portfolio and do “tax loss harvesting” for you (I’ll explain that latter).

I love my Google Home devices. I was skeptical at first about how useful how useful a device could be if the only way to interact with is is through voice commands, but it turns out there are a whole host of tasks where it’s actually really convenient to just say “Hey Google” a command and listen to the response. There are limitations to the interaction medium, but I can almost always turn to my phone or a computer in those cases.

Stress. We all want to avoid stress. Stress causes deformation, degradation. Over time, stress breaks and destroys.

This is a follow up to my previous post about CORS with mod_perl, I wrote a little bit about CORS (Cross Origin Resource Sharing) and about setting the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header from mod_perl. If you haven’t read it, I would recommend doing so (and not just because I wrote it ).

Back around the end of March Bryan Wendell, from Bryan on Scouting, posted an update about the popularity of different merit badges base on the number earned last year.

Recently at work, I added support for Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) to our web infrastructure. There is lots of information online about how CORS works and how to add support for it to your server. In fact, there is even a web site called enable-cors.org that has good information on how to enable CORS on many platforms. It’s a good for a start, but not enough for a production environment.

If you are like me, you have a lot to do in any given day. Some big, complicated things, like designing a new server architecture or crafting a complex and efficient SQL query. But there are also a lot of little things, like sorting and deleting email or keeping track of your Github issues.

While I am experienced in many languages (Ruby, Python, Perl, Java, etc…), my language of choice is JavaScript.