@jnjosh’s internet weblog.
As little as I blog here it might be a surprise that I’m starting a different blog but here we are. Over the last year, I’ve spent a lot of time learning Italian, learning how to cook Italian, and learning about my family history and genealogy. So much that I just want to talk about it all the time. Most people don’t want to hear me talk about Italy all the time so it’s an outlet.
You may have noticed lately that I’ve been blogging a bit more regularly. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do with my site but always found reasons not to do it. A lot of times the reasons were just being busy—which is kind of a fake reason. Other times it was I just didn’t know what I wanted to write about. So I’d like to talk a little about what changed in my blogging mindset, what tools I’ve been using, and how I’ve started building a second brain.
As I’ve written about in the past this blog is powered by Hugo—a static site generator. That’s great and all but it really limits when I can write posts. Something running Hugo needs to build the site and that output needs to be published somewhere. I’ve done a few things to make this process a more automatic. Writing Posts on my MacBook Pro First of all I needed to make it much easier to create a new post.
I just realized that I’ve owned jnjosh.com for 10 years now. For the first couple years I tried to make it a blog about all my stuff from filmmaking to app development. Then it just became that thing I kind of updated now and then. It’s a constant struggle where I don’t write for awhile, then really want to write so I “reboot” it. I think my best year was 2012, It wasn’t consistent through the year, but I seemed to share quite a lot that year.
Over the last month I’ve been using the Go language more and more. It’s a pretty fun language but I often find myself wishing I was writing Swift. I came across this new static engine system that was written in Go and thought I’d try it out. It’s called Hugo. I don’t have anything bad to say about Octopress, and a new version is coming soon. But wow, Hugo is fast.
During a recent interview with Marcus Zarra on the CocoaConf Podcast, Marcus made a quick little comment that really resonated with me. To paraphrase, Marcus said something like “If you ask for opinions about something to a room of developers, you don’t get much of a response. If you just say something wrong they’ll tell you about it.” It’s an interesting point. People do love to correct you when you say something wrong or even something not 100% correct.
Over at Two Toasters we’ve started a blog to discuss technical topics around iOS (and Android) development called Toastmo.
Lately I’ve been pushing everyone to use UIAppearance in their work and custom views. Today we posted an article I wrote about it that covers all the basics and gives a few examples of implementing the protocol to help your own views.
UPDATE: This post is no longer online. Sorry.
It’s that time of year again. That time, late in the year, where I start wishing I blogged more often. It actually started earlier this year when I rewrote this whole blog1 back in March. So what got me back here in a text editor writing a blog post? Really it came down to that weekly feeling at the end of the weekend that I’ve finished very little. I guess if I can finish at least one small blog post, I can start feeling like I’ve finished something.