Two cups

A Thought Process for Managing Overwhelm

May 22, 2023

When I was a Starbucks Partner, I quickly learned something about the feeling of overwhelm. Imagine being in the middle of a holiday rush with ten drinks queued up and a group of ten people followed by several families, all ordering complex blended drinks and seasonal drinks, with some even requesting half-and-half steamed to 145º added on top of the usual 2% milk. That’s enough to make anyone go crazy. What I was taught, however, was to not see the entire queue of drinks, but instead to focus on – you guessed it – the two drinks in front of me.

Starbucks is a machine of beverage preparation productivity, and the established rhythm supported working on the first half of one drink, finishing the second drink, then starting the next drink, finishing the previous one, and so on. It was an ingenious system and, as someone who thrives in a flow state, I found it incredibly satisfying.

EcoFlow Delta Pro Whole House Battery Backup

How I installed the EcoFlow Delta Pro for whole house battery backup.

March 6, 2023

Problems to solve:

• Maintain power during outages due to weather/other happening more regularly
• Expandable if we needed to extend the house in case of more frequent outages (OR)
• Expandable if we get solar panels to store more sun
• Not locking me into transfer switch or generator inlet
• Simple installation to start with, just allow us to get house powered when mains are down - able to be complex later if desired

Which At-Home Coffee Maker To Buy

Let's talk about what coffee you want to make and what your budget is to find the right at-home coffee set up for you. From Espresso and Lattes, to everything in-between.

April 15, 2020

Setting up the criteria for your decision

What do you want to make?

I’m going to focus on just two very simple coffee styles: Lattes and Brewed Coffee. From experience, if we start to break out into all the variances (especially on the brewed coffee side) then we’ll be here all week. So what coffee do you like?

Now, if you just want to copy me, I wrote a post about what my coffee setup is these days. You can see that here: My 2020 Coffee Setup.

What is your budget?

You can start as affordable as $10 for a great coffee maker setup and I’ll top out at around $800 for everything you need. We’ll chat about everything in between.

What goes into coffee?

Let’s first talk about what goes into a good cup of coffee. Water and ground beans. Let’s start there.

My 2020 Coffee Setup

My daily coffee setup and what I love about it.

April 15, 2020

A few years ago I wrote about how I brewed my coffee in the morning. Honest, I have more gear now but I often revert back to the simpler times with just my AreoPress. That said, I’ve changed things up a bit and I couldn’t be happier.

How to Change the Temperature of the Breville Infuser Espresso Machine

The Breville Infuser (BES840XL) has a programable PID allowing temperature changes from 196º F to 204º F. Here is how, and why, one might want to do this.

April 17, 2018

Why would one want to change the temperature?

Coffee is nearly all water. That said, the water you use to extract your coffee impacts the flavor of the coffee. Temperatures below 195 ºF (90.5 ºC) will produce a weakly flavored, or under-extracted, shot of espresso. The higher the temperature, the more “total dissolvable solids” will be present in your final shot leading to a more developed shot of espresso. Of course, you can go crazy and have your temperature too hot. Your Breville Infuser’s PID limits you to 204 ºF (95.56 ºC) F so you can’t get too wild.

How I Make My Morning Coffee

In the mornings I like to keep my coffee routine simple. Here's a step-by-step guide on how I make my coffee using an Aeropress.

January 2, 2017

I’ve had a lot of people ask me about how I make my coffee. Being a massive coffee nerd (I have more than 4 textbook style books on coffee and its chemistry) people seem to think that making my morning coffee could be equated to launching the Space Shuttle. I can assure that it is not.

Here is a super simple step-by-step inspired by Marco Arment from this podcast. This is how I make my coffee using an AeroPress every morning.

LostGrid Version 8

December 28, 2016

Version 8 is now available

What Changed?

See full changelog below for all the changes.

Breaking Changes

• Waffle grids now have their last element floated to the left. This can be changed to make the last element float to the right. You can revert to having the last element float to the right by adding “float-right” to the end of line. a { lost-waffle: 2/5 3 0 no-flex float-right; }
• The Offset was initially done backwards (negative went right and positive went left). This is now more intuitive. You can get your existing project working with version 8 by simply making your previous negative fractions positive and your positive fractions negative. (e.g. lost-offset: 1/3; => lost-offset: -1/3;)
• LostGrid no longer supports 0.10 and 0.12 versions of Node.

New Features

• You can now use vw and vh as units for grid calculations instead of the default %. Read the Docs
• A new “rounder” feature was added allowing you to adjust the rounder multiplier. (See this post to learn more)

LostGrid to no longer support older versions of Node

Some notes about LostGrid and Node versions.

November 9, 2016

LostGrid is going to drop support for Node v0.10 and v0.12

Okay okay…not just yet. But I’m releasing a patch today that will start to put warnings out there about the drop of Node support in Version 8. Version 8 isn’t quite ready yet and I’m going hold off releasing it until December when Node support for v0.12 ends.

Moving forward, LostGrid is going to support Node versions according to the Node LTS docs. See Docs here

LostGrid, the Pixel Gap

LostGrid's new beta is looking to solve some of the pixel gap issues with a new rounding parameter.

November 6, 2016

LostGrid Version 8 Beta 1 (the second one) (v8.0.0-beta.1)

This second beta release of LostGrid’s Version 8 is working to solve the pixel gap issues that some users experience using Calc-based grids. Inspired by the original creator of LostGrid, Cory Simmons, there is now a “rounder” parameter.

Read Beyond Yourself

Do you ever read a book that is beyond you...that you don't feel like you're completely ready for? Good.

October 30, 2016

My mom did a lot of things right; I am so blessed by her. I was reading a book this evening, The Essential Wooden, and something hit me and hit me hard. …and something I realize my mom, whether she knew it or not, was doing very, very right: She got me books I wasn’t ready to read.

Have a few books on your bookshelf you’re not ready for. One day, maybe not tomorrow, you’ll be ready for them…and when you are you’ll be glad they are there.

LostGrid Gets A New Beta

LostGrid has some updates that are now in beta; things like lost-offset are getting a facelift.

October 18, 2016

LostGrid has a beta! (v8.0.0-beta.0)

This first release has a new more intuitive version of lost-offset that now shifts the content a bit more like you’d feel it should. Negative fractions moves it to the left and positive fractions move it to the right. It feels great to use!

The Ongoing Adventures of a Frontend Developer

Links and notes from my talk at Clark College in Washington.

October 5, 2016

I was asked to give a talk on “The Ongoing Adventures of a Frontend Developer” at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington. Here are some links and notes from that talk.

Creating a Maintenance Site with Express and Pug

Setting up a maintenance site for multi-domain routing.

September 9, 2016

If you’ve ever had to create a maintenance page for your website when you need to do some server work or some larger database operation that will need your system offline, you’ve probably suffered a headache about how to do it well. How about if you have multiple sites that you have to take down and you want there to be a “we are down right now” but branded for each domain? This was the dilemma that I had to solve and I must say, I like what I came up with.

New LostGrid release 7.1.0

New LostGrid Darcy release with feature enhancements and a major under-the-hood refactor.

August 29, 2016

What changed?

Changelog

• #322 [FEATURE ENHANCEMENT] There is a new ability to add an rgb color value to lost-utility: edit; to customize your editing color. lost-utility: edit rgb(60, 0, 0);
• #324 [REFACTOR] LostGrid’s core is now written to follow the airbnb javascript styleguide with ESLint linting along the way.

I’ve missed diving into code like I used to. This is a minor release adding a little feature enhancement for lost-utility. There are some cases where you might want to have different colors used in the edit mode of lost-utility. Now you can add in an rgb value. When I went to bed after hitting “release” last night I realized that I should probably also add in some color variables as well like “blue” and “red” etc. Because I’m converting it to rgba I don’t think it would be as simple as accepting valid css colors but that’s certainly something that could be in the cards.

How to add gradients to images with CSS ::after

Adding a linear-gradient to images is rather easy and can be adapted to create a variety of design enhancements.

July 23, 2016

If you’re wanting to add a gradient to an image I have found a lot of posts that explain how to do it with background images. This has been the go-to strategy of mine for a while but I thought it didn’t feel quite right for every case.