Blog
The blog contains . . . everything. Quick references, miscellaneous tutorials, conference notes, and so on. It's a blog as brain with a tech focus. For many of the posts, I am the primary intended audience: the blog is there so I can quickly look up things I need. Others are more tutorial-like, or designed to answer quick questions. The writing style is generally informal, and closer to natural language than I'd use in documentation. I don't reliably maintain and update the content in this section.
Featured posts
Posts
timebox.so teardown
This post is a teardown of timebox.so, a todo list app that I recently spotted on Reddit.
I'm doing the teardown because there was a lot that impressed me in the product presentation, and I want to capture my takeaways. This is a learning exercise and set of notes for me to look back on if I ever launch a product - and hopefully a helpful real-life example for you!
How to get Reddit karma quickly
A quick guide to getting to 50+ karma on Reddit.
Spiky opinions?
This post is a response to an article a friend, Adeline Amar sent to me: Spiky point of view: Let’s get a little controversial by Wes Cao.
I found the article intriguing: lots of good stuff in it, but wrapped in language that didn't really fit the core arguments and examples. I want to dig into what 'spiky' is doing here, try and extract Cao's main point, and look at the value it brings.
Create custom statuses for pages in Material for MkDocs
The Material theme for the MkDocs static site generator has a Status feature. You can use frontmatter to mark a page as either new or deprecated, and the theme gives it an icon in the navigation.
Recently, at n8n, I wanted to mark pages as beta to signal they're documentation for a beta feature. I didn't want to use new and its default icon for this, so had to add a custom status.
Set up minikube on Windows
In my work as n8n's tech writer, I need to maintain some Kubernetes-based deployment guides. This blog post contains the steps for setting up minikube and kubectl on Windows, running it, and testing n8n's Kuberenetes hosting configurations. This is a letter to my future self. Some steps are n8n-specific, but this can also serve as a quick guide for any Kubernetes testing.
Cookie consent across subdomains with Material for MkDocs
This post looks at why you'd want shared cookie consent across your subdomains, then outlines the key features to be aware of when setting this up with Material for MkDocs, and provides a code sample to help you get started.
Add cover images to blog posts in Material for MkDocs
Modify Material for MkDocs to include cover images on the blog index page.
Prevent MkDocs from replacing tabs with spaces in code blocks
This article describes MkDocs' default processing of tabs in code samples, explains why it can be a problem, and shows how to fix it.
Using Markdoc with Eleventy: a quick test
Trying out Stripe's recently open sourced Markdown extension and linter.