New Design and a New Tool - hluska.ca
This post introduces the latest update to hluska.ca along with the launch of a new accessibility-focused tool: SCSS Contrast – WCAG Grid. Designed for productive beginners like me, the tool generates a visual matrix of color contrast ratios based on your SCSS variables. I share the origin story of the tool, thank the friends who helped refine it, and outline what’s coming next in its development.
A pause
I have recently been learning more about design and have gotten some new websites out that I am very proud of. But it is time to stop releasing, reflect on what I have learned and plot out my next several years of learning.
New Design and a New Tool - hluska.ca
It's been a year since I last redesigned hluska.ca and I have learned a huge amount since. My design skills were terrible - so terrible that I found myself losing interest in my own sites. But the fitness tracker project really convinced me that I need to skill up. And the more skill I gained, the more uncomfortable I got with my existing sites. This was the last one that I redesigned and I am very happy with the results.
The Fourth Design
I rebuilt the fitness tracker website using everything I have learned about design over the last several months. It is very fast, highly accessible and full of content on exercise, nutrition and anatomy. My design skills have come far and I am growing to really enjoy design.
On tooling
This article takes a quick look at some of the tools being used to build Fitness Tracker and goes over why I chose to use each of them.
Fun generating content
I've been working on getting Fitness Tracker release ready which has meant going through a lot of structured data and trying to turn it into something that people can read and build fitness routines with. This has involved generating text suitable for both websites and in app consumption and rather than use generative AI, I decided to roll my own model with python. Results are okay so far, but quickly improving.
Fitness Tracker
Automatic tracking with things like watches, phones and other devies may work for some people but not for me. And so in December, I started turning a tool that I've been using into a desktop application. It started off in Electron but now it's all Rust and React. Here's a quick update.
The Important Questions
A take on Rust development and acronym-induced existential dread. From compile times to SQLX pronunciations, this article explores the real tradeoffs you make building desktop apps with serious tooling.
A note to the thinkers
There are a lot of very smart, but very sad people coping with things they discuss with generative AI now and that is almost unspeakably depressing. Almost because I think that those of us who have been through change before have an obligation to start speaking about it. This is my attempt at that.
Performance Testing - NumPy versus PyArrow
This post, the first in a series on Fantasy Baseball, is going to start at two points. First, it's going to implement a scraper that will collect stats for an entire year of major league baseball. And then it's going to run some performance tests to see whether NumPy or PyArrow is faster at reading the CSV files generated. PyArrow is faster all the time...but it particularly shines when data sets get larger.