Looking Back on 2025
I can do hard things.
More issues
Oddly Specific Kids Book Reviews
In this post I will be sharing a few short reviews on children's books (board or picture books) that I've read with my kids lately. Both kids are under 4, so we're talking about books for the preschool, toddler, and infant audience specifically. My
French or English school for our kids? A case study in choosing community
This week my household attended an open house event for the French public elementary school we are considering enrolling our child in to start Junior Kindergarten next fall.
Ottawa has four separate school boards covering the same geographic area, that are each managed entirely separately: French secular, English secular, French
Simple Needs, Hard to Satisfy
My current immigration status is: saw a really pretty cloudy, still bright sky over a cornfield while riding my bike here in Ottawa, and cried.
For a while in the last year we've been in Canada, I kept having a dream that we had to return to Lincoln
Migrating a Rails app from Webpacker to jsbundling-rails with Webpack
Recently at work I undertook a project to migrate a client's decade-old Rails app from using Webpacker to compile & bundle frontend assets, to using jsbundling-rails with Webpack. The app is big and fairly complex, and the project ended up taking much longer than I had originally anticipated.
Really Big Bike Trailers
First posted: January 14, 2024
Updated 2025-09-02: Added Wike, Burley Hopper, Specialty Cargo Add-ons section
I can haul a lot of stuff on my cargo bikes (one front bucket style, one midtail; both electric), but I'm always interested in ways to haul even more when necessary.
In particular,
Toothpaste Should Not Burn, Actually
Recently at work, our weekly company Talko Tuesday meeting once again became Talko Toothsday when the conversation turned to teeth and dental care. I don't entirely know why this topic even comes up so much in this particular workplace, and over time I've made a show
What Makes These Cities Feel Like Themselves
I just read a friend's post about the unique aspects that makes certain cities feel like uniquely that city, and I wanted to write down a few things that come to mind for me for cities I'm familiar with.
Like Comfect/The Quad Urbanist says in
One Year in Canada
We've now been living in Ottawa for a full year. Annual events that were happening last May when we came to visit before moving have happened again, and ones that happened shortly after we first arrived to live here are happening again, too. Summer flew by somehow; I&
Hosting your Static Site on Cloudflare: Tips & Tricks
Over the last year or so I've been moving many of my static site projects (including this site) to the free tier of Cloudflare hosting, from their former homes at Netlify.
Why Cloudflare
I've been pretty happy with Cloudflare, and it's what I often