For a long time, I’ve been intimidated by JavaScript builds. They have a reputation for being complicated, difficult to understand, and unforgiving. This tracks with my past experiences. I have been burned before, so my approach has been to avoid builds, and just use script tags like it is 2005. Yes, it is possible to […]
Being a subject selector in an academic library is pretty repetitive. I’m basically applying the same selection criteria to different materials over and over again. In my specific role, I’m almost always looking for books (and ebooks) that are for lower-division undergraduates/general readers; that are from reputable academic presses; and that fall within the subject […]
I’m really taking my time writing some JavaScript for our library homepage. The current code (that I want to replace) is working fine, but that’s not the reason I’m dawdling. I’m going slowly because I want JavaScript to move more slowly. In my opinion, the whole language can just slow down. I know that’s an […]
I’m currently reading a book by Kyran Dale called Data Visualization with Python and JavaScript, and it’s super interesting. In my experience, it’s very unusual to find a fully bilingual programming book. This is a great example. Most technical books, for better or worse, focus exclusively on one programming language. I’m still in the early […]
Code4Lib 2023 wrapped up today. I attended in person this year, as it was nearby, in Princeton, New Jersey. As always, it was really great. One of my favorite things about this conference is that I always go home feeling a lot more optimistic about my profession. I was happy about the large number of […]
JavaScript has changed a lot over the years. Old browsers are not equipped to handle new syntax. ES6 (in 2015) was a major change. That was a long time ago. But unfortunately, on our campus, we still have browsers deployed in labs that predate ES6. Why is this? My guess is that old system images […]
I had been meaning to upgrade our library website to Vue 3 for a while now. We had been on Vue 2 for some time. But there was a hard deadline for switching over, because Vue 2 reaches end-of-life at the end of 2023. Out of prudence I didn’t want to push up too close […]
It looks like it might be the end of the road for our bot that archives tweets about Kingsborough Community College. Recently, the official @twitterdev account announced the impending end to the free tier of the Twitter API. On top of that, Mr. Musk himself suggested that the new replacement basic paid tier should cost […]
I was complaining about the Computers in Libraries magazine website recently, for pretty obvious reasons. I wanted to link to an article I wrote for the magazine from my faculty bio page, but I can’t in good faith send people to that website. I mean, it’s fine that the site is old; it’s actually kind […]
