Things new and old

How to better your ask to get more helpful responses

Do you ever struggle getting help or even more, simply getting a response sometimes? I have lost way too much sleep boiling over the lack of response to an ask with all kinds of crazy thoughts racing through my head. Sometimes it starts with, “don’t these people check their email” and quickly spirals into suspicion, conspiracy theory, and beyond. What I have learned in the last twenty years is that the problem isn’t usually them… very often it has been me.

Preface:

I am not an expert. I am just learning React and wanted to learn Thunk and Redux. This is me documenting my learning journey and circling back to try and help others doing the same thing with (hopefully) relevant stuff.

I am linking the most helpful resources and articles I found at the end. They are the experts. My most helpful contribution may be to those climbing the learning curve of unfamiliarity like I just did. Once you’re there, those folks will take you home.

Photo by George Coletrain on Unsplash

What are ‘Static Site Generators’ (SSG’s), what are the pros and cons, and when should we use them?

When building my own personal portfolio website, I chose to lean into static site generators and learn something new. The personal portfolio is an excellent use case for a Hugo site hosted somewhere like Netlify, and that is just what I did with RobertKevinPhillips.com.

In this post I will:

1. Explain what SSG’s are
2. Cover pros & cons
3. List some popular SSG sites that may surprise you

What are Static Site Generators (SSG’s)?

The name here tells us a lot. The implication, obvious, that some sites are static while others are dynamic. In the case of static, think fixed or constant content. This means that, just like creating a Word document and clicking save, developers create HTML content for a whole website (perhaps many pages thereof) and save that version of the content. They then upload all of this content server where it can be delivered upon request to browsers, and quite well by the way. More on that later…

Photo by Thor Alvis on Unsplash

For our first React map/routing project, my team decided to use the Mapbox GL API to display locations on a map of that a dispatcher needed to interact with to assign and plan work.

In this post I will:

1. Briefly describe what Mapbox GL JSis and does
2. Show a little example of how we used it
3. Share my impression after this first use
4. Helpful links

What is Mapbox GL?

“Mapbox GL JS is a JavaScript library that uses WebGL to render interactive maps from vector tiles and Mapbox styles. It is part of the Mapbox GL ecosystem, which includes Mapbox Mobile, a compatible renderer written in C++ with bindings for desktop and mobile platforms.”
see also: Mapbox GL Javascript API

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