Author Archives: Mike Crittenden

I love tools. It’s a bit of an obsession. As an outlet for this, I’m starting a weekly screencast where I do short (like, 1-2 minute) intros into various tools that people might find useful. It’s called Tool Time (yes, like in Home Improvement…please don’t sue me). Check it out on Twitter.

I’m a fan of Grav CMS. I’m a fan of static site generators. But Grav CMS is not a static site generator. I’m creating this post to link to people who are confused by this. That word, “static” Grav is a “static file CMS”. Things like Jekyll or Hugo or Gatsby are “static site generators”. […]

Let’s define a “static” site to mean that each page is just a regular old HTML file sitting in directory. In other words, if you visit /about-us in a browser, then you’re sent the HTML file that lives at /about-us/index.html which contains the entire page. Obviously, nobody wants to sit there and edit each HTML file individually, so fabulous […]

My 4th kid is now almost a month old, so it seems like as good a time as any to write up some random tips I’ve learned for dealing with young kids. Here they are, in no specific order. Sleep A friend of mine with 3 kids, when asked for parenting advice, said “just think […]

I spent the first few months of 2018 working through the Book Riot 2018 Read Harder Challenge. I had gotten stuck in a rut of reading dumb suspense and murder mystery books and wanted to break out of that, so this seemed logical.

How often each day do you feel like an idiot? Hopefully, the answer is “just enough.” I believe that measuring idiotic feelings per day (IFPS) is a decent method of predicting or identifying burnout. Here are your options: I feel like an idiot all the dang time! This is likely a sign that one (or […]

For those of you who work on a lot of unfamiliar servers, you probably use vim a good bit. It can be useful to have a simple, small .vimrc file that you can just copy to wherever to set some sane defaults. Here’s the one I use for that. It fixes indenting, syntax highlighting, and […]

If you’ve never heard of the 3 C’s, here’s some context. Basically, it’s a strategy for writing issues/tickets that breaks them into the Card (user story), the Conversation (documentation and detailed requirements), and the Confirmation (testing steps and acceptance criteria). Here’s a concise little template that you can copy and paste when creating JIRA tickets. h2. […]

This is the post that I’ll use as a living dumping ground for random useful git snippets that I come across. Enjoy! git blame -w # ignores white space git blame -M # ignores moving text git blame -C # ignores moving text into other files Use git blame to see when a change was […]