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2440 posts latest post 2026-04-21
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Apr 2026 | 41 posts

Chrome Extensions I use

There are many useful chrome extensions out there. I probably have way too many installed, here are four that I am currently using.

This post was inspired from Chris over at daily-dev-tips

Love it or hate it passwords are hard to manage. Everyone needs a password manager to avoid the dreaded password reuse, and to be able to quickly rotate them with a service. I use lastpass, thus it’s browser extension is my most used extension.

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2 min read

Creating Reusable Bash Scripts

Bash is a language that is quite useful for automation no matter what language you write in. Bash can do so many powerful system-level tasks. Even if you are on windows these days you are likely to come across bash inside a cloud VM, Continuous Integration, or even inside of docker.

I have three techniques that help me write more composable bash scripts.

Break scripts down into reusable components

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Three things to Automate with Python using Pandas

Here are three things that I see my non programming counterparts doing every single day. These really sum up so much of what folks do within an office. So many of us dabble in or become power users of spreadsheets without knowing there is an alternative out there that can save us time, automate boring things, and allow us to open up our minds for the part that we add value, Thinking about the data.

Lets face it, stitching together spreadsheets is zero value add by itself, but if you can see something in the data and take action on it, this can be huge value add to your company. Learning just a bit of python will help focus more of your attention on “value add operations” and leave the mundane stuff to your computer.

I see this one all the time. One team gets a spreadsheet from another team once per month and they need to stich all the pieces together. Excel really opens the door for some nasty hidden bugs in your manually stiched together data. It also takes time out of your day...

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4 min read

How to Install miniconda on linux (from the command line only)

miniconda is a python distribution from continuum. It’s a slimmed-down version of their very popular anaconda distribution. It comes with its own environment manager and has eased the install process for many that do not have a way to compile c-extensions. It made it much easier to install the data science stack on windows a few years ago. These days windows are much better than it was back then at compiling c-extensions. I still like its environment manager, which installs to a global directory rather than a local directory for your project.

Installing miniconda on Linux can be a bit tricky the first time you do it completely from the terminal. The following snippet will create a directory to install miniconda into, download the latest python 3 based install script for Linux 64 bit, run the install script, delete the install script, then add a conda initialize to your bash or zsh shell. After doing this you can restart your shell and conda will be ready to go.

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How to crush amazing posts on DEV

This post was inspired by a comment I left on @dsteenman’s post.

{% post dsteenman/how-long-should-a-blogpost-be-2k6n %}

Most of the time I prefer short as I am more likely to read the whole thing. If its setup as a series I am more likely to work my way through the whole series in a matter of a few sessions. Just my preference

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Black Tech Pipeline

I was particularly inspired by @chantastic episode 103 of the react podcast with @ParissAthena. They spoke about the black tech pipeline as well as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Pariss is quite an inspiration. She has done so much work to create a better place for POC in tech. I like that not only is she helping them get jobs but acting as a mentor for their first few months on the job to make sure that they are able to find their place and fit in.

Based on an episode of react podcast.

🎙 Listen to the full episode.

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Review of the git-auto-commit-action

It’s a really cool GitHub action that will automatically commit files changed during the action. I was using this to render a new readme based on a template.

Check out the repo for git-auto-commit-action.

It’s a really cool GitHub action that will automatically commit files changed during the action. I was using this to render a new readme based on a template.

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2 min read

Integration testing with Python, TestProject.io, and GitHub Actions

As I continue to build out waylonwalker.com I sometimes run into some errors that are not caught because I do not have good testing implemented. I want to explore some integration testing options using GitHub’s actions.

Running integration tests will not prevent bugs from happening completely, but it will allow me to quickly spot them and rollback.

The very first thing that comes to my mind is anything that is loaded or ran client-side. Two things quickly came to mind here. I run gatsby so most of my content is statically rendered, and it yells at me if something isn’t as expected. For performance reasons I lazy load cards on my blogroll, loading all of the header images gets heavy and kills lighthouse (if anyone actually cares). I am also loading some...

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8 min read

New Machine for developing Tests with TestProject.io

Today I setup a new machine on Digital Ocean to use with TestProject.io, Here are my installation notes.

apt update && apt upgrade -y apt install zsh chsh zsh sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)" curl -fsSL https://starship.rs/install.sh | bash echo 'eval "$(starship init zsh)"' >> ~/.zshrc # python sudo apt update sudo apt install python3-pip -y echo 'alias python=python3' >> ~/.zshrc echo 'alias pip=pip3' >> ~/.zshrc # pipx apt install python3-venv pip install pipx pipx install black pipx install shell-functools pip install ipython # docker sudo apt update sudo apt install apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl gnupg-agent software-properties-common curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo apt-key add - sudo add-apt-repository "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu $(lsb_release -cs) stable" sudo apt...

1 min read

🐍 Practice Python Online

When learning a new skill it’s important to practice along the way. In order for me to show up to practice I need to make it easy to show up. An easy way to show up to practice with python is to use an online repl. With these you can try out something quick. Sometimes I see snippets from blogs or tweets and I need to try the out for myself to really understand.

When learning a new skill it’s important to practice along the way. In order for me to show up to practice I need to make it easy to show up. An easy way to show up to practice with python is to use an online repl. With these, you can try out something quick. Sometimes I see snippets from blogs or tweets and I need to try them out for myself to really understand.

Here are three different options that I have used in the past to try out something at some various levels. I am sure there are plenty more, but these are three that I have tried. I am not covering all of them, because It’s been a while since I have used one other...

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2 min read

Kedro Catalog

I am exploring a kedro catalog meta data hook, these are some notes about what I am thinking.

try pandas method -> try spark -> try dict/list -> none

Is there an easy way to create a nosql database in memory from a a list of dictionaries?

Edit On GitHub

I recently added a button to my blog, and subsequently my posts on DEV.to. It’s the best thing that I have done for it in a while. It makes it so easy to do quick edits.

I refer back to my old posts quite a bit, sometimes I find errors in them. Honestly most of the time its too much effort to load up my editor make the change and git add and git commit. It’s not much, but when I am referring to my own post generally I am just trying to get something done and don’t have time for that.

The slug that I am getting from gatsby is formatted as /blog/this-post/. Note the trailing slash and missing file extension, thats where the ${slug.slice(0, -1)}.md comes in.

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2 min read

Why use a cms

When first learning to code its very common to hard code everything right into the code. This happens with most folks in just about any language. Whether its HTML or markdown for front end content, or even hardcoding parameters in our backend languages like python, or node.js.

Hard coding everything right into your code makes it really hard for non-technical collaborators to join. It makes it nearly impossible to hand websites off to clients without needing to come back for routine updates.

The cms generally come with a rich content editor that feels more like something most folks are used to. There are buttons for changing the font, font-size, adding images, bold, italics, etc.

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3 min read

🐍 Parsing RSS feeds with Python

I am looking into a way to replace my google reader experience that I had back in 2013 before google took it from us. I am starting by learning how to parse feeds with python, and without much previous knowledge, it proved to be much easier than anticipated thanks to the feedparser library.

This is how I used python to parse rss and setup my own custom feed.

Install the feedparser library.

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2 min read

Reader-2020

The input will be a yaml file containing a list of Items you want to stay up to date with. Inside each item will be a url, and weight.

email: max-entries: 10 recipients: - [email protected] markdown: max-entries: 100 output: - README.md json: max-entries: 1000 output: - feeds/feed.json rss: max-entries: 1000 output: - feeds/feed.xml html: max-entries: 100 output: index.html items: Waylon Walker: weight: 5 url: https://waylonwalker.com/rss.xml @_WaylonWalker: weight: 3 twitter: https://twitter.com/_waylonwalker DEV Waylon Walker: weight: 8 url: https://dev.to/waylonwalker Stack Overflow Kedro: weight: 5 url: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/kedro Kedro GitHub: weight: 4 url: https://github.com/kedro-org/kedro Kedro Pypi weight: 10 url: https://pypi.org/project/kedro/

Types #

  • rss feed (primary source)
  • youtube feed
  • Stack Overflow tags
  • GitHub...

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1 min read

🤓 What's on your GitHub Profile

I ran this post on dev.to and got a great response of great examples, check it out.

dev.to whats-on-your-github-profile

The GitHub profile feature just went live for a subset of users. Simply creating a repo named after your username, and clicking share to Profile on the sidebar will create a custom profile that shows up just above your pinned projects.

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🙋‍♂️ Can Anyone Explain Twitter Cards to me?

Can someone explain how or why twitter cards render differently from device to device? I do understand that twitter cards a built from meta tags, the full list can be found in their docs

Mobile Looks fine.

On Desktop it is not picking up the image.

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How I Built My GitHub Profile

I ran a discussion on dev that collected quite a list of examples in the comment section. So many great calls to action, animations, memes, and weird tricks.

dev.to whats-on-your-github-profile

Waylon Walkers GitHub profile

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