Birders are crazy. My wife came to me the other day with an interesting challenge. “Honey, I cannot see far enough to identify the sea birds!”. All images in the this article are available full resolution at: https://allangraves.myportfolio.com/bird-scoping. I encourage you to look at the larger versions for comparisons. For…

It’s 2021, and Covid-19 is running rampant. You’ve lost your job, or you’re looking for a career change, after being told you were essential, but not going to get any hazard pay. You know the kid down the street drives a really nice car, and looks like they have it…

The key mark of any experienced coder is one who is willing to refactor the code. Code deals in abstractions and generalizations at the high level, and with specifics at the low. If you imagine a ruler with abstract at one end and specific at the other, you might get…

Or… How I learned to love React FlowBox. — This one should have been easy — or so I thought. I had a block of text, and I needed to highlight text in that block. I figured I’d whip something together, and be done in a few minutes. Then, I started WAY overthinking things. Let’s walk through all the…

“To Err is Human, to Really screw things up requires a computer” Oh, how true. While React seems conceptually simple, it deals with a state model that requires us to hold multiple state machines in our head. It is all too easy to put state in various places and really screw it up — and then you get to figure out why. …

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… Or so it seemed, a work friend of my Dad’s gave me a strange gift for Christmas. I’m going to date myself now — but it was a circa 1980’s Electronic Project Kit. …

Every good app needs a good navigator. Just like a cross-country trip, a good navigator takes us from place to place in our app, ensuring that we get to the place we want to go. A bad navigator takes us… well, where the navigator wants to go. …

A few hours ago, I was working on a piece of React Native code that required dynamic image exports off the file system. Of course, I started with the React Native Image document: https://reactnative.dev/docs/image React Native has some great docs, so after reading this, I figured it would be a…

So, my daughter *loves* Choose Your Own Adventures, and everything like it. The one thing that has driven her nuts though — she cannot truly customize them. Instead, she loves the stories I tell — she can participate and customize them, to her heart’s content. For instance, when she gets…