I think this sequence is the heart of the entire movie

Just saw American in Paris for the first time, at the Little Theatre cinema in Bath. I really enjoyed it, though not as much as Singin’ in the Rain (because Singin’ is one of the best moves EVARRR). I did have a thought in the middle of the Lautrec dance sequence though–every Gene Kelly movie seems to be built around one piece of more abstract, more beautiful choreography, and it’s almost like the movie was made just so he could film that dance.

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I’ve recently been working on an update to Url Grey, my URL shortener. I recently came across a situation where I wanted to create and update a bunch of short URLs at once, and the only options I had were console witchery, and manually doing it one by one (did the latter). It’s the first time the need has come up for me, but it felt like a good combination of thing I’d like to have as an option in the future, and something that would stretch my Rails abilities in the implementation.

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When I woke up today, one of the first things I saw was Kai Cole (architect, and pertinently in this circumstance Joss Whedon’s ex-wife) had written in The Wrap about her marriage to Joss Whedon, and its end. It’s heart-breaking. I’ve updated my open letter to Joss in response.

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It turns out that the highest price of living expatriated from the country where I grew up is that the distance between me and my home prevents me from physically participating in the politics that matter right now.

This post is maybe NSFW.

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I struggle with depression, and I’m aways looking for ways to help myself get through things. One thing that I’ve found works for me is burying myself in code–it provides enough structure, momentum, and a positive feedback loop that it can help me get out, and it’s good that it’s something that I can pick up and do even when I’m at my worst.

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I get depressed sometimes. I’m not talking the colloquial depression where you feel a little mopey though. I get clinical depression, that has in the past required the support of a therapist to work through.

I don’t see a therapist anymore though (but I would if I thought I needed to again), and I’ve developed some coping mechanisms that help keep me on track and navigate rising tides of depression until they go out again.

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while false
  give_up(you)
  let_down(you)
end

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My father in law recently took me to my first cricket match: Australia vs England in the qualifying rounds of the Women’s Cricket World Cup. It was absolutely fantastic!

(This post is going to be pretty boring if you don’t like either baseball or cricket, FYI.)

Before I went, I was thinking of cricket as a weird hybrid of baseball and (10-pin) bowling: you have a batter, but rather than just hitting runs, their job is to stop the pitcher from knocking over some sticks set up just behind them. I can report that this is mostly inaccurate.

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This post is a bit similar to last week’s because it describes a solution I came up with for an issue in writing my automated deployment to Dokku series (link to first post): how to programmatically link to other posts in a series without having to manually write markdown links.

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For a while I’ve been looking for a way to schedule posts for this blog, which is being hosted on Github Pages. Because Jekyll is a static site generator and not a full CMS, there isn’t an inbuilt way to do it. I had found a post about using Zapier to merge in feature-branches for every new post to get this working, but when I was looking at it, it didn’t really appeal, in large part because it requires giving full access to your repo to Zapier.

When I started putting together the automated dokku test and deployment series (link to first post), it got to the point where I needed scheduling, because I was writing the posts on vacation all at once, but didn’t want them to go live all at the same time. So I ended up hacking together a quick and dirty fix with a VPS running a cronjob.

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