Ep 4: A Podcast, Density (😱), and Desirable Streets
Ep 4: A Podcast, Density (😱), and Desirable Streets
👋 Happy Friday!
You're getting this email because you sometime in the last few years you asked to get emails from me, either as they relate to software development, random ranting on the internet, or rock climbing. (intermediateruby.com, josh.works, and climbersguide.co respectively, the latter being offline for the moment. 😬)
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Warning: 1000 word email ahead
"I don't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead"
-Mark Twain
I feel more pensive on Fridays than I do on Thursdays - I think I'm going to take a stab at sending these emails out end-of-day on Friday. It's either that, or end-of-day Monday. Thoughts? Smash reply (or unsubscribe) and let me know!
Last time I mentioned being on a podcast - the podcast episode is published, on the software development-focused podcast GreaterThanCode.
Ironically, for a podcast with three software developers on it, we spent most of the time talking about rock climbing and accidents within (and outside of) rock climbing.
If you're a rock climber, even if not into software development, you'll probably still find it interesting:
Greater Than Code Ep 220: Safety Science and Failure As An Opportunity For Growth with Josh Thompson
I'll share more about it next week! I've got some blog posts I need to dust off that are all about lead falling, and have some great gifs, like a gif of this amazing catch:
Anyway, a little more about Urbanism and Desirable Streets:
Housing and Urbanism 🏡🏫🚋🛣
Two emails ago I proposed that:
These [historic often-photographed downtown buildings] are obviously some of the most beautiful buildings in Golden, and if they burned down tomorrow, it would be impossible to rebuild them in their current form.
Last email I explained why these buildings would be illegal today, particularly the most loved appreciated buildings in Golden:
Each individual building violates HUGE portions of modern zoning laws. The primary offenders:
- Minimum lot size
- Setback requirements
- Off-street parking requirements
I then asked "do you think it should be completely illegal to build another collection of similar buildings.
One response:
I think it should be illegal to make them illegal!
And another encouraged a dose of potentially life-saving wisdom:
It would also be illegal to rebuild the beautiful ship called the Titanic.
So, what to do? Is there a graceful reconciliation here, between "don't re-build the Titanic" and "don't make old stuff illegal? Hit "reply", tell me your thoughts.
Two links for you urbanologists:
From the piece:
Every trip has a shortest route, from a to b.
But on average, pedestrians choose to walk around 10% farther than their shortest path.
Why don't people always take the shortest route?
I'd never heard this phrase before. Have you? Ironically, we all use "desire paths" nearly every day.
It feels like this is some sort of commentary on the modern world:
A desire path (often referred to as a desire line in transportation planning, and also known as a game trail, social trail, fishermen trail, herd path, cow path, elephant path, goat track, pig trail, use trail, and bootleg trail) is a path created as a consequence of erosion caused by human or animal foot traffic. The path usually represents the shortest or most easily navigated route between an origin and destination. The width and severity of erosion are often indicators of the traffic level that a path receives. Desire paths emerge as shortcuts where constructed paths take a circuitous route, have gaps, or are non-existent.
👩💻 Software Development
Besides the podcast that I mentioned, I've got two links for you:
👉 How To Integrate Stripe Checkout and a Static Site Generator
Ages ago (before Covid, back when we travelled and socialized), I'd wanted to hook up Stripe to my website to allow someone to "pay money, get a document in their inbox", and thought surely there's no way I have to use something like Gumroad to do this. I'm a Software Developer(TM)!
Turns out it was rather harder than I'd expected. Many hours later (and a few sets of API keys, some emails to Zapier and Stripe support, and a few dozen test transactions), I figured it out.
Anyway, that product had sat on a shelf for a year, languishing, and broken (pesky rotated API keys).
For reasons I'll explain later, the course has floated back up in my attention, and just this morning I figured out how to add Apple Pay to the payment options.
Check out my notes: How To Add Apple Pay Options To Stripe Checkout
I'm working on building the skills around rapidly building/deploying (to Heroku's free tier, so it takes a minute to boot up...) tiny applications. I'm starting with Sinatra, I'll probably bump up to Rails once I need a database more complicated than writing strings to "database.txt" at the root of the application. 😂
Anyway, I'll be publishing a lot more "toy apps" down the road. I've got a bunch of ideas, like:
- Haiku generators/madlibs
- learn REST API basics via a treasure hunt
- Basic Cron jobs - email yourself a question every few days, receive answers, report on results occasionally
And more. But I can now build and deploy this tiny little sinatra app, which has an absolute minimum of styling and responsive content, from scratch, in about twenty minutes. Oh, the potential.
⁉️ Questions and Requests
On Monday, I'm planning on tying into a lead rope for the first time in about six months. On a scale of 1-10, I think my anxiety level questing off (at the beginning of the session) will be about 6. Two routes later, I'll be 2.
How about you? You sport climbers out there - how anxious do you feel getting back into sport after a long break?
- Josh
PS Did you make it all the way down here? Wow. Amazing. You should get a prize just for that. But we know extrinsic rewards are less durable than intrinsic, so I'm doing you a favor by not presenting any other reward. :)