I'm a full-stack web developer, and this is my blog. Please connect with me on LinkedIn or visit my Github for more! Also, you may be interested in learning more about me.

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Projects

• The Surprising Power of Jekyll's site.data

  Oct 21, 2025 • things-i-learned

  

  I’ve been speaking a lot this past year. This is new and exciting to me, and I want to track all my accomplishments, because each one of them feels new, exciting, and honestly a little scary. So keeping track of everything is a great way for me to mark these accomplishments (I may also have had a donut after my last talk at Momentum).

  But do I want to manually update this page every time something changes? Heck naw. This is structured data, and Jekyll should treat it as such.

  Enter site.data

  Enter site.data. Any structured file (JSON, YAML, CSV or TSV) you place in your Jekyll _data folder will become accessible as site.data.filename ¹. You can then access it like any other variable. Jekyll is smart enough to interpret your file as a list which you can sort, filter, etc.

  What this means is I can create a CSV like this:

  event_date,venue,talk,link
  2025-10-16,Momentum Dev Con,Get Unblocked Faster,,
  ....
  

  and then access it via:

  
  {% assign all_appearances = site.data.speaking_appearances | sort:'event_date' %}
  
  <h2>Upcoming</h2>
  {% for row in all_appearances %}
  {% assign date_to_check = row.event_date | date: '%s' %}
  {% if date_to_check > current_date %}
  <p> {{row.event_date | date: '%B %d, %Y'}}:
  {%if row.link%}
  <a href="{{row.link}}">
  {%endif%}
  {{row.talk}} -
  {%if row.link%}
  </a>
  {%endif%}
  {{row.venue}}
  </p>
  {%endif%}
  {% endfor %}
  
  

  This looks like a lot if you’re not used to Liquid syntax, but it’s basically a fancy templating language. On the first line, we assign a variable to hold the “list of stuff in site.data.appearances, sorted by event_date” (which is one of the headers in the CSV). Then we loop through each item in the list and compare its date, which has been converted to a UNIX timestamp, to the current date (which I assigned earlier in the template). If the item has a date in the future, we render it to the page, optionally with a link to the source material.

  This is already a huge time-saver, and means that all my dates, links, etc., will be rendered consistently, and I can change their styling/look without having to manually copy and paste.

  But let’s not stop there. I don’t want to manually update a CSV that lives on my home computer (or in a github repo), that sounds boring. So inspired by my husband Chris Combs who has set up something similar, let’s automate this!

  Enter a database that is not a database

  Google Sheets is not a database, although I wouldn’t be the first person to use it as such. And for a simple way to store (a small amount of) structured data², it’s pretty darn good.

  So I copy my CSV from above into a google sheet and publish it to the web as a CSV. This does make the CSV publicly accessible for anyone who knows the URL, but I’m not storing any PII in here, so it’s fine. Then, as an extra line in my custom deploy pipeline as well as my custom preview script, I add:

  wget https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/link/to/spreadsheet?output=csv --output-document=${SITE_ROOT_DIR}/_data/speaking_appearances.csv || echo "Something went wrong"
  

  This means that every time I deploy, or launch a local version of the site with bundle exec jekyll serve, I get the most up-to-date version of the Google sheet, which I can update from anywhere.

  Jekyll is still a static site generator, so I still have to deploy to see the most recent changes, but that works for me, for this thing that is only semi-regularly updated anyway. If this is not for you, you probably already know that and will not use Jekyll.

  I hope this was useful! I definitely think there’s a lot more that can be done with Jekyll’s datafiles and I can’t wait to come up with more insane ideas.

  Further reading

  • Jekyll’s official site has some very cool examples of things you can do with a datafile.

  Footnotes

  1. for this reason you should avoid having two files with the same base name but different extensions. Which seems like a silly limitation but oh well. ↩

  2. if I give ten million talks this solution may not scale. But I think a number of things about this hypothetical would become unsustainable first. ↩

• Accessibility the Easy Way With Deque's Linter

  Oct 4, 2025 • things-i-learned, housekeeping • accessibility

  I have been interested in, though never an expert in, web accessibility, for years. I believe common-sense affordances like alt text and keyboard navigability in a website are shining examples of the curb-cut effect, so while I am not (currently) disabled¹, I do at least try to make my websites accessible.

  But I didn’t know until attending Abbey Perini’s talk at CodeWord last week that I could automate at least some of this work with an accessibility linter.

  Wait, a what?

  Yeah, my reaction too. But just like Prettier or eslint can enforce code style rules, an accessibility linter can enforce, or at least warn you about, accessibility violations. I immediately downloaded deque’s axe Accessibility Linter plugin for VSCode and it’s already caught a few things on this here blog. (I may have forgotten alt text in a few places…)

  Accessibility is much more than automated tools. A site could pass the linter and pass all kinds of other tests and still be difficult to use. But this is one new tool in my toolbox that I didn’t know about before, and I’m glad to have it.

  Watch Abbey’s talk for yourself on Youtube.

  1. The stats vary, but some say that 1 in 3 Americans will experience a temporary disability of 90 days or more before reaching the age of 65. That’s a lot. ↩

Breaking news

My talk on how to build a cookbook in Python has been accepted for PyLadiesCon, online this December.

• Who's Touching My Files? Watch Out With Watchman

  Sep 25, 2025 • things-i-learned

  Is Mr. Game and Watch a watch-man? I don’t see why not.

  I have a weird setup at work with a lot of interlocking config files. (We sort of halfway support git’s sparse-checkout feature but with an internal tool that’s supposed to keep everything in sync outside of git. Don’t ask. It’s better than I’m making it sound.)

  Anyway because of this funky setup, I was running into an issue where a file was being modified, incorrectly, when I ran some command. I wasn’t sure which command was causing the ghost line to reappear, because it kept happening behind my back. It was driving me crazy, and I tried all sorts of solutions to ‘catch’ the file appearing.

  What finally worked was watchman, a little file monitor tool that Facebook developed for web development. What it’s supposed to do is monitor a directory for changes, and then run some sort of command on changed files. It runs in the background and automatically remembers your watches even if you reboot your machine, which cannot be said for inotifywait or fswatch or any of the other things I tried. It also works on Windows, Mac and Linux, because under the hood it hooks into one of the above utils depending on your OS. In other words, it Just Works(tm).

  The canonical watchman example is running a CSS minifier any time CSS within a certain directory is modified.

  watchman watch path-to-dir

  watchman -- trigger path-to-dir name-of-trigger '*.css' -- minify-css

  In my case, I don’t need to run any sort of processor on changed files, I just need to know who or what is changing them. Easy:

  watchman watch path-to-dir

  watchman -- trigger path-to-dir mytrigger 'the-file.txt' -- say "I changed"

  This was so silly (and for a while my computer was making a horrendous number of annoying noises) but it worked great and helped me track down which unrelated command was changing my config file.

  Learn more about watchman from the official docs and give it a shot.

  P.S. the official docs have about 3 suggestions for where to find watchman’s logs– I found mine in none of those suggestions, but I was able to run watchman get-log to find the (quite mysterious) location.

Breaking news

I'm speaking in-person at Momentum Dev Con in Cincinnati.