Alert! this week I once again write on extra geeky topics. I'm not sure if I should write more geeky things or more generic things. I guess this warning is sort of like when you watched Teen Titans and the theme song was in Japanese.

Fast Connection

It's great to be back in Civilization this week, after a week vacation at a national park for our anniversary. It really made me think of how much we take things for granted. Like internet service. It's also weird when you have to take pretty much everything you need for a week and try to fit it in an RV. You end up taking too much stuff and find out very quickly what you forgot.

That reminds me of how we put web projects together. Maybe we add too many modules and tools, use less than half of them and realize you forgot to take care of other, more important things. Runing the Lighthouse Performance Chrome Extension and Accessibility report (great Chrome or Terminal tool by the way) and realizing your numbers are too low.

Full Stack...Really?

It isn't just that we don't have great tools, but the responsibilities for web development have really exploded to the point where it's not reasonable for someone to be a Web Master like in the old days. I'm not sure hiring a true Full Stack Developer is even possible these days.

Then there's the whole CI/CD toolchain where you run tests, create your build process, push to your endpoint. Does anyone even FTP something anymore? I have this one client that I use FTP for and even for that I've switched to git-ftp.

CI/CD Tools

After finishing up the Bootstrap course (out soon I hope). I've got a lot of cool Github and Github Actions courses in my pipeline. I've picked up a lot of experience with Github Actions recently and really enjoyed what it can do for you, so I can't wait to share.

Also, I have a ridiculous amount of Github clothing. Their graphic design is second to none on the web industry, so I sort of over-purchased it a bit. I don't do a lot of Live Action, my courses then to have more screen capture. They're VERY picky about what you can wear when you do one of those. However, I don't wear a lot of fancy shirts. It's usually just a t-shirt for me.

Thankfully they approved the Octocat shirt above, which you can see me wearing on some of my few courses where you see me and also as the official intro photo in a course.

They also built me this set that I think looks like no one else's and has a lot of my personal items in it, but I felt like I would do them a solid and bought this generic blue hoodie. I got the eagle in Canada when I first met Morten in person and the little robot beside it is from a BarCamp event that I hosted here in my hometown a while back.

I was pretty relieved when Microsoft bought Github since I figured no-one would complain that I was wearing a shirt from a Microsoft owned property now that we were...cousins.

Wait a minute...am I getting personal again...this is the geekier edition for pete's sake? Ugh!

Github Actions

So, if there was one technology I suggest you dig into this year, I'd be Github Actions. It frees your computer from having to run tests, builds and pushes and puts all of them on Github's servers.

If you want to take a look at an example, I created this action called copy-to-branches and published it in the Marketplace. It does something not a lot of people will need, but it does show you how to combine a bash script to run Github Commands and have them modify your Github repo. Opening up endless possibilities for the future.

Here's a course I did on Github Actions. It's a good intro. I really think Github Actions is changing the way people do the web. Plus I feel (and I don't have any inside info) that Microsoft bought them for a much higher purpose than what they're doing right now. What that is...who knows.

What are GitHub Actions? from GitHub Actions First Look by Ray Villalobos

Coming Back

I'll be coming back soon with new videos as well as a new episode of "The Launch"​, so stay tuned and let me know if the comments if you prefer the more geeky Ray (and who doesn't) or the more non-geeky Ray (I don't know if I can do generic topics for too long). See you soon.