Since I'm now in my third week of employment with them I figured it was safe to announce: After 4+ years with Govalo I started a new job at Filevine! Honestly this was one of the longer job hunts of my career so far. I'm not sure if it's the market or that I was a bit more picky in what I applied for, but it started way back in September of last year (2025). I was mostly applying for staff level engineer roles and a small handful of manager roles. I hadn't considered Filevine but a friend who...

I've been sharing a lot of links to my blog on social media lately. I figured I should probably help those of you still stuck in the social silos of big tech break free from the chains of the algorithmic feed. It’s time to remind you of tech long forgotten by many, but still widely used if you know where to look. RSS Remember that orange square with two quarter circles and a dot? Yeah, this thing! RSS (short for Really Simple Syndication) was developed in the late 1990s and early 2000s as a ...

I don't know why but I'm super excited about this! I think that it's something to do with the thought of being able to try new recipes all the time. I've always loved trying new flavors and foods. The thing I hate though is finding the recipes and shopping for the ingredients for a weeks worth of groceries to make exactly the right number of servings. But be honest with yourself, you hate it too. We all hate it. We decided to do something about it and subscribe to Blue Apron. When I say we ar...

I’ve been wanting a dead‑simple way to publish small personal sites on Neocities without build tools, databases, or plugins. Today I’m sharing Neo‑CMS — a tiny flat‑file CMS that renders Markdown right in the browser. The whole idea is: just files. Drop Markdown into /content, list those files in content/index.json, and add a little YAML front matter for titles, menus, and slugs. That’s it. No build step. No dependencies. No CLI. If you can edit a text file and upload it to Neocities, you ca...

I’ve been having a lot of fun the past few days building out my home server. It’s been a fun adventure revisiting old territory, and I wanted to take some time to write about the setup I’ve settled on for now. The core idea behind this setup is simple: the foundation should be well documented. That way, if I want or need to tear it all down, build a new server, and spin everything back up, I can do it with minimal effort. This setup definitely still has some rough edges, but what I have is so...

I’m sitting here writing this on the couch of the in-law suite at my girlfriend’s parents’ house in St. George, Utah. Now that is a sentence I never would have guessed I’d be writing last year. Honestly, it’s not even a sentence I think I could have guessed I’d be writing back in April. But here I am. That feels like as good a place as any to pause, look forward, and write down a few goals for 2026. I’m a firm believer that growth without goals is mostly accidental, and I’d like to be a litt...

I just merged PR #21 into django-blog, adding first-class h-card support across the app. This is part of my slow march toward more semantic, IndieWeb-friendly markup without bolting on heavy third-party tooling. This change is mostly invisible from a UI perspective, but it adds a lot of structure under the hood. What’s an H-Card? An h-card is a microformat for representing a person or organization in HTML. Think of it as a lightweight, standards-based alternative to things like JSON-LD for b...

If you’ve ever built a Shopify app, you already know that webhooks are at the heart of the platform. Everything from orders and fulfillments to customers and subscriptions fires through them. But actually testing Shopify webhooks during development can be exhausting. You either need a publicly accessible HTTPS endpoint, a tunnel that loves to break at the worst possible moment, or a staging environment just to debug one handler. Triggering real events from the Shopify admin is slow, unreliab...

I recently started my journey of rebuilding this blog using Django. It's a learning experience for me, with the side benefit of nudging me to write more. Something I wanted to add was some super basic analytics to help make sure this site is actually being used by someone other than me. I wanted to see things like a (somewhat naive) count of unique visitors, total page views, where requests were coming from (both referrer and geographically), and response codes (mostly so I can find 404s). Th...

My girlfriend Azure and I sometimes do body doubling night where we each take part in our own hobbies in the same room as each other. It's a great way to spend time together and still have our own interests. Azure Azure's been working on her alcohol ink art. She's getting really good! I love watching her create art. Aaron I've been working on my blog (of course lol). I created a workable posting interface from the front-end of this blog. It's what I'm using to write this post (mostly as a t...