Semantic versioning (or semver) is a very basic concept that stirs a bit of controversy on the internet. A quick google for “semantic versioning problems” brings back a number of essays about all the shortcomings. They do make fair points, though to be able to appreciate the deficiencies, it’s good to just understand the thing […]

https://cron-trigger.netlify.app/ https://github.com/lpmi-13/cron-trigger So cron expressions are a basic aspect of linux computing, and you’ll see them in all the major public cloud providers (AWS/Azure/GCP) for running things on a schedule. They’re useful to know, and once you’ve actually used them, they’re fairly straightforward. Well…AWS and Azure both use special syntaxes that are non-standard, but I […]

Asking learners to organize code blocks that have been shuffled around is an approach often referred to as Parsons Problems. There is an excellent short rationale for them, and also a more in-depth research study (along with various other online sources) if you’re interested in reading more. The general idea is that there is a […]

All credit for the amazing title “Snub Modules” goes to Peter West. https://github.com/lpmi-13/snubmodule Having created (and learned quite a bit from) the how to update a submodule micromaterial, I figured I’d go ahead and also learn how to “un-submodule” a submodule. Essentially, if you ever want to stop tracking a submodule and just have it […]

I’m currently trying to map out what the future looks like for micromaterials, and I’ve been kicking around a few thoughts: it would be cool if there were a central place to discover all the micromaterials (like https://www.micromaterials.org/, but less restricted to just github) it would also be very nice if this central place offered […]

So git submodules aren’t really all that complicated, but because they’re wrapped in mystery and intrigue (much like rebase and reflog), they tend to be a bit less well understood. As any long-time readers of this blog will immediately guess, I’m going to say that’s mostly because submodules are merely unfamiliar, rather than being complicated. […]

Similar to the previous micromaterial on IP addresses, I decided to make something, primarily to help myself remember more details about netmasks. https://netmask-slider.netlify.com/   The short explanation is they are used to specify subnets (sub-networks) within networks, mostly so we don’t run out of IP addresses (slide the dot all the way to the left […]

I’m starting to move more into the area of tech-focused micromaterials, and this is part of a large shift towards a focus on TechEd. Does that term already exist? I googled around a bunch and couldn’t find any association with the way I’m using it, so I’m just gonna keep using it until somebody is […]

…or, do…but on the third syllable! here’s the web app (and it’s a PWA, so available offline!) source code at https://github.com/lpmi-13/stress-match-game This micromaterial is mostly an ode to my first love of corpus-informed word lists, the Academic Word List (Coxhead, 2000). Since these words tend to be multi-syllabic and a bit less common in informal […]

This isn’t about a micromaterial per se, but more about the data used to create micromaterials. I was reading an excellent blog post about word lists, and wondered how many of them were accessible in formats other than excel spreadsheets. I soon found out that a lot of them were actually in pdfs (notoriously difficult to […]