While developing PillowSkin, I have become used to the habit of creating small releases. This resulted in me always having to repetitively write the commands git checkout master, then git merge develop, then git tag... It does get old after a while when your total release count gets into the hundreds (PillowSkin is at ~180 versions at this point in writing). However, with the power of Python scripting, we can do a little bit of scripting to save us countless cumulative hours of googling for the right commands to type. This post details the creation of a simple CLI tool to automate release building using Invoke, a Python task runner, which I explain in my main post here

This "simple trick" is nothing very special: it's our good old friend gzip. However, not all static website hosts automatically compress and serve your website and assets. This may inadvertently result in larger-than-necessry file sizes when creating and publishing your static websites on hosts such as Gitlab Pages, Github Pages, or Netlify. As such, we need to manually compress the files as part of our website build step.

Adding Python into your Elixir web application is a very tantalizing proposition. Elixir isn't that great at crunching numbers, but by leveraging the data science powers of Python, we can add in some machine learning magic into our applications.

PostCSS is a fantastic tool to add to your website. It helps to do some post-processing magic for your CSS files with its plugin ecosystem. Some notable plugins that I personally like a lot are autoprefixer, a plugin that adds vendor prefixes to your CSS, and TailwindCSS, a utility-based CSS framework.

However, when I was adding PostCSS to my Hugo websites, it wasn't as straight-forward as reading the documentation and following the instructions. Nope, not at all. Just have a look at the PostCSS pipe function documentation in on the Hugo documentation site. It's terribly sparse with hardly any valuable examples.

I spent a good few hours just trying to get it to work. So, for the benefit of those who find this while trying to figure out the Hugo documentation, here's the full steps.

To develop on crouton, you will need to allow ChromeOS to access to the required server ports locally, which is blocked by the chroot’s firewall. Effectively, you will be adjusting the firewall (using the iptables package) on the chroot’s startup. You will need to do this for the two ports required by Expo, 19000 and 19001. Follow the crouton documentation for more detailed instructions on running servers in crouton.