This morning I went through the unexpectedly pleasant experience of adding an SSL certification to this site. Turned out to be much easier than I planned on, and there was only one small hiccup I was able to resolve quickly. I opted to go with a free Let's Encrypt SSL/TLS Certificate and use the automated installation from certbot. The certbot instructions were straightforward and only took a few minutes to complete, but did result in one issue, so here's a quick tutorial on how to add an SSL cert to your Ghost site quickly. First, a few specifics about my current setup: Ubuntu 14.04 (trusty) Nginx 1.4.6 Ghost 0.11.10 Hosted on DigitalOcean Install the necessary packages sudo apt-get update sudo

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A few months ago I joined the drop for the Massdrop x RAMA M10-A Mechanical Mini Pad - a programmable 10-key mini-pad designed by a collaboration between industrial design studio RAMA WORKS and UK-based manufacturer Machine Industries. The keypad is CNC-ed from aircraft-grade aluminum and has a hefty weight. In short, it's absolutely beautiful. Included with the machined housing and reprogrammable 10-key PCB is a set of Cherry switches, keycaps and micro-USB cable. The keypad was available unassembled or assembled for a few bucks more. I went with unassembled. Assembly of the M10-A The physical assembly of the keypad wasn't too bad. To start I watched a few videos as a refresher on soldering. Then soldered in the Cherry MX Clear switches, popped on the keycaps,

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This past week I had the chance to tour the soon-to-open RocketSpace campus in London. The Islington location builds on the success of their San Francisco campus and will be followed by new campuses in Australia and others in Europe. RocketSpace's campuses are more than just coworking offices (though the London campus does have hot-desks available), the building is designed for small, growing start-ups. Our tour guide explained they typically look for start-ups who have received at least one round of post-F&F funding. The London campus is part of the Royal Bank of Scotland building and built in a figure-eight shape - two connected circular buildings with courtyards in the middle. This floorplan maximizes the number of offices with windows and is a feature

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Quick tutorial on how to add attributes to the <body> element within a React app. There are many use cases for this - the primary being to add a class (e.i. <body class="some--class">, and it works for any other attribute. The reason this is needed is because the <body> lies 'outside' most React apps. The recommended setup for React is to add a <div> within a page's <body> where your root component will be rendered, like this: <html> <head> </head> <body> <div id="root"> <!-- Root Component --> </div> </body> </html> Add

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Last week my wife and I had the chance to hop down to Porto, Portugal for a few days - flying in early Friday morning and departing the following Wednesday. As I'm not a fan of working from (most) hotel rooms I scoped out the coworking office options and booked a desk at Porto i/o. Porto i/o has two locations, Downtown and Riverside, both within the central historic area. The Downtown location is a bright, 3-story building with communal desks, coffee/snacks and meeting rooms which can be booked for a single day to several months. On the day I was there most desks were booked and the other coworkers were super helpful, giving me a tour of the office and making sure I

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