Cassey Lottman

In Ruby on Rails, the software ecosystem I predominantly work in these days, yarn has been the default package manager for the javascript side of things for a long time. (See my big write-up of the timeline & current state of frontend asset management in Rails). When many of the apps I regularly work on were written, that was a pretty reasonable choice! Yarn had some solid advantages over npm generally, way back when (that's less obviously true now; npm works just fine these days, and has some…

Instead of showing you a picture that does not at all do the bright yellow cover and red ink justice, here it is in greyscale. Recently I enjoyed a very good zine called "Clipart Crypt: a clipart fanzine", by Lee Arden. Lee is a zinester and small press runner I've gotten to know over the last few years. The zine was excellent; I encourage you to purchase a copy and enjoy it, too! Physically, the zine is large, a bit bigger than US letter sized paper. It has a slightly thicker yellow cover, and…

We have some friends visiting us here in Ottawa soon and I wanted to share a few ideas of things they might want to check out while they're here. I may have gotten a little carried away. This list is curated based on my own particular perspective and knowledge; there's certainly some cool stuff I didn't include because I don't know about it or because I haven't made it there yet myself. It's reflective of my own location: we live on the west end, near the Civic Hospital and Experimental Farm…

I really like riding bikes as a way to get places. I like doing it with my kids, too! There aren't quite as many books for kids about bikes as there are about say, cars and trucks and construction equipment, but there are some out there. Here are a few I like a lot! # Picture books: In paper pages (picture books; preschool-ish age), we have: "Bikes for Sale" by Carter Higgins. This one is my absolute favorite. It's a story of friendship, ultimately, with two people (er, anthropomorphic animals)…