Zagaja.com

At MAPC we have been thinking more about making our web applications accessible to all our users. Unfortunately standard web frameworks and tools do not bake this functionality in. Accessibility is its own specialization with code and nuances that software developers have to learn on top of everything else they do. The good news is that as this issue has become more prominent tools are emerging to make it easier to automate making your application accessible. One tool I started experimenting with is the axe-matchers gem from Deque.

This week is looking to be the highest number of RSVPs we’ve ever had at Code for Boston. Instead of the usual 30–40 people we are going to have over seventy people attend our Meetup. This trend started a few weeks ago and I have raised our Meetup cap to compensate for the increased interest. Despite this, we still have a waitlist. After a year of steady attendance it looks like we may quickly hit a new level of participation.

A year ago I started work on bills.ctnewsjunkie.com, a place where people can express their opinions on bills before the Connecticut General Assembly. The nice thing about bills.ctnewsjunkie.com is its pretty simple. All you need to do is vote up or down a bill depending on if you like it. Then we display those votes so readers know how popular a bill before the Connecticut General Assembly is with the rest of readership.

I spent yesterday getting headless Chrome working with RSpec and Capybara on one our projects at MAPC. The reason for doing this is many of our website visitors use the chrome browser, and the new headless version of Chrome allows us to run an automated test suite on our application that uses it in a way our users do. Writing these automated tests that focus on features, called system tests in Rails, can increase our confidence that we are not breaking our application with new code.

I began 2019 by taking a hiatus from the blog to focus on some New Years resolutions. One of them was to finally start learning how to use the Arduino system that I received for Christmas. What is Arduino? It is an electronics prototype platform. You can buy small parts and combine them to form your own gadgets. In many ways it is a more complex version of Legos. It is interesting, rewarding, and also quite challenging.