from brodan import Blog

illustrator

Leveling Up with Adobe Illustrator

Back in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, I started learning how to use Adobe Illustrator. I wrote about it in a previous blog post: On Learning Adobe Illustrator. I've since been using Illustrator more and more with the goal of designing goods beyond just enamel pins, such as

html

Personal Site Redesign

I'm happy to announce that I've finally launched a long overdue facelift of my personal website, https://brodan.biz/. Goals There were a number of goals in mind with this redesign: 1. Accessibility (a11y) - I wanted my site to be compliant with web accessibility standards as much as possible.

kubernetes

Quick Read: How to Set a Default Container in a Kubernetes Manifest

Another day, another minor inconvenience at work that I should have fixed ages ago. This week I finally took a minute to fix a Kubernetes annoyance that I was dealing with for ages: how to specify a default container when using a multi-container deployment manifest. The Problem When using kubectl,

python

Quick Read: Improving Build Times with Docker + Python

I recently found myself frustrated by how much time I was wasting waiting on Docker to rebuild my Python image anytime a dependency changed. I knew there had to be a better way.

flipper-zero Featured

A Visual Guide to Flipper Zero GUI Modules

I've recently been diving into the Flipper Zero multi-tool and learning how to develop a custom Flipper Application Package (FAP). It's been a very overwhelming process as there is very little documentation when it comes to the Flipper Zero firmware and what it has to offer. Thanks to Derek Jamison

tattooing

Brodan's Tattoo Bucket List

This post is a collection of all of the tattoo artists I hope to meet and get tattooed by before I run out of space on my body. I've only planned to tattoo my legs and as a result I don't have much time left. This means that, unfortunately, not

NFT

Learning NFT Provenance by Example: Investigation Follow-Up

It's been nearly a year since I decided to verify the BAYC's provenance hash and made an interesting discovery. This post is a follow-up on what I've learned since then.

ffmpeg

Dynamic Aspect Ratio Detection With FFmpeg

This week I've been working on a challenging new feature for one of GIPHY's GIF creation tools. The goal is to detect every aspect ratio change of a long-form video, which is useful for videos such as smart-phone videos that contain a combination of vertical and horizontal video. Here's an

ethereum

How to Run a Private (Local) Ethereum Network with Go Ethereum

I've been learning more and more about Ethereum lately and I wanted to solidify some of my understandings by running an Ethereum node locally. I ran into several issues along the way due to a combination of less-than-helpful documentation and super outdated Stack Exchange and Medium posts. In this post

NFT

Learning NFT Generation By Example: An Open-Source Success Story

Lately I've been heads down on a generative NFT PFP project and working heavily with a Node.js tool called sharp [https://sharp.pixelplumbing.com/]. sharp is a high-speed image processing library that's useful for image converting, resizing, extraction, etc. GitHub - lovell/sharp: High performance Node.js image processing,

NFT Featured

Learning NFT Provenance by Example: A Bored Ape Investigation

I was recently approached by an artist friend of mine to help them build and launch an NFT collection using their artwork. I've never worked with smart contracts or any of the NFT-related technologies, so I've been learning all of it myself. One concept that I found particularly interesting was

ghost

How to Hide the Ghost Blog Subscribe Button

Ghost is the platform I use to host this blog, and I love it. However, I don't offer subscriptions and yet the subscribe button won't go away. This post covers how to hide it.

python

Logging S3 Download Progress with Python and Boto3

This post demonstrates how to log the download progress of an S3 object at self-defined intervals using Python's built-in logger and without any additional third-party libraries (besides boto3). At the time of this writing I'm using boto3 version 1.18.2 and Python version 3.9.1. The full source

tattooing

8 AAPI Tattoo Artists You Should Support and Follow This Month (And Every Month After).

A personally curated list of eight exceptional AAPI tattoo artists.

react

Rendering a Custom Font Dynamically with React + TypeScript

This past week at GIPHY I was working on an interesting feature for one our creation tools involving TypeScript and custom font uploads.

illustrator

On Learning Adobe Illustrator

In an effort to start doing some of my own design work for my pin company, Pingrove Press, I finally took another crack at learning Adobe Illustrator and how to work with the dreaded pen tool.

web monetization

How To Monetize a Ghost Blog with Web Monetization

This post is going to be quick and easy. Web Monetization (WM) helps you get paid for your content. You can learn all about it on https://webmonetization.org/. If you use Ghost [https://ghost.org/] for your CMS/blog like I do, there's an easy way to integrate WM

command line

betty: A Slightly Better cp

betty is a simple command line tool which combines the functionality of cp and mkdir into one command.

tattooing

Brodan's Tattoo Compendium

Brodan's tattoo collection from 2014-present.

toreba

On Winning Toreba

I've won ten prizes on Toreba to date, and I have the receipts to prove it.

python Featured

Configuring a .pypirc File for Easier Python Packaging

Today I published a new blog post on my Truveris's engineering blog on how to configure a .pypirc file to simplify Python packaging. You can read the post here: Configuring a .pypirc File for Easier Python Packaging [https://truveris.github.io/articles/configuring-pypirc/] If you have any questions or feedback

tattooing

7 Color Tattoo Artists You Should Have Already Emailed

In a previous iteration of this post I presented 9 kickass blackwork tattoo artists. In this iteration, I'll discuss a bunch of the best color tattoo artists I've ever encountered.

nodejs Featured

Verify Travis CI Webhook Notifications with Node.js

Travis CI allows users to configure webhook notifications which can be sent during certain build events. I recently played with this feature in order to send SMS messages via Twilio.

python

Parsing CSV Files with Python's DictReader

I had an interview today (spoiler: I didn't get an offer), and one of the rounds of my interview involved refactoring some poorly written Python [https://www.python.org/] code. In this code was a function that parsed a CSV file and returned all the rows with columns matching some

twilio

Building Twilio MMS Bots

I recently wrote two short tutorials for this awesome project called hack.guides() which is run by pluralsight. These posts are intended to cover identical material in two different langauges (ruby and python).