Hello, I'm   Jason

I’m hiring! I’m currently looking to fill a variety of roles as our organization continues to expand. I’ve placed a few highlights under each of the positions below. Please review the general descriptions and if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me, or apply and ask our Human Resource team. Hope to see you soon!

Earlier tonight I pushed a minor updated to the SpaacedOut Jekyll theme to the Ruby Gems repository. This update has a minor change in the pagination and fixed the tag page links. You can grab a copy of the gem by visiting https://rubygems.org/gems/spaacedout.

Over the past several weeks I’ve hinted that I may move my website, JasonGaylord.com, over to GitHub Pages. I wanted to do this for a few reasons. The biggest reason was to focus more on delivering content and posts and less on the way something looked and how it worked. CloudScribe is a great .NET Core CMS that offers a lot of flexibility in a full featured website. However, that’s not the needs of my personal site.

I’ve been searching all over the web trying to find a way that I could schedule posts for future dates on GitHub pages. I have a tendency of writing content well in advance and scheduling the content to be released for future dates. I was struggling to find a sound solution for this. Searching online directed me to:

For the past several weeks I’ve been working on my first Jekyll theme called SpaacedOut. Jekyll themes are also used by GitHub Pages as GitHub Pages are actually a Jekyll site under the hood. The theme is responsive and contains a basic look and feel with a menu on the left in a desktop view and the menu collapsed, but available as a slide out, in a mobile view. This will give you an idea of what the theme looks like:

I’ve been experimenting with Jekyll and GitHub Pages lately. Jekyll is a Ruby-based generator that uses the Liquid template langue to generate the static content. Ruby is not my most fluent language as I typically develop in C#. Did you know that there are static site generators for other languages? Jamstack has put together a website called StaticGen that lists the various static generators and their language. For .NET and C#, there are 7 different static generators, DocFX being the most popular as it’s Microsoft sponsored. But, there are others. Visit their site to filter based on what languages you lean towards. I’m interested in hearing which generators you prefer and what interesting ways you are using them.

There are times where using a full JavaScript framework simply does not make sense. In these cases, you’ll need to use traditional, vanilla JavaScript to enumerate through the DOM. With ES6, the for…each loop is no longer valid. So, you’ll need to use a for…of loop. Let’s assume we have a div with a class of page-content. We may want to look for all links within that container and set the target of those links to a new tab. We can accomplish this like so:

Jekyll 4.0 was released on August 20, 2019. However, GitHub pages does not natively support 4.0 today. They currently support only version 3.8.5 today. There are ways to pre-compile you application using Jekyll 4 and deploy the contents to the gh-pages branch of your GitHub pages application. One way you can accomplish this is by using a GitHub action such as the one built by Bryan Schuetz. GitHub also limits the dependencies they support out of the box. So, if you’d like to use jekyll-admin, for example, you’ll have to pre-compile. I recommend that before starting to use GitHub Pages with Jekyll, you are certain you are aligning your dependencies with those found on GitHub Pages. The site https://pages.github.com/versions/ will help you with this.

There is now just 1 week remaining for the Call for Speakers for TechBash 2020. TechBash is an event geared towards web and software development, DevOps, and cloud technologies. We continue to feature speakers from a very diverse skillset and background. To submit for the event, you can visit the link over at Sessionize by visiting https://jasong.us/tb20cfp.

Come learn from Microsoft Regional Directors, Microsoft MVPs, TechBash organizers, and authors as you learn about software architecture and methodologies. The event takes place on Friday, June 5th, 2020 from 10am-4pm ET. To register, visit  https://www.2020twenty.net/softwarearchitecture/.