I started using a static site generator for my personal site back in 2018. I was looking for a more lightweight platform than Wordpress, and SSG’s were a great alternative. Especially since they fit great into CI/CD workflows. I selected Wyam because it’s written in C# and used Razor for it’s templating syntax, which made my transition easier since I’m already familiar with both of those. Wyam served me great for two years, but development on the project has stopped in favor of a new framework, Statiq. Since Statiq’s release is TBD, I decided to migrate to Hugo.

I decided to celebrate this Black History Month by reading only black authors. I even managed to mix in some non-fiction, a rarity for me. I thought it’d be fun to share my reading list along with my highlighted passages.

Kobe Bean Bryant. August 23, 1978 - January 26, 2020. My mind has been all over the place since Kobe’s tragic death. I’ve been thinking about mortality, fatherhood, legacy, basketball, grief, depression, happiness, forgiveness, appreciation, family, friendship…as I said, all over the place.

Music was a bit of a mixed bag for me in 2019. I listened to less music than usual because my commute was reduced drastically, so I had less time to check out new music and rediscover old favorites. However, music brought me one of proudest moments of the year when my daughter randomly said to me, “I need to listen to more Rapsody.” That we all do, Daughter! Rap’s Eve was my favorite record of the year. And with that, on to the categories:

2019 was quite a year of reading for me. I easily completed my Goodreads Reading Challenge by reading 34 books, which beat my previous record of 33 books in 2018.

As the decade draws to a close, I thought I’d make a list of some of my favorite books, albums, and movies released or published in the 2010s. For when the dog bites. And the bee stings. In no particular order:

From xkcd.com:

Challenge accepted, Randall!

I use Trakt to keep track and rate all of the movies I watch. Fortunately, Trakt provides an API so that I can programmatically retrieve all of my ratings. The OMDb API includes Rotten Tomatoes ratings, so I was able write a small C# console application to compare my ratings of 8 or greater to Rotten Tomatoes. Here’s a quick sample of what that code looks like:

Barack Obama shared his summer reading list (see below), and he’s inspired me to share mine. Here are the books I’ve read so far this summer: