Programming By Stealth

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes and the audio podcast at pbs.bartificer.net. Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: PBS_2025_10_25 Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and look for the #pbs channel, and check out our pbs-student GitHub Organization. It's by invitation only but all you have to do is ask Allison! Join the Conversation: allison@podfeet.com podfeet.com/slack Support the Show: Patreon Donation Apple Pay or Credit Card one-time donation PayPal one-time donation Podfeet Podcasts Mugs at Zazzle NosillaCast 20th Anniversary Shirts Referral Links: Setapp - 1 month free for you and me PETLIBRO - 30% off for you and me Parallels Toolbox - 3 months free for you and me Learn through MacSparky Field Guides - 15% off for you and me Backblaze - One free month for me and you Eufy - $40 for me if you spend $200. Sadly nothing in it for you. PIA VPN - One month added to Paid Accounts for both of us CleanShot X - Earns me $25%, sorry nothing in it for you but m

Bart had an itch to scratch, and he decided to scratch it with PowerShell. You'll remember that he gave us a teaser Tidbit seven months ago in Tidbit 11, and we still haven't started learning PowerShell so this one is yet another teaser. The itch he had was trying to understand the "Monty Hall Problem" [en.wikipedia.org/...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem), and by writing a script to simulate a thousand rounds of the game, he was able to finally understand the solution. It is great fun hearing Bart describe how he spent the first few days of his annual leave programming ... because it was fun! You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes and the audio podcast at pbs.bartificer.net. Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: PBS_2025_07_19 Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and check out the Programming By Stealth channel under #pbs. Support Bart by going to lets-talk.ie and pushing one of the big blue support buttons. Referral Links: Setapp - 1 month free fo

We've been having great fun in Programming By Stealth learning how to use Jekyll to create a website using GitHub Pages. This week Bart goes through the challenge he left us with last time — to add a nav bar to our little static website using Bootstrap 5 along with Jekyll and Liquid templates. Bart had a lot of fun with his solution so it was fun to hear him dust off the cobwebs on Bootstrap. Then we turn to learning about Jekyll's `includes` feature, which is reusable snippets similar to how TextExpander snippets let you write something and change it in only one place. The worked examples simplify the code in a way, and we learn how to use `includes` to create advanced image markup. I also enjoyed learning about Liquid comments and how you can create white space between sections of your code for ease of writing and debugging that then never show up in the resultant HTML.

We continue our series on making websites using GitHub Pages. Building on our Jekyll knowledge with Liquid templates, we now learn how to create our own theme with Jekyll layouts. The terminology of Jekyll is still tricky, but with some worked examples and a challenge this time, maybe it will start to cement in our brains! You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes and the audio podcast at pbs.bartificer.net.

In this episode, Bart continues teaching us about GitHub Pages using Jekyll by introducing us to Liquid Templates. Liquid allows us to move from adding static content to our web pages to auto-generated information. It's a lot for one lesson, and some of the terminology is a little weird, but as always, Bart's worked example brings it home. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

In this tidbit episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots and Helma van der Linden start by reviewing how she took the reins of the XKPasswd project to first convert it from Perl to JavaScript, then to rewrite the web app. After that, she separated the JavaScript library from the web app code. This episode is primarily walking through exactly how she accomplished that split. And now XKPasswd is officially out of beta and available at xkpasswd.net You can find Helma's fabulous tutorial shownotes and the audio podcast at pbs.bartificer.net.

Last time we learned how to install Ruby, install Bundler, install Gems, and build a very simple website using Jekyll as our static site generator into GitHub. In this installment of our Jekyll miniseries, Bart explains Jekyll's build process which is mostly automated by how you name things and the content of the files you create (like adding YAML front matter.) Then we spend some quality time bemoaning how the Jekyll developers reuse the word "assets" to mean two different things. Bart avoids some of the associated confusion by creating some naming conventions of our own. We get to do a worked example where we learn a little bit about Pages in Jekyll and do a few things the hard way that we'll redo the easy way in the coming installments. If you're following along realtime, note that we won't be recording for 6 weeks because of some birthdays and Allison's trip to Japan.

In our miniseries on GitHub Pages, we learn how to create a basic Jekyll site. To do this, we must install a modern version of Ruby, install its Gem Bundler, create a little placeholder site, and then serve Jekyll to view our site locally. We push it to GitHub where the GitHub Actions we learned about last time do their magic and create a real website all for free. But we didn't stop there. One of our goals is to create our own theme, and to build on what we get with Bootstrap. We actually download the source, not compiled version of Bootstrap and pick and choose the files we want to use. While learning about the standard conventions for directory structure in Jekyll sites, we'll also learn about Sass — Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets — and how Jekyll will turn them into standard CSS. It's a bit of a heavy lift in terms of a lot of moving pieces, but no one bit of this was hard to learn. It was great fun, and this is just the beginning of what we're going to learn about using Jekyll as a fully-functional

Way back in September of 2022, Bart finished off the Webpack miniseries by leaving it as an exercise for the student to deploy their web apps to GitHub Pages. Bart closes that circle in this installment while teaching us how to use GitHub Actions. We learn about workflows, jobs, steps, events, and runners. Bart includes great tables in the shownotes of the terminology, so we now have a handy reference guide for making our own YAML files to run GitHub actions. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net. Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: PBS_2025_02_15 Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and check out the Programming By Stealth channel under #pbs. Support Bart by going to lets-talk.ie and pushing one of the big blue support buttons. Referral Links: Parallels Toolbox - 3 months free for you and me Learn through MacSparky Field Guides - 15% off for you and me Backblaze - One free month for me and you Eufy - $40 for me if you spend $200. Sadly nothin

In Programming By Stealth this week, Bart has started a new miniseries to teach us how to use GitHub Pages to create a website (for free.) In PBS 175, he starts by explaining what Static Site Generators (like GitHub Pages) are, and the pros and cons vs. a more traditional content management system like WordPress. Neither are wrong, they just solve the same problem in different ways. He then gives us the framework for the tools we'll be using and lays out the next few lessons where we'll get in and get our hands dirty. I'm extremely excited about this miniseries and I hope you will be too. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net. Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: PBS_2025_02_01 Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and look for the #pbs channel, and check out our pbs-student GitHub Organization. It's by invitation only but all you have to do is ask Allison! Join the Conversation: allison@podfeet.com podfeet.com/slack Support the Show: Patreon

As promised, we're back with part 2 of the Powershell Teaser. We pick up where we left off, starting with learning about parameter definitions and the advantages such a structured language affords us, including automatically generated help files and error checking. Bart updated the shownotes to include valuable resource links to take your PowerShell to a higher level. We walk through our plan for 2025, where Bart is going to teach us about GitHub Pages (which power the Programming By Stealth shownotes) and then how to change the style you see with Bootstrap to make it your own. After that we expect to get back to PowerShell but that's a ways down the road so things could change.

Bart Busschots is enamored with the open source shell from Microsoft called PowerShell. His goal was to give us a teaser on this modern shell but there was enough material in his shownotes that we're recording the audio in two halves. Feel free to read ahead in the shownotes if you like, or you can wait till the second installment to read the rest. In this first half, we learn about how Bart begrudgingly started using PowerShell and what made him become such a fan. He walks us through the philosophy and then the structure of commands first. We get to play with a few tiny scripts to illustrate how the "plumbing" works in PowerShell and we learn about how message streams work with data streams. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net. Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and check out the Programming By Stealth channel under #pbs. Support Bart by going to lets-talk.ie and pushing one of the big blue support buttons. Referral Links: Parallels Toolbox - 3 months free for you and

In a very unusual Tidbit episode of Programming By Stealth, Allison interviews NosillaCastaway and Programming By Stealth student Steve Mattan about how he's running Large Language Models locally on his Mac. He pulls this off using a series of open source tools, starting with Ollama for the models from the command line, and then Enchanted to give him a nice GUI. He explains how he's integrated the local LLM into VSCode for his coding, and how he uses Keyboard Maestro to launch all of this at once. You can find the outline and links to how Steve's doing this at pbs.bartificer.net. Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: PBS_2024_12_07 Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and look for the #pbs channel, and check out our pbs-student GitHub Organization. It's by invitation only but all you have to do is ask Allison! Join the Conversation: allison@podfeet.com podfeet.com/slack Support the Show: Patreon Donation Apple Pay or Credit Card one-time donation PayPal one-time donation Pod

In this installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart completes his miniseries on Git Submodules. Last time he created an imaginary company with three developers and went through three relatively simple scenarios where Git submodules were implemented. In this finale installment, he takes it up a notch in complexity and we actually get to push submodule changes. The path is fraught with danger and I get stuck on the very last scenario but Bart wouldn't let me give up and eventually helped me understand. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net. Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: PBS_2024_12_07 Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and look for the #pbs channel, and check out our pbs-student GitHub Organization. It's by invitation only but all you have to do is ask Allison! Join the Conversation: allison@podfeet.com podfeet.com/slack Support the Show: Patreon Donation Apple Pay or Credit Card one-time donation PayPal one-time donation Podfeet Podca

In PBS 172 Bart Busschots explained what Git submodules are and the kinds of problems they solve. In this practical lesson, he walks us through three scenarios where we actually get to type in Git commands to learn how the process works. We get to pretend we're in a small web app business where company branding is important. In the first scenario, we're a new developer joining an app team and we have a repo that already includes the branding submodule. In the second scenario, we're a seasoned developer on the team creating a new app and we need to import the branding submodule. Finally, in the third scenario, we're one of the brand designers and we want to update the branding. In the third scenario we learn two different ways to incorporate the branding changes into our web apps. I'm always happy when I get to play along in the Terminal, so this lesson was great fun. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net. Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and check out the Programming B

Bart takes us back into our Git miniseries to explain Git submodules, which are essentially nested Git repos. After we learn what they are, he explains why nesting is needed. Then he takes us through three use cases as a way of illustrating the kinds of problems Git submodules can solve. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net. Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and check out the Programming By Stealth channel under #pbs. Support Bart by going to lets-talk.ie and pushing one of the big blue support buttons. Referral Links: Parallels Toolbox - 3 months free for you and me Learn through MacSparky Field Guides - 15% off for you and me Backblaze - One free month for me and you Setapp - One free month for me and you Eufy - $40 for me if you spend $200. Sadly nothing in it for you. PIA VPN - One month added to Paid Accounts for both of us CleanShot X - Earns me $25%, sorry nothing in it for you but my gratitude

In ye olden days, iOS kept everything sandboxed in a way that apps weren't allowed to reach outside of their own data to open individual files. But with the aptly named Files app, and an API to allow a human to do the picking, apps can now open files directly on iOS. This "innovation" allows us to have a Git client on iOS and have it use a linked repo that's stored in the Files app. This means we can use any text editor we like to open the repos files for editing. In this tidbit episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart walks us through how to configure the iOS Git client Working Copy to clone a repo from GitHub, and then open the files in his favorite text editor on iOS, Textastic. Hat's off to Jill of Kent that explained to Bart and me more than a year ago that this was possible, but a fist shake to Bart for not telling me how to do it till now! You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net. Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and check out the Programming By Stealth channel under

We have a bit of a changeup for today's lesson. While Bart Busschots is in attendance for this episode, he is not be the instructor, he is a student like me. Our instructor today is the delightful Helma van der Linden and she's going to teach us about how she applied the Model View Controller pattern to our project XKPasswd. You can find Helma's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net. Join the Conversation: allison@podfeet.com podfeet.com/slack Support the Show: Patreon Donation PayPal one-time donation Podfeet Podcasts Mugs at Zazzle Podfeet 15-Year Anniversary Shirts Referral Links: Parallels Toolbox - 3 months free for you and me Learn through MacSparky Field Guides - 15% off for you and me Backblaze - One free month for me and you Setapp - One free month for me and you Eufy - $40 for me if you spend $200. Sadly nothing in it for you. PIA VPN - One month added to Paid Accounts for both of us CleanShot X - Earns me $25%, sorry nothing in it for you but my gratitude

We're back from our summer hiatus (actually scheduled for the first time ever instead of accidentally happening!) In this week's episode, Bart takes on the task of explaining the philosophy behind why having a framework for software development is useful and even crucial as projects get bigger and more complex. We chose this topic because the XKPasswd project has already started using a framework called Model View Controller. We get the barest understanding of MVC in this explanation from Bart, and the next episode of Programming By Stealth will be the wonderful Helma van der Linden explaining the details of her implementation of MVC for the XKPasswd project. In the first episode of its kind, I won't be the only student in the class - Bart and I will be learning together. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net. Join the Conversation: allison@podfeet.com podfeet.com/slack Support the Show: Patreon Donation PayPal one-time donation Podfeet Podcasts Mugs at Zazzle Podfeet 15

In this Tidbit version of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots interviews Mattias Wadman, one of the maintainers of the jq project. This was great fun as we just finished learning jq in Programming By Stealth. Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: PBS_2024_08_06 You can find out more about Mattias & the various projects he is working on at the links below: Follow Mattias on Mastodon: @wader@fosstodon.org Mattias’ GitHub Profile which hosts some notable jq-related projects: fq for querying binary files with the jq language: github.com/wader/fq A list of presentations about fq — github.com/… The fork of the Go version of jq that powers fq — github.com/… The language definition file for adding jq support to IDEs like VS Code: github.com/wader/jq-lsp jq implemented in jq: github.com/wader/jqjq Some notable jq commits & files mentioned during the interview: The very first commit in Haskel The switch to C jq’s main function which is written in jq