With all of these 4-H activities that I've been helping with, I've been in my car. A lot. That means that I don't always have access to great internet, great resources, and I can't always connect home to my servers, there. I've decided to combat that by building a single, portable network. A network in a box, if you will. Here's how I did it.

This is it... My first non-work-related technical presentation at a conference. It's pretty exciting! It's right in my own back yard, even! I'm presenting at LinuxFest Northwest, 2024!

Recently, I was asked to provide a guest lecture. That was a first, for me, and was very fun getting prepared for the lecture. Don't get too excited, it wasn't anything wild, but it was a lot of fun!

Holy cow... did somebody order a whole bunch of 4-H activities? Oh... I think that might've been me.

Computers are so intricate, complex, and finely tuned that it can be scary for young folks to spend any significant time getting their hands on the hardware, and really exploring. What's more, it's not common for people to really understand what parts make up a computer, and how they can be used.

What better way to learn, then by doing. That, after all, is the ethos of 4-H. The very esence of how 4-H teaches youth effective life-skills every day. This "photo upload app" that I've been working on relies on some of the newest, prettiest, fanciest web framework technologies available to make the common user-interaction experience very smooth so that youth may engage in digital activities easily, without having to learn new hoops to jump through. Still, it's being built for youth, by youth, so wouldn't it be disappointing if there weren't aspects that were clearly touched by youth? Clearly inspired by them? Sharing their energy and creativity?

Over the last few months, I've been working with a 4-H member to develop and build a smart, simple, and elegant web-application for 4-H members to upload photos they take while participating in a youth conference. Since I'm working with a 4-H member to develop the website, everything needs to have a focus on education, and I need to spend as little time as possible fussing with the infrastructure side of things, since that's not what we're focusing on. I decided that we should make a system using my self-hosted GitLab and Jenkins instances to automagically deploy changes so that the youth doesn't have to learn how that's done, and fight with the server all the time!

I recently attended the 2022 University of Idaho, Washington State University joint Youth Swine Field day in Asotin, WA. It's been a while since I've been very involved in swine projects in 4-H, but it's been good getting back into the swing of things. Admmittedly, I'm learning new things all the time, myself, but since the ethos of 4-H is "Learn by Doing," I'm always one for good, tangible, hands-on exercises to help engage youth while teaching. I thought it about time that I share a few of my ideas!