Amy's Blog

Windows 11 - The Good and The Bad (there is no ugly)
10 Mar 2022
Towards to end of last year I decided to go for it and install Windows 11. Now keeping in mind that I was installing it on my only computer, and only a couple of days before I ran a workshop, it probably wasn’t the best idea (everyone knows you don’t install updates before workshops, let along an entire new operating system), but thankfully everything worked out fine. Coming up on about 5 months now, it’s grown on me, and although there’s a few things that could get an improvement, you can see the thought that’s gone into this latest Windows version.
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My New Setup
04 Feb 2022
Over the new year, we moved house (because that isn’t a stressful enough time already), and I took the chance to upgrade some of my office setup, specifically my desk. Usually I just upgrade things as I need them, and a fair few things got upgraded last year anyway (computer, camera, mic), so this was a last big part to completely transform the space where I spend far too much of my time.
- #smart-home
- #setup
- #desk
- #office
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External Link 1 luckygirliegirl
15 May 2021
Tune in to this episode of 1 Luckygirliegirl and be a fly-on-the-wall for my conversation with Amy about lockdown Down Under, awkward socializing, and spending time doing not-work.
- #podcast
- #interview
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External Link New Breakpoint - Tabs vs. Spaces
29 Apr 2021
So, do developers who use tabs take four or eight steps at a time, or do developers who use spaces care more for accuracy than tabs-based developers?
- #accessibility
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External Link Call of the Cursor - Is this a quokka? Ask Quokkabot!
16 Nov 2020
Quokkas are an adorable animal found on Rottnest Island in Australia. Amy Kapernick is a Twilio Champion who has written a bot that can identify whether a picture sent to it contains a quokka or not. It can even send you a picture of a quokka if you're not sure what one looks like. It's all built using Twilio and some machine learning.
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Hacktoberfest 2020
01 Oct 2020
To say this year has been strange is an understatement, and it's terrifying to realise that October is already upon us! To me October is a couple of things, for example October means it's Frocktober, and for the entire month I'll be only wearing dresses to raise money for ovarian cancer, but October also means it's time for Hacktoberfest!
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Setting up a Windows Computer for Dev
20 Aug 2020
In the past, Windows has developed a reputation for being a difficult OS to use as a developer. Things were difficult to install and run, involved complex workarounds and you could forget doing anything involving Ruby. Thankfully in recent years that's improved, even more so with the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) so it's now possible to do pretty much everything you can on a unix system.
- #windows
- #dev
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Building Quokkabot Part 3: Moving to Azure Static Web Apps
01 Jun 2020
Last week I got the chance to speak at Microsoft Build, and do a first-look demo on their newly announced featured - Azure Static Web Apps. And as I didn't get access to Static Web Apps until they same time everyone else did (the day before my demo), I got to showcase how simple it was the first time you used it (ok, so maybe it was the second time that I'd used it).
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External Link Getting started with front-end testing using Cypress
21 May 2020
We all know that testing is important, but this is often limited to unit testing and integration testing, focusing on the back-end of our application, and we tend to forget about testing the front-end. There are so many different types of tests that we need to run on the front-end, it’s hard to know where to start. There’s accessibility testing, performance testing, user testing, HTML validation, visual regression testing and UI testing — not to mention the countless tools available for each type, and the different ways to set them up.
- #dev
- #testing
- #tools
- #front-end
- #cypress
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Building Quokkabot Part 2: Quokka Recognition
19 May 2020
Last year, for a demo at Twilio Superclass in Sydney, I built a bot that sent pictures of Quokkas when requested - Quokka on Demand (covered in Part 1 of this blog series, Building Quokka on Demand). After that was done, chatting with Phil and Devin from Twilio, they came up with a new idea - a Quokka recognising bot, something people can send pictures to, and it identifies if there's a Quokka in the photo.
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Generating SSL Certificates
06 May 2020
I remember a few years back when I first started using SSL certificates on my websites, I spent several hours trying to get stuff working on the command line, eventually finding an online generator and working out what they needed me to do to verify the site and generate the certificate. And once that was done, I still needed to install it on my hosting, the whole process was complicated and confusing, and even once I'd written it down it still took some concentration to get it done (and needed to be repeated every 90 days to renew the certificate).
- #ssl
- #security
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External Link OktaDev - Awesome Login CSS Customization!
05 May 2020
Ready to match the sign-in theming to your site? Okta has you covered! In this video, join Heather Downing and special guest Amy Kapers for a walkthrough on what CSS tricks you can use with the Okta Live Widget sandbox.
- #css
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