RyanCheley.com

A Giant Pain in the Ass

ryan — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0700

Content Warning: This is a highly personal post about a cancer diagnosis.

On Feb 16, 2026 I was 'prepping' for a routine colonoscopy that was scheduled for February 17th at about 1pm. For those of you unaware what is involved in 'prepping' don't google it, but just know that your …

Migrating to Hetzner with Coolify

ryan — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0800

What I did

A few weeks ago, I got to watch Jeff Triplett migrate DjangoPackages from DigitalOcean to Hetzner¹ using Coolify. The magical world of Coolify made everything look just so ... easy. Jeff mentioned that one of the driving forces for the decision to go to Hetzner was the …

Year in Review 2025

ryan — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0800

I was hoping to have this written and posted last week, but for Christmas this year Santa brought me a cold which knocked me on my butt for a few days.

I had done a bit of prep, but wow, when I look back at 2025 it was a pretty …

Details on My Candidate Statement for the DSF

ryan — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 00:00:00 -0800

The Django Software Foundation Board of Directors elections are scheduled for November 2025 and I’ve decided to throw my hat into the ring. My hope specifically, if elected, is to be selected as the Treasurer. I have 4 main objectives over my two year term.

Getting an Executive Director …

Deploying n8n on Digital Ocean

ryan — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 00:00:00 -0700

This guide shows you how to deploy n8n, a workflow automation tool, on your own VPS. Self-hosting gives you full control over your data, avoids monthly subscription costs, and lets you run unlimited workflows without usage limits.

I'm using Digital Ocean¹ for this guide, but these steps work on …

Why We Need to Stop Fighting About AI Tools and Start Teaching Them

ryan — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 00:00:00 -0700

In mid-June, Hynek tooted on Mastodon the following toot:

Watching the frustratingly fruitless fights over the USEFULNESS of LLM-based coding helpers, I've come down to 3 points that explain why ppl seem to live in different realities:

Most programmers:

1) Write inconsequential remixes of trivial code that has been written …

Migrating to Raindrop.io

ryan — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0700

With the announced demise of Pocket by Mozilla I needed to migrate all of my saved articles to 'something else' by the end of the month. I've actually tried to migrate from Pocket a few times over the years. I landed on Instapaper for a while, but it never really …

A New Project at Work

ryan — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0700

I was added to a work email that was requesting a not-so-small new project that was going to need to be completed. The problem that needed to be solved was a bit squishy, but it had been well thought out, and it had an importance to it that was easy …

Updated TIL

ryan — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0700

While browsing Mastodon the other day I came across a toot that linked to this Cursed Knowledge page. I thought it was a great page, but it occurred to me that it could be helpful to apply the same sort of styling to my TIL Repo.

My TIL (Today I …

Fun with MCPs

ryan — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0700

Special Thanks to Jeff Triplett who provided an example that really got me started on better understanding of how this all works.

In trying to wrap my head around MCPs over the long Memorial weekend I had a breakthrough. I'm not really sure why this was so hard for me …

Firebirds 2024-25 Season

ryan — Wed, 21 May 2025 00:00:00 -0700

The 2024-25 season for the Coachella Valley Firebirds ended on May 9th with a 2-0 loss to the Abbotsford Canucks. Overall, that series saw the Firebirds score

one goal in Game 1
one goal in Game 2
five goals in Game 3
no goals in Game 4

This isn't surprising …

Uptime Kuma and Claude

ryan — Thu, 08 May 2025 00:00:00 -0700

While talking to a colleague of mine he had mentioned something called Uptime Kuma, which is an open source alternative to Uptime Robot. This was interesting for me because I have Uptime Robot checking a couple of my websites and I thought, "Hey, maybe I can use Uptime Kuma as …

The Invisible Decision-Makers: Why Systems Ignore Their Users

ryan — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0700

The Origin of Systems

When thinking about systems it's easy to think that they have always been there, or been that way. This isn't true of course. The systems that are in place were put there, by people. People that made decisions. Decisions are what I want to focus on …

Process, People, and Priorities

ryan — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0800

In every organization, three critical elements determine success: People, Processes, and Priorities. While all are essential, their ranking matters profoundly. Based on my experience across several organizations, I've found that Processes must come first, followed by People, with Priorities anchored firmly at the foundation.

This deliberate ordering—Processes at the …

Technical Solutions to People Problems

ryan — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 00:00:00 -0800

"If you think technology will solve your problems, you don't understand technology and you don't understand your problems"

~ attrib. Laurie Anderson

From a Toot by Jake Rayson

In a previous post, I wrote about how to ask why without sounding like a jerk. This is a slightly related concept (at …

How to Watch a Hockey Game - Reading the Standings

ryan — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 00:00:00 -0800

This is the fourth part of my How to Watch a Hockey Game Series. You can catch up on previous articles here

Game Outcomes

In many North American sports when reading the standings there are typically just Wins (W), and Losses (L).¹

Hockey is a bit different. When you …

How to Watch a Hockey Game - What to Watch

ryan — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 00:00:00 -0800

In a previous post of this series I laid out some basic rules of hockey. In this post I'll hopefully provide some tips on what to watch during your first few hockey games.

What should I 'watch' though?

This is a tough question and depends on if you're watching on …

How to Watch a Hockey Game - Game Play

ryan — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 00:00:00 -0800

Game Structure

Hockey has some stuff in common with live theater. No ... really! 😁

They both have dressing rooms and they both have intermission ... but that is probably where the similarities end.

Each hockey game is split into three 20 minute periods. There is an intermission between each period that lasts …

How to Watch a Hockey Game - Three Rules

ryan — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 00:00:00 -0800

I've written a few times before about hockey. I love watching my local sports puck team¹ and really wish more people watched it. So, I'm going to write a beginners guide to watching hockey so that you too, dear reader, can become an avid fan.

Hockey is a pretty …

Remember the Colosseum!

ryan — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 00:00:00 -0800

The Roman Colosseum

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 497 CE the Colosseum fell into disrepair. Rightfully so! Who can worry about keeping up a giant megalith made by people centuries ago while you're just trying to figure out where your next meal may come from, or …

Looking Back at the Half Marathon Streak

ryan — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 00:00:00 -0800

Looking Back at the Half Marathon Streak

How It Started

In February 2012, a half marathon was being held in Palm Springs, and one of my walking friends asked if I wanted to do it... about 5 days before it was set to happen. I said I wasn't interested, and …

Year in Review 2024

ryan — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 00:00:00 -0800

I did my first Year in Review last year and have decided to carry on the tradition to make sure I know what I did!

I've written about themes before, so I won't go over it again here. Below is a high level of what my 2024 themes were

Winter …

Weezer Live

ryan — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 00:00:00 -0800

I started college in 1996. In 1997 one of the most influential albums of my early adulthood was introduced to me ... Weezer's Pinkerton.

I hated it.

I wanted the Blue Album again but different somehow, and Pinkerton was NOT it.

However, a weird thing happened. Once I moved into my …

uv and pip

ryan — Sat, 23 Nov 2024 00:00:00 -0800

On Sunday November 3 I posted this to Mastodon:

I've somehow managed to get Python on my macbook to not install packages into the virtual environment I've activated and I'm honestly not sure how to fix this.

Has anyone else ever run into this problem? If so, any pointers on …

Migrating django-tailwind-cli to Django Commons

ryan — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 00:00:00 -0800

On Tuesday October 29 I worked with Oliver Andrich, Daniel Moran and Storm Heg to migrate Oliver's project django-tailwind-cli from Oliver's GitHub project to Django Commons.

This was the 5th library that has been migrated over, but the first one that I 'lead'. I was a bit nervous. The Django …

DjangoCon US 2024

ryan — Sun, 17 Nov 2024 00:00:00 -0800

DjangoCon US 2024

I was able to attend DCUS 2024 this year in Durham from September 22 - September 27, and just like in 2023, it was an amazing experience.

I gave another talk (hooray!) and got to hang out with some truly amazing people, many of whom I call my …

Django Commons

ryan — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 00:00:00 -0700

First, what are "the commons"? The concept of "the commons" refers to resources that are shared and managed collectively by a community, rather than being owned privately or by the state. This idea has been applied to natural resources like air, water, and grazing land, but it has also expanded …

DjangoCon US 2024 Talk

ryan — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 00:00:00 -0700

At DjangoCon US 2023 I gave a talk, and wrote about my experience preparing for that talk

Well, I spoke again at DjangoCon US this year (2024) and had a similar, but wildly different experience in preparing for my talk.

Last year I lamented that I didn't really track my …

Summer of Writing

ryan — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 00:00:00 -0700

In keeping with my themes for 2024 this summer was to be 'The Summer of Writing'.

This theme didn't have a specific post or word count, but I knew I wanted to write more¹.

I had a few things I needed to do to get this started. One of …

Mentors

ryan — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0700

Having just finished up my second round of Djangonaut.Space (which I wrote about here) I wanted to write a bit about mentors ... how to find one, how to work with one, and how to be one.

Finding a Mentor

One of the best ways to find a mentor is …

Reflections on Djangonaut Space Session 2

ryan — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0700

A few weeks ago I completed my second session as a Djangonaut.Space Navigator. The Djangonaut.Space program is an opportunity for people to be introduced to contributing to Django and Django adjacent projects.

In this most recent session I was a Navigator for Team Mars with a fantastic Captain …

How to ask why without sounding like a jerk

ryan — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0700

As technical folks working with non-technical folks sometimes the asks that come through are unclear. In order to get clarity on these we want to ask questions to get clarification on the ask, but it can be challenging to not sound like a jerk when we ask. This can happen …

SSH Keys

ryan — Sat, 13 Jul 2024 00:00:00 -0700

If you want to access a server in a 'passwordless' way, the best approach I know is to use SSH Keys. This is great, but what does that mean and how do you set it up?

I'm going to attempt to write out the steps for getting this done.

Let's …

Spring of Transition

ryan — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 00:00:00 -0700

I've written before about the Theme's that CGP Grey has discussed and I think they're great! I've just recently completed my 'Spring of Transition'.

So what is the Spring of Transition? For me it meant focusing on that last bit of time that my daughter will be living with me …

Using justpath to go on a pyrrhic adventure to clean up my PATH

ryan — Fri, 24 May 2024 00:00:00 -0700

A while ago I heard about a project called justpath from Jeff Tripplet on Mastodon. It seemed like a neat project to try and clean up my path and I figured, what the heck, let me give it a try.

I installed it and when I ran it for the …

Trying out pyenv ... again

ryan — Fri, 29 Mar 2024 00:00:00 -0700

I think I first tried pyenv probably sometime in late 2022. I saw some recent stuff about it on Mastadon and thought I'd give it another go.

I read through the installation instructions at the ReadMe at the repo and checked to see if it was already installed (spoiler alert …

Winter of Learning

ryan — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 00:00:00 -0700

Winter of Learning Retrospective

Have you heard the good word about themes? If you haven't, take a look at this great video by CGP Grey on Themes and how they can work. For the last couple of years I've been doing yearly themes ... with limited success. This lack of success …

An Argument to Realign the AHL

ryan — Sat, 24 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0800

What is the AHL

The AHL, or American Hockey League, is a hockey minor league based in the US and Canada. It's widely considered to be the step right below the NHL which is the top Hockey League in North America.

There are 32 teams in the AHL, and 23 …

Year in Review 2023

ryan — Sun, 31 Dec 2023 00:00:00 -0800

I've never done a year in review, but this seems like a good a time as any, right? I had a rough outline, but after reading the great Year in Review from Tim Schilliing, Paolo Melichore, and Velda Kiara, I was inspired to actually finish mine.

Professional

In the moment …

So you want to give a talk at a conference?

ryan — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 00:00:00 -0800

Last October I gave my first honest to goodness, on my own, up on the stage by myself talk at a tech conference. It was the most stressful yet fulfilling professional experience I've had.

Fulfilling in that I've wanted to get better at speaking in public and this helped in …

Error Culture Part III

ryan — Tue, 14 Nov 2023 00:00:00 -0800

How can I tell if I'm in an error culture?

In part 1 I spoke about the idea of Error Culture. In that post I define what error culture.

In part 2 I spoke when Error Culture starts. This time I'll talk about how you can tell if you're living …

Error Culture Part II

ryan — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 00:00:00 -0800

In my last post I spoke about the idea of Error Culture. In that post I define what error culture. This time I'll talk about when it starts to happen. For a recap go back and read that before diving in here.

When does error culture start?

Error culture can …

Error Culture

ryan — Sun, 29 Oct 2023 00:00:00 -0700

What is Error Culture?

It's inevitable that at some point a service ¹ will fail. When that service fails you can either choose to be alerted, or not. Because technology is so important to so many aspects of work, not getting an alert for a failing service isn't really an …

DjangoCon US 2023

ryan — Tue, 24 Oct 2023 00:00:00 -0700

My Experience at DjangoCon US 2023

A few days ago I returned from DjangoCon US 2023 and wow, what an amazing time. The only regret I have is that I didn't take very many pictures. This is something I will need to work on for next year.

On Monday October …

Firebirds Inaugural Season

ryan — Sat, 01 Jul 2023 00:00:00 -0700

On Wednesday June 21, 2023 the local sports puck team (i.e. Hockey), the Coachella Valley Firebirds hosted Game 7 of the Calder Cup Finals against the Hershey Bears.

There are sports writers that can write on how the series went, better than I can so I'll leave that to …

GCP Cloud Architect Exam Experience

ryan — Sat, 01 Apr 2023 00:00:00 -0700

Last October it was announced that Desert Oasis Healthcare (the company I work for) signed on to pilot Google's Care Studio. DOHC is the first ambulatory clinic to sign on.

I had been in some of the discovery meetings before the announcement and was really excited about the opportunity. So …

Contributing to Django or how I learned to stop worrying and just try to fix an ORM Bug

ryan — Sat, 12 Nov 2022 00:00:00 -0800

I went to DjangoCon US a few weeks ago and hung around for the sprints. I was particularly interested in working on open tickets related to the ORM. It so happened that Simon Charette was at Django Con and was able to meet with several of us to talk through …

Upgrading to PostgreSQL 14

ryan — Sun, 28 Aug 2022 00:00:00 -0700

Django 4.1 was released on August 3, 2022 and I was excited to upgrade to it. I did the testing locally and then pushed my changes up to GitHub to deploy. The deployment was successful, but when I went to visit my sites ... womp womp. I got a Server …

A Goodbye to Vin

ryan — Fri, 05 Aug 2022 00:00:00 -0700

One of the earliest memories of my grandmother is visiting her in 29 Palms ¹ ² in her permanent mobile home. I remember sitting on the davenport watching the Dodgers on a small 13" COLOR CRT TV. I remember that the game was broadcast on KTLA5. But what I remember …

Django and Legacy Databases

ryan — Wed, 15 Jun 2022 00:00:00 -0700

I work at a place that is heavily investing in the Microsoft Tech Stack. Windows Servers, c#.Net, Angular, VB.net, Windows Work Stations, Microsoft SQL Server ... etc

When not at work, I really like working with Python and Django. I've never really thought I'd be able to combine the …

Inserting a URL in Markdown in VS Code

ryan — Fri, 08 Apr 2022 00:00:00 -0700

Since I switched my blog to pelican last summer I've been using VS Code as my writing app. And it's really good for writing, note just code but prose as well.

The one problem I've had is there's no keyboard shortcut for links when writing in markdown ... at least not …

Logging Part 2

ryan — Thu, 07 Apr 2022 00:00:00 -0700

In my previous post I wrote about inline logging, that is, using logging in the code without a configuration file of some kind.

In this post I'm going to go over setting up a configuration file to support the various different needs you may have for logging.

Previously I mentioned …

Logging Part 1

ryan — Wed, 30 Mar 2022 00:00:00 -0700

Logging

Last year I worked on an update to the package tryceratops with Gui Latrova to include a verbose flag for logging.

Honestly, Gui was a huge help and I wrote about my experience here but I didn't really understand why what I did worked.

Recently I decided that I …

New Theme, who dis?

ryan — Sun, 27 Feb 2022 00:00:00 -0800

Because I have a couple of posts that I need/want to work on, and I have the time to work on them, I have of course decided to instead to update the theme on my blog because that was a way better use of my time 😂

Also, because the …

I made a Slackbot!

ryan — Sat, 19 Feb 2022 00:00:00 -0800

Building my first Slack Bot

I had added a project to my OmniFocus database in November of 2021 which was, "Build a Slackbot" after watching a Video by Mason Egger. I had hoped that I would be able to spend some time on it over the holidays, but I was …

Putting it All Together

ryan — Wed, 09 Feb 2022 00:00:00 -0800

In this final post I'll be writing up how everything fits together. As a recap, here are the steps I go through to create and publish a new post

Create Post

Create .md for my new post
write my words
edit post
Change status from draft to published

Publish Post …

Automating the file creation

ryan — Wed, 02 Feb 2022 00:00:00 -0800

In my last post Auto Generating the Commit Message I indicated that this post I would "throw it all together and to get a spot where I can run one make command that will do all of this for me".

I decided to take a brief detour though as I …

Auto Generating the Commit Message

ryan — Fri, 28 Jan 2022 00:00:00 -0800

In my first post of this series I outlined the steps needed in order for me to post. They are:

Run make html to generate the SQLite database that powers my site's search tool¹
Run make vercel to deploy the SQLite database to vercel
Run git add <filename> to …

git add filename automation

ryan — Wed, 26 Jan 2022 00:00:00 -0800

In my last post I mentioned the steps needed in order for me to post. They are:

Run make html to generate the SQLite database that powers my site's search tool¹
Run make vercel to deploy the SQLite database to vercel
Run git add <filename> to add post to …

Auto Tweeting New Post

ryan — Mon, 24 Jan 2022 00:00:00 -0800

Each time I write something for this site there are several steps that I go through to make sure that the post makes it's way to where people can see it.

Run make html to generate the SQLite database that powers my site's search tool¹
Run make vercel to …

Adding Search to My Pelican Blog with Datasette

ryan — Sun, 16 Jan 2022 19:30:00 -0800

Last summer I migrated my blog from Wordpress to Pelican. I did this for a couple of reasons (see my post here), but one thing that I was a bit worried about when I migrated was that Pelican's offering for site search didn't look promising.

There was an outdated plugin …

The Well Maintained Test

ryan — Mon, 22 Nov 2021 19:57:00 -0800

At the beginning of November Adam Johnson tweeted

I’ve come up with a test that we can use to decide whether a new package we’re considering depending on is well-maintained.

and linked to an article he wrote.

He came up (with the help of Twitter) twelve questions to …

Styling Clean Up with Bash

ryan — Tue, 26 Oct 2021 19:23:00 -0700

I have a side project I've been working on for a while now. One thing that happened overtime is that the styling of the site grew organically. I'm not a designer, and I didn't have a master set of templates or design principals guiding the development. I kind of hacked …

djhtml and justfile

ryan — Sun, 22 Aug 2021 00:00:00 -0700

I had read about a project called djhtml and wanted to use it on one of my projects. The documentation is really good for adding it to precommit-ci, but I wasn't sure what I needed to do to just run it on the command line.

It took a bit of …

Prototyping with Datasette

ryan — Mon, 09 Aug 2021 18:26:00 -0700

At my job I work with some really talented Web Developers that are saddled with a pretty creaky legacy system.

We're getting ready to start on a new(ish) project where we'll be taking an old project built on this creaky legacy system (VB.net) and re-implementing it on a …

Contributing to Tryceratops

ryan — Sat, 07 Aug 2021 00:00:00 -0700

I read about a project called Tryceratops on Twitter when it was tweeted about by Jeff Triplet

I checked it out and it seemed interesting. I decided to use it on my simplest Django project just to give it a test drive running this command:

tryceratops .

and got this result …

Contributing to django-sql-dashboard

ryan — Fri, 09 Jul 2021 00:00:00 -0700

Last Saturday (July 3rd) while on vacation, I dubbed it “Security update Saturday”. I took the opportunity to review all of the GitHub bot alerts about out of date packages, and make the updates I needed to.

This included updated django-sql-dashboard to version 1.0 … which I was really excited …

Publishing content to Pelican site

ryan — Wed, 07 Jul 2021 00:00:00 -0700

There are a lot of different ways to get the content for your Pelican site onto the internet. The Docs show an example using rsync.

For automation they talk about the use of either Invoke or Make (although you could also use Just instead of Make which is my preferred …

Setting up the Server to host my Pelican Site

ryan — Mon, 05 Jul 2021 00:00:00 -0700

Creating the user on the server

Each site on my server has it's own user. This is a security consideration, more than anything else. For this site, I used the steps from some of my scripts for setting up a Django site. In particular, I ran the following code from …

Migrating to Pelican from Wordpress

ryan — Fri, 02 Jul 2021 00:00:00 -0700

A little back story

In October of 2017 I wrote about how I migrated from SquareSpace to Wordpress. After almost 4 years I’ve decided to migrate again, this time to Pelican. I did a bit of work with Pelican during my 100 Days of Web Code back in 2019 …

Debugging Setting up a Django Project

ryan — Sun, 13 Jun 2021 11:00:00 -0700

Normally when I start a new Django project I’ll use the PyCharm setup wizard, but recently I wanted to try out VS Code for a Django project and was super stumped when I would get a message like this:

ERROR:root:code for hash md5 was not found.
Traceback …

My First Python Package

ryan — Sun, 06 Jun 2021 18:11:00 -0700

A few months ago I was inspired by Simon Willison and his project Datasette and it’s related ecosystem to write a Python Package for it.

I use toggl to track my time at work and I thought this would be a great opportunity use that data with Datasette and …