Just Say No to Plugin Fuzzy Versioning!

On PhoneGap Build’s Plugins documentation page, it mentions fuzzy versioning: picking the latest version of a plugin when building an app. It’s enabled using the tilde operator:

<plugin name="com.phonegap.plugins.example" spec="~2.2" />

I strongly recommend against this type of versioning. Yes, this ensures that you always have the latest major version included in your app, but it’s a matter of control - once you’ve incorporated a plugin into your app, you’ve tested it and you know it works. I’m confident in version 2.2.1 here…

Moving netkow.com from Tumblr to Hugo & Netlify

Netkow.com has received a big facelift! I’ve moved off of Tumblr and am now using Hugo (static site generator) and Netlify for hosting and SSL.

Backing Up Tumblr

Before I could move over to a new hosting stack, I needed to back up my Tumblr content (close to 80 blog posts). This was the most difficult part of the migration, as it wasn’t as easy as I had hoped it would be. Tumblr has an API which can be used to export content and several free tools use it, but many of them are dead/abandoned.

In Memoriam: Brandon J. Nelson

[Lisa and I delivered this eulogy at the wake for Brandon’s family on March 5th, 2017.]

Hi. For those that don’t know, my name is Matt Netkow. I’m here today with my wife Lisa, also a close friend of Brandon’s. I worked at SAVO with Brandon for a few years and we remained good friends after he left for Slalom Chicago. He eventually referred me to Slalom Seattle, so we’ve been connected through many avenues these past few years.