Good people drink good beer - Hunter S. Thompson
Good people write good code - me
Hi 👋. I am Kevin Williams, a technology and customer service leader that loves existing in that slice of the Venn diagram where the two disciplines overlap. I am also a life-long Oregonian and love all the stereotypical PNW things - the rain, the woods, soccer, Subarus (proud owner of two) and good coffee.
By day I lead the technology and service initiatives for a large manufacturing and distribution company. By night I fiddle around with Ruby projects and host a podcast dedicated to Christmas music 🎄🎶.
My past life includes about a decade working for a regional retailer where I wrote a bit of VB and .Net code but spent most of my time developing and maintaining their Point of Sale codebase (anyone familiar with IBM 4690 OS?).
I also spent several years leading an IT team at the University of Oregon (go Ducks!), supporting the Development, Alumni, Stewardship, Public Affairs, Communications, Marketing and Branding teams (and probably a few others too). We also proudly provided IT support for the Oregon Bach Festival.
Beer and Coding in Eugene was my personal blog, started in 2009 and cataloging my work spreading the gospel of craft beer, my adventures in homebrewing and samples of stuff I was building in php (remember kids, this was before the Laravel days).
This website is now just a splash (vanity?) page for myself...this one you're reading right now! Just a single html file hosted on Render.com. If you're interested, you can see a majority of the old content using the Wayback Machine.
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The Friendliest App is my first Ruby on Rails project. It is an allergy-friendly meal research and planning tool for the Disneyland Resort (an example of extreme niching down). I wrote the first lines of code in early 2020, after a Holiday visit to the parks and our family's first trip since my partner was diagnosed with celiac disease.
I settled on (then later fell in love with) Rails after a flurry of research and learning that some of my favorite tools are built on the framework. I then launched at the absolute worst time, the same week in March 2020 that COVID closed the parks for over a year.
Today the Friendliest App is a passion project. It houses over 350 allergy-friendly meals from over 140 restaurants and eateries, contains an archive of over 800 menus since the parks reopened in April 2021 and receives around 1,500 daily views. User stats collected through the privacy-focused Active Analytics Gem by Base Secrete (no Google Analytics here!).
The project desperately needs some attention. Some of the javascript broke when I upgraded the project to Rails 6 to 7 and I haven't taken the time to re-write it. I'm also very behind on updating the current menus and restaurant information.
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KarteDrop was my first attempt at a monetized product. It was a webapp developed to rekindle the simple joy of sending or receiving postcards.
This project is currently on hiatus. I'm not sure where I sit with the ethics of AI generated artwork so, until I sort that out, it's been taken offline.
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'Tis the Soundtrack is a project that combines two of my passions, Christmas and music history. It is a Podcast, a YouTube Channel and a Blog, proudly built with Bridgetown, a fantastic progressive site generator and framework built on Ruby.
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I have been using the Good People Write Good Code tagline on this site for over 15 years. Recently, I created a series of logo designs feature the slogan and themed to various programming languages and frameworks.
Currently, there are designs for:
These designs are available as stickers (and other merchandise) via my Redbubble Shop. These designs are all 100% made by a human (this human!) and did not use any AI.
You'll also find a selection of popular KarteDrop designs, available as postcards and greeting cards These were created using AI.
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This is another series I created on Redbubble to celebrate the tabletop gaming and scale modeling communities.You'll find designs featuring hobby knives, paint brushes, sprue cutters, paint bottles and D20 dice.
Just like my Good People Write Good Code series, these designs are also 100% made by a human (me again!) with no help from AI.
I am attempting to contribute more to the Ruby on Rails and open source communities, but still suffer greatly from imposter syndrome, so it's rare I feel I have something of value to share.
This is a quick code example of using Stimulus.js to display the current value of a Range Slider.
This was written because I had a hard time finding an example using Stimulus, most were older, bulky and required jQuery. The code was adapted from a Rails project where I was using Rails Form Helpers and Tailwind CSS. It has been cleaned up to use pure HTML/CSS/Stimulus.
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This is a code example pulled from the "Share to Social" functionality I wrote for the Friendliest.app. This one is less tidy and relies on the tooling I used in my application - TailwindCSS for styling, Lineicon social icons and jQuery (yes, I know) for the javascript events.
If you would like to get in touch, you can shoot me an email at crankyolditguy[at]gmail[dot]com.
I gave up on Twitter in late 2022 and it's been one of the greatest choices I've made in life.