McGarrah Technical Blog

Building a Draft Preview Site for Jekyll — Part 3: The Implementation

· 14 min read
The design is done. Time to build it. This post covers the complete implementation — repo creation, DNS configuration, the final GitHub Actions workflow, Staticrypt testing results, and every edge case I hit along the way.

Why Data Science Follows the Research Model, Not the Software Development Model

· 10 min read
Software development succeeds 4 out of 5 times. Data science succeeds 1 out of 5. That difference is not a quality problem — it is a fundamental difference in the nature of the work. DS follows the academic research model: hypothesis, experiment, documented failure, iterate.

Building a Draft Preview Site for Jekyll — Part 2: Refining the Design

· 9 min read
With the options narrowed down to a separate GitHub repo with Staticrypt, I started designing the actual implementation. That's when the interesting problems showed up — Giscus feedback, Staticrypt navigation quirks, leaky RSS feeds, and the question of whether a password even matters when the source is public.

Migrating 16 Domains from SquareSpace to Porkbun — Part 2: The Sprint Finish

· 9 min read
With several domains approaching renewal at SquareSpace, I pushed through the remaining transfers in a rush week. Fifteen of sixteen domains now live at Porkbun — only mcgarrah.org remains, deliberately held back until I have a proper weekend to migrate its 25+ DNS records without breaking production services.

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