Programming By Stealth

Latest Episodes:

PBS Tidbit 17a — Simplifying Developer Setups with Docker Jan 28, 2026

Show notes

This very special episode of Programming By Stealth is a Tidbit written and taught by the lovely Helma van der Linden. Bart has wanted to understand Docker better, and Helma has some great use cases for how to use them for developer setups so it was a good opportunity for Bart to learn from Helma.

The material is quite long, so the podcast was recorded in two segments, Tidbit 17a and b. Tidbit b will be along shortly, and picks up and the heading entitled "Reusing the Docker image".

pbs.bartificer.net

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PBS Tidbit 16 — How Podfeet.com Works Jan 10, 2026

Show notes

Bart continues his unofficial series where he listens for where I say, "I wish I understood..." This time, he explains the history of how Podfeet.com has evolved over the last 20 years. We started with a shared server, then a virtual machine, to a dedicated server, and to a separate database server. He explains how the LAMP Stack works (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) and all the work Apache had to do. Then he explains how, when I moved Podfeet.com to NGINX + PHP-FPM, things got much more efficient. He even takes us through how Cloudflare protects my site and provides caching to speed up access to Podfeet.com to the benefit of all.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes and the audio podcast at pbs.bartificer.net.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: PBS_2026_01_09

Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and look for the #pbs channel, and check out our pbs-student GitHub Organization. It's by invitation only but all you have to do is ask Allison!

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PBS Tidbit 15 — Building an Indie Author Site with Hugo by Eddie Tonkoi Nov 05, 2025

Show notes

This week, we have a guest contribution by the fabulous Eddie Tonkoi. He walks us through his journey to move his wife's book series website using a static site generator called Hugo. He hosts the generated files on GitHub and serves them (for free) through Cloudflare.

You can find Eddie's fabulous tutorial shownotes and the audio podcast at pbs.bartificer.net.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: PBS_2025_11_05

Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and look for the #pbs channel, and check out our pbs-student GitHub Organization. It's by invitation only, but all you have to do is ask Allison!

Join the Conversation:

allison@podfeet.com
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PBS Tidbit 14 — Coding with AI Oct 25, 2025

Show notes

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes and the audio podcast at pbs.bartificer.net.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: PBS_2025_10_25

Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and look for the #pbs channel, and check out our pbs-student GitHub Organization. It's by invitation only but all you have to do is ask Allison!

Join the Conversation:

allison@podfeet.com
podfeet.com/slack

Support the Show:

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PBS Tidbit 13 — PowerShell Tames Monty Jul 19, 2025

Show notes

Bart had an itch to scratch, and he decided to scratch it with PowerShell. You'll remember that he gave us a teaser Tidbit seven months ago in Tidbit 11, and we still haven't started learning PowerShell so this one is yet another teaser. The itch he had was trying to understand the "Monty Hall Problem" [en.wikipedia.org/...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem), and by writing a script to simulate a thousand rounds of the game, he was able to finally understand the solution. It is great fun hearing Bart describe how he spent the first few days of his annual leave programming ... because it was fun!

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes and the audio podcast at pbs.bartificer.net.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: PBS_2025_07_19

Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and check out the Programming By Stealth channel under #pbs.

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PBS 181 of X — Reusable Snippets with Jekyll Includes Jun 06, 2025

Show notes

We've been having great fun in Programming By Stealth learning how to use Jekyll to create a website using GitHub Pages. This week Bart goes through the challenge he left us with last time — to add a nav bar to our little static website using Bootstrap 5 along with Jekyll and Liquid templates. Bart had a lot of fun with his solution so it was fun to hear him dust off the cobwebs on Bootstrap.

Then we turn to learning about Jekyll's `includes` feature, which is reusable snippets similar to how TextExpander snippets let you write something and change it in only one place. The worked examples simplify the code in a way, and we learn how to use `includes` to create advanced image markup.

I also enjoyed learning about Liquid comments and how you can create white space between sections of your code for ease of writing and debugging that then never show up in the resultant HTML.

PBS 180 of X — Theming Jekyll May 25, 2025

Show notes

We continue our series on making websites using GitHub Pages. Building on our Jekyll knowledge with Liquid templates, we now learn how to create our own theme with Jekyll layouts. The terminology of Jekyll is still tricky, but with some worked examples and a challenge this time, maybe it will start to cement in our brains!

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes and the audio podcast at pbs.bartificer.net.

PBS 179 of X — Introducing Liquid Templates in GitHub Pages with Jekyll May 10, 2025

Show notes

In this episode, Bart continues teaching us about GitHub Pages using Jekyll by introducing us to Liquid Templates. Liquid allows us to move from adding static content to our web pages to auto-generated information. It's a lot for one lesson, and some of the terminology is a little weird, but as always, Bart's worked example brings it home.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

PBS Tidbit 12 — XKPasswd Rewrite Exits Beta Apr 23, 2025

Show notes

In this tidbit episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots and Helma van der Linden start by reviewing how she took the reins of the XKPasswd project to first convert it from Perl to JavaScript, then to rewrite the web app. After that, she separated the JavaScript library from the web app code. This episode is primarily walking through exactly how she accomplished that split. And now XKPasswd is officially out of beta and available at xkpasswd.net

You can find Helma's fabulous tutorial shownotes and the audio podcast at pbs.bartificer.net.

PBS 178 of X — Getting Started with Jekyll Pages Mar 17, 2025

Show notes

Last time we learned how to install Ruby, install Bundler, install Gems, and build a very simple website using Jekyll as our static site generator into GitHub. In this installment of our Jekyll miniseries, Bart explains Jekyll's build process which is mostly automated by how you name things and the content of the files you create (like adding YAML front matter.) Then we spend some quality time bemoaning how the Jekyll developers reuse the word "assets" to mean two different things. Bart avoids some of the associated confusion by creating some naming conventions of our own. We get to do a worked example where we learn a little bit about Pages in Jekyll and do a few things the hard way that we'll redo the easy way in the coming installments.

If you're following along realtime, note that we won't be recording for 6 weeks because of some birthdays and Allison's trip to Japan.

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