Chad Schulz

Relaunching squalr.us in 2026

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My Google Analytics had been collecting zero data since July 2023.

I didn’t know that until I actually looked. The site loaded fine, posts rendered, nothing was obviously broken. But under the hood: Universal Analytics had been sunset for almost three years, the GitHub Actions deploy workflow was pinned to a v0.0.1-preview tag from 2019, Hugo was running on whatever version Azure felt like installing that day, and the theme was a git submodule I hadn’t touched since 2021.

Glizzy Relay

Sat, 09 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Live scoreboard and scoring for a hot dog eating relay. Glizzy Relay runs the whole event: teams of three eat a hot dog and drink a beer in sequence, a tap/spacebar timer captures every runner’s split, and an ESPN-style broadcast scoreboard updates live on the big screen as the race happens.

It started as a stopwatch replacement for a real event I judge — the Hot Dog Eating Relay at Halcyon Brewing in Seattle — and grew into a hostable platform: anyone can sign in, schedule their own event, roster teams, and run race day end to end. It’s free, no ads, public or private events.

Desktop Tracker

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I work across several Virtual Desktops throughout the day — one for deep work, one for Slack and email, one for whatever side thing I’m poking at. The problem: I had no idea where my time was actually going. Time-tracking tools track apps or windows, not desktops. I wanted desktop-level granularity.

So I built Desktop Tracker. It’s a Windows system tray app that silently watches which Virtual Desktop is active and logs time against it. At the end of the day it syncs totals to BambooHR so the hours show up in the right place without me having to manually enter anything.

WTF is NFT

Sat, 29 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

tldr;

NFTs, or Non-Fungible tokens, are digital assets (commonly image or audio) that are bought and sold on an NFT marketplace with transactions backed by blockchain technology. The blockchain allows for the transactions to be tracked on a distributed “ledger” that publicly details all transactions. Maintaining the blockchain “ledger” is eating up a ton of processing power across the globe and contributes to significant electricity consumption.

Why are people buying NFTs? That seems to be more of a psychology question, but we seem to be in the early “NFT fad” phase, where they’re kind of the hot new thing (think Beanie Babies in 1997) which is why JPEGs of a Tweet and monkeys are selling for millions of dollars.

Deploying an 11ty Site to Azure Static Web Apps

Thu, 13 May 2021 20:27:15 -0700

I am a huge fan of two things: Azure and static site generators . I am super excited Azure now has an easy-to-use, free offering for deploying small hobby websites. Historically hosing a small site on Azure cost about $50/mo (to get SSL support), then through Azure Storage Static Web hosting the cost went down to pennies but was complex to configure . Now Azure offers Azure Static Web Apps (generally available as of 05/12/2021) which makes hosting a breeze for a static site.

A blog post about the blog you're reading this post on

Wed, 21 Apr 2021 15:51:27 -0700

Update (2026): The CSP configuration and GA setup shown in this post reflect what was live at the time. Both have since been updated — GA migrated to GA4, domains updated to googletagmanager.com, and unpkg.com/opensea.io removed after the NFT embeds were dropped.

A few months ago I decided I wanted to do some blogging about technical challenges, process observations (and opinions), and some topics I would find valuable to have written down somewhere. I also find blogging cathartic as a means to get an idea, that could otherwise stay wedged, out of my head.

301 Redirects and Reversing a 301 Redirect

Tue, 20 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

On large sites there’s often a need to redirect pages that move, have rebranded content, or become deprecated over time. Along with maintaining the “search equity” of a page, it’s also important to keep the site usable and coherent for users. This can be challenging to configure and maintain, and even more challenging if a 301 redirect needs to be reversed.

Redirect setup

Search equity: the “link juice” or how much SEO weight a specific page carries.
301 redirect: a “permanent” redirect that will also transfer search equity.
302 redirect: a “temporary” redirect that will not transfer search equity.

When a page, or URL, is no longer needed on a site there are a few paths to take. The ideal scenario would be to add a 301 redirect from the deleted page to a new page that is a content-equivalent of the removed page. For example, if the content on page /foo/ is being moved to /bar/, a 301 redirect would be appropriate.

The Importance of Software Documentation

Sun, 28 Mar 2021 20:55:27 -0700

The first time I heard the term “durable artifact” was from Isaac Hepworth about a year and a half ago. At the time we were part of an evolving web team with a lot of opportunity for process and workflow improvements. Fast-forward to today and this same team is broken into specialized groups, planning out sprints and quarters, and working on complex site-wide features (during a global pandemic) and documentation has become more relevant than ever.

Estimating work on a software team

Thu, 25 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

How long is this going to take?

Estimating work is difficult. Properly estimating work is work. When working on a team with many stakeholders, accurate estimates provide valuable data to decision makers. The estimate can contribute to a features priority and help plan the roadmap for a team.

From the engineering side, it can be difficult to resist the desire to start coding. It may feel counter-intuitive, but pausing to establish a plan can be invaluable.

Prioritization Framework

Sun, 21 Feb 2021 20:57:43 -0800

An overwhelmingly large backlog can be a challenging thing to manage. To get it under control a “prioritization framework” may be the solution.

One option is declaring “backlog bankruptcy” and scrapping the entire thing to start from scratch. This can be popular if many of the items are old, a new team has taken over a project, or you just want “a new start”.

Another option is to take control of your backlog and put features in a priority order for execution. A “prioritization framework” may also be the solution for backlogs that have a large number of stakeholders vying for work from limited resources. Either way, a system would help evaluate each work item and produce a prioritized list of work.

GitHub Pull Request Automation with GitHub Actions

Thu, 17 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

GitHub Actions are currently in beta but are already proving to be another great addition to the GitHub ecosystem.

The Actions allow you to integrate Azure DevOps-like workflows into your repositories, either defined by you or from the ever growing marketplace .

Creating an Action

GitHub’s “hello world” Creating a JavaScript action article is a great way to get a simple action running and understand the basics of the metadata, toolkit packages, and workflow definitions. All possible GitHub API integrations can be found in the octokit documentation .

merge-bot

Fri, 20 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

PR management for GitHub repos. merge-bot automates pull request integration by checking a configurable set of conditions before merging: required labels, blocking labels, and optional reviewer approval. Once conditions are met, the PR is merged with the method of your choice and the branch is cleaned up.

It’s designed to replace the manual label-watching and back-and-forth of “is this ready?” — wire it up, set your rules, and let the bot handle the rest.

Using Azure Static Websites for production

Sun, 18 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This is a follow-up to my previous article Cutting hosting costs by 99% with static websites on Azure in which I describe the basics of setting up the feature as well as discuss the cost benefits. I realized there were a few configuration issues that needed to be solved for websites to be production ready.

Create Azure Storage and enable “Static website”

Create a StorageV2 storage account to utilize the static website hosting. Enable “Static website” through the Azure portal UI.

Cutting hosting costs by 99% with static websites on Azure

Tue, 31 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Microsoft Azure now offers static website hosting through Azure Storage and it will save you a ton of money. The static websites feature, currently in preview, was launched on June 28, 2018.

Hosting a website (with a server) can be done for free on Azure, but adding a custom domain requires the “Shared” tier which starts at $9.67 USD/month. Adding SSL requires the “Basic” tier which starts at $55.80 USD/month, plus the cost of the SSL certificate. However the same website hosted through static websites with a custom domain and SSL will cost roughly $0.20 USD/month.

squalr.us

Sat, 12 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Backlog

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Changelog

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

ChatGPT

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Is Google Bing?

Hummingbird Bite

Spyro the Dragon Poem

Crushed by Hats

Crushed by Hats: The Apology

Chillout with Chad 🎧

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Chillout with Chad was a weekly listening party and social chat. We listened to an entire album or curated playlist and chatted about music, music-inspired nostalgia, and life. No requirement to chat. Just hang out, listen, and do your own thing.

Upcoming

Past

2022.08.15: Episode 57: Pearl Jam “Ten”
2022.08.08: Episode 56: Zero 7 “Simple Things”
2022.07.25: Episode 55: Depeche Mode “Violator”
2022.06.13: Episode 54: Massive Attack “Mezzanine”
2022.05.23: Episode 53: Queens of the Stone Age “Songs For The Deaf”
2022.04.25: Episode 52: Radiohead “OK Computer”
2022.04.11: Episode 51: The Strokes “Is This It”
2022.04.04: Episode 50: Black Sabbath “Black Sabbath”
2022.03.28: Episode 49: Gorillaz “Demon Days”
2022.03.21: Episode 48: Pixies “Doolittle”
2022.02.14: Episode 47: The Dave Brubeck Quartet “Time Out”
2022.01.31: Episode 46: Caravan Palace “<|º_º|>”
2022.01.24: Episode 45: Nirvana “MTV Unplugged In New York”
2022.01.03: Episode 44: Pink Floyd “Wish You Were Here”
2021.12.06: Episode 43: Led Zeppelin “Led Zeppelin IV”
2021.11.29: Episode 42: The Cure “Disintegration”
2021.11.15: Episode 41: David Bowie “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars”
2021.11.08: Episode 40: Talking Heads “Stop Making Sense”
2021.11.01: Episode 39: Daft Punk “Discovery”
2021.10.11: Episode 38: Miles Davis “Kind of Blue”
2021.10.11: Episode 37: Plini “Impulse Voices”
2021.10.11: Episode 36: Stevie Wonder “Songs in the Key of Life”
2021.09.20: Episode 35: Fleetwood Mac “Rumours”
2021.09.13: Episode 34
2021.08.23: Episode 33
2021.08.16: Episode 32
2021.08.09: Episode 31
2021.08.02: Episode 30
2021.07.26: Episode 29
2021.07.12: Episode 28
2021.06.21: Episode 27
2021.06.14: Episode 26
2021.05.18: Episode 25
2021.05.11: Episode 24
2021.05.04: Episode 23
2021.04.26: Episode 22
2021.04.19: Episode 21: 2000s Rock
2021.04.12: Episode 20: 80s Pop
2021.04.05: Episode 19
2021.03.29: Episode 18: Anjunabeats Volume 10
2021.03.22: Episode 17
2021.03.15: Episode 16: Grum
2021.03.08: Episode 15: Justice
2021.03.01: Episode 14
2021.02.22: Episode 13: Daft Punk RIP
2021.02.08: Episode 12
2021.02.01: Episode 11: Daft Punk
2021.01.25: Episode 10: Chicane “Giants”
2021.01.11: Episode 9: Ben Böhmer “Live from Printworks London”
2021.01.04: Episode 8: Lane 8 - Sunrise Set - Grand Lake, CO
2020.12.21: Episode 7: CamelPhat “Dark Matter”
2020.12.14: Episode 6
2020.12.07: Episode 5
2020.11.30: Episode 4: deadmau5
2020.11.23: Episode 3: 90s/00s
2020.11.16: Episode 2
2020.11.09: Episode 1