PBS Tidbit 13 — PowerShell Tames Monty

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. Support Bart by going to lets-talk.ie and pushing one of the big blue support buttons. Referral Links: Setapp - 1 month free for you and me Parallels Toolbox - 3 months free for you and me Learn through MacSparky Field Guides - 15% off for you and me Backblaze - One free month for me and you Eufy - $40 for me if you spend $200. Sadly nothing in it for you. PIA VPN - One month added to Paid Accounts for both of us CleanShot X - Earns me $25%, sorry nothing in it for you but my gratitude

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In our miniseries on GitHub Pages, we learn how to create a basic Jekyll site. To do this, we must install a modern version of Ruby, install its Gem Bundler, create a little placeholder site, and then serve Jekyll to view our site locally. We push it to GitHub where the GitHub Actions we learned about last time do their magic and create a real website all for free. But we didn't stop there. One of our goals is to create our own theme, and to build on what we get with Bootstrap. We actually download the source, not compiled version of Bootstrap and pick and choose the files we want to use. While learning about the standard conventions for directory structure in Jekyll sites, we'll also learn about Sass — Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets — and how Jekyll will turn them into standard CSS. It's a bit of a heavy lift in terms of a lot of moving pieces, but no one bit of this was hard to learn. It was great fun, and this is just the beginning of what we're going to learn about using Jekyll as a fully-functional content management system.

Way back in September of 2022, Bart finished off the Webpack miniseries by leaving it as an exercise for the student to deploy their web apps to GitHub Pages. Bart closes that circle in this installment while teaching us how to use GitHub Actions. We learn about workflows, jobs, steps, events, and runners. Bart includes great tables in the shownotes of the terminology, so we now have a handy reference guide for making our own YAML files to run GitHub actions. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net. Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: PBS_2025_02_15 Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and check out the Programming By Stealth channel under #pbs. Support Bart by going to lets-talk.ie and pushing one of the big blue support buttons. Referral Links: Parallels Toolbox - 3 months free for you and me Learn through MacSparky Field Guides - 15% off for you and me Backblaze - One free month for me and you Eufy - $40 for me if you spend $200. Sadly nothing in it for you. PIA VPN - One month added to Paid Accounts for both of us CleanShot X - Earns me $25%, sorry nothing in it for you but my gratitude

In Programming By Stealth this week, Bart has started a new miniseries to teach us how to use GitHub Pages to create a website (for free.) In PBS 175, he starts by explaining what Static Site Generators (like GitHub Pages) are, and the pros and cons vs. a more traditional content management system like WordPress. Neither are wrong, they just solve the same problem in different ways. He then gives us the framework for the tools we'll be using and lays out the next few lessons where we'll get in and get our hands dirty. I'm extremely excited about this miniseries and I hope you will be too. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net. Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: PBS_2025_02_01 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: [email protected] podfeet.com/slack Support the Show: Patreon Donation Apple Pay or Credit Card one-time donation PayPal one-time donation Podfeet Podcasts Mugs at Zazzle Podfeet 15-Year Anniversary Shirts Referral Links: Parallels Toolbox - 3 months free for you and me Learn through MacSparky Field Guides - 15% off for you and me Backblaze - One free month for me and you Eufy - $40 for me if you spend $200. Sadly nothing in it for you. PIA VPN - One month added to Paid Accounts for both of us CleanShot X - Earns me $25%, sorry nothing in it for you but my gratitude

As promised, we're back with part 2 of the Powershell Teaser. We pick up where we left off, starting with learning about parameter definitions and the advantages such a structured language affords us, including automatically generated help files and error checking. Bart updated the shownotes to include valuable resource links to take your PowerShell to a higher level. We walk through our plan for 2025, where Bart is going to teach us about GitHub Pages (which power the Programming By Stealth shownotes) and then how to change the style you see with Bootstrap to make it your own. After that we expect to get back to PowerShell but that's a ways down the road so things could change.