Programming By Stealth

Hosted by Bart Busschots & Allison Sheridan

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Episodes

213

Latest episode

Jun 2026

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About the show

A collaborative project between Bart Busschots and Allison Sheridan to sneak up on real programming in small easy steps, using the allure of the web as the carrot to entice people forward.

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60 recent

June 7, 20261 hr 32 min

PBS 185 of X: Customising Bootstrap 5 with Sass

This final instalment of Sass lays a strong foundation for our return to developing statically generated websites with Jekyll. We learn how to deeply customise and integrate Bootstrap into our own styles. As is often the case, Bart starts by describing the different techniques that can be used to customise Bootstrap with Sass, and then ties it all together with a worked example. We now have the tools to use Bootstrap, even if our website uses a content management system like WordPress. 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_06_06 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: Patreon Donation Apple Pay or Credit Card one-time donation PayPal one-time donation Podfeet Podcasts Mugs at Zazzle NosillaCast 20th Anniversary Shirts Referral Links: Setapp - 1 month free for you and me 15% off Carbon Copy Cloner Wispr Flow - 1 month free for you PETLIBRO - 30% off 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

May 27, 20261 hr 28 min

PBS 184b of X: Sass Basics

This week, Bart and I recorded the second half of Programming By Stealth installment 184. The first half covered the Sass basics, and in this half, we get to learn through a worked example how to write in Sass, which compiles to regular old CSS. He created a little web page with some wise and humorous quotes from notable people in history, and used everything we learned in the first half to style the page. As I told Bart at the end, it's great that he teaches us the foundation of these tools, but it's equally great to have a worked example where we can see theory in action, and reference these examples in the future. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes for both Part A and Part B at pbs.bartificer.net. If you want to jump right to the spot in the notes were Part B starts, go to this direct link pbs.bartificer.net/...)

May 10, 20261 hr 57 min

PBS 184a of X: Sass Basics

In our most recent installment, Bart taught us how to use CSS "variables" (custom properties) to customize Bootstrap to make your pages not look like every other Bootstrap page on the Internet. He explained at the end that you can take all of this quite a bit further if you learn how to use Sass (Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets). Sass is a preprocessor for CSS, which means it creates "normal" CSS but allows you a lot more flexibility in how to create that CSS. For example, you can even create lists and maps and loop over them just like a proper programming language. We get Sass for free with Jekyll so why not take advantage of it? There's a lot to learn about Sass, so we broke this topic up into two parts, but even this first "half" is a mammoth episode. Nothing is a hard lift, but there's a lot to lift! You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes for both Part A and Part B and the audio podcast for Part A at pbs.bartificer.net. As Bart says at the very end, Part B comes with a "health warning" as it hasn't yet been proofread!

April 26, 20261 hr 25 min

PBS 183 of X: Customising Bootstrap with CSS 'Variables'

In our previous installment, Bart taught us how to use CSS "Variables" to style our web pages and web apps. In this installment, he takes it up a notch by showing us how to start with a Bootstrap-enabled page, and still customize the colors, fonts, and more with CSS "Variables". 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_04_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!

April 26, 20261 hr 38 min

PBS 182 of X: CSS 'Variables'

In this very fun installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart teaches us how to use CSS “variables”, which aren’t actually variables (they’re custom properties). These non-variables allow you to take advantage of Bootstrap to style web pages, but make the look and feel all your own. Bart outdid himself on the shownotes, the examples, and the challenge looks super fun. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes and the audio podcast at pbs.bartificer.net. If you appreciate the work Bart puts into Programming by Stealth, consider supporting him through Patreon or Paypal by going to supporting him on Patreon..

March 15, 20261 hr 26 min

PBS Tidbit 18 — A Real-World Jekyll Example

Bart taught us about creating static sites with Jekyll and even how to create custom layouts using Bootstrap 5. We learned about Markdown files with YAML front matter and more. In this Tidbit, Bart walks us through how he used everything he learned and taught us to migrate his Let's Talk website from WordPress to Jekyll hosted on GitHub Pages. It's a fun episode because we learn what worked well, what slipped through the cracks, and what he forgot to do. He built up a lot of technical debt on Let's Talk with his Let's Talk Apple and Let's Talk Photography podcast posts, so he highly encourages you to fork the site and create pull requests to help him clean up the older posts. You can see how many posts need cleanup (mostly adding contributors) at lets-talk.ie/temp-episodes-to-review.html You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes and the audio podcast at pbs.bartificer.net. Join the Conversation: allison@podfeet.com 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 NosillaCast 20th Anniversary Shirts Referral Links: Setapp - 1 month free for you and me Wispr Flow - 1 month free for you PETLIBRO - 30% off 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

February 1, 20261 hr 22 min

PBS Tidbit 17b — Simplifying Developer Setups with Docker

This instalment is the second half of PBS Tidbit 17 in which Helma van der Linden is the instructor and Bart Busschots is the student. We pick up the plot right where Helma begins to teach how to reuse the Docker image created in the first half of the lesson. You can find Helma's fabulous tutorial shownotes and the audio podcast at pbs.bartificer.net Join the Conversation: allison@podfeet.com 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 NosillaCast 20th Anniversary Shirts Referral Links: Setapp - 1 month free for you and me PETLIBRO - 30% off 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

January 28, 20261 hr 40 min

PBS Tidbit 17a — Simplifying Developer Setups with Docker

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". You can find Helma's fabulous tutorial shownotes and the audio podcast at pbs.bartificer.net Join the Conversation: allison@podfeet.com 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 NosillaCast 20th Anniversary Shirts Referral Links: Setapp - 1 month free for you and me PETLIBRO - 30% off 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

January 10, 2026

PBS Tidbit 16 — How Podfeet.com Works

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! Join the Conversation: allison@podfeet.com 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 NosillaCast 20th Anniversary Shirts Referral Links: Setapp - 1 month free for you and me PETLIBRO - 30% off 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

November 6, 202540 min

PBS Tidbit 15 — Building an Indie Author Site with Hugo by Eddie Tonkoi

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 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 NosillaCast 20th Anniversary Shirts Referral Links: Setapp - 1 month free for you and me PETLIBRO - 30% off 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