Joshua Iz.
Joshua Iz

My name is Joshua Iz. I’m a dj, music producer, developer, designer, coffee lover, traveler, and writer based in Chicago.

Latest Posts:

  • Published on

    Why Digital Performer Is The Best DAW

    There are certain things that people will never cease to debate: 1) Is Chicago deep dish really pizza? 2) Who is the best heavy metal band of all time? 3) What is the first house music record? 4) What is the best Digital Audio Workstation (DAW)?

    If you want to know the answers — or at least my answers — read until the end!

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    Published on

    Mounting A React App in a Shopify Theme

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    Recently I've had to build out some custom functionality in Shopify and my framework of choice is React. I've seen a few posts floating around on the intarwebs explaining that Shopify's Liquid templating language and React just don't mix. That's hogwash.

    Not only can Liquid + React play nicely together, with a little finessing you can use Liquid's build-at-runtime feature to your advantage to pass dynamic data from Liquid → React on page load. Here's how.

    Read more →
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    Published on

    Using GitHub Actions to Post to Twitter on Commit

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    After recently redesigning my site at joshuaiz.com with Next.js, Tailwind CSS and MDX, there was one feature that was a must for me to include: automatically Tweet any new posts to Twitter with a link and image.

    If you are deploying your site's posts or pages using static files in a GitHub repo, I'll show you how to Tweet any new posts with an image automatically on commit but only with specific text in your commit message. You can update your site and posts and then Tweet whenever you are ready!

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    Published on

    A Practical Guide to Preparing Web Content for Your Developer

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    A message from a developer to content managers, marketing teams, and point people: help us help you.

    Your team has decided on a redesign or a new website, you've hired a developer or an agency to perform the work and it's full steam ahead. Great!

    Here are a few tips from a developer on how to provide content in a way that makes our jobs easier. And it will help you get organized as well. That seems like a win-win to me.

    Read more →
  • CookRanks - Digital Dub Clash cover art
    Published on

    New Release: Cookie Ranks - Digital Dub Clash

    CookRanks - Digital Dub Clash cover art

    First, a few words about dub

    Anyone who knows me well knows that I've been listening to a lot of dub over the past few years. Dub is my music of choice when working on non-music stuff like coding or designing so it is playing almost constantly at home. While working I can't listen to house or techno or hardly any music that I play as a dj as my mind will get fixated on the music and little to no work will get done. For me, dub is the perfect music to have on in the background for working or just to chill things out which is not a bad thing anytime.

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    Published on

    Migrating Your Site from WordPress to GatsbyJS

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    In my last post 'Porting My WordPress Site To GatsbyJS' I discussed a bit about the motivation to move my site from WordPress where it had been for over a decade to GatsbyJS.

    In this post, I'll provide a detailed walkthrough to help migrating a simple WordPress site to a Gatsby site with some Markdown files as the data source. Hopefully, I can clarify some of the pain points that I ran into along the way to help your transition be a little smoother.

    Read more →
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    Published on

    Porting my WordPress Site to GatsbyJS

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    Don’t mean to overhype it, and note it has its warts. But @gatsbyjs blog authoring experience is incredible. Hot reloading feels instant. I write posts and tweak styles or layout, and see my changes reflected in real time. This was my dream.

    — Dan Abramov (@dan_abramov) December 1, 2018

    I've been working a lot with React lately and in the React ecosystem there has been a considerable amount of buzz about GatsbyJS — a really cool static (or not-so-static) site generator which uses all of the latest JavaScript stuffs: React, Webpack, GraphQL, code-splitting, prefetching that can load data from just about anywhere: local markdown files, a CMS like WordPress or Drupal, json, and more. While Gatsby has been around for a couple years, it seems to be really picking up steam as of late.

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