Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
Coffee is something that has embedded itself into most of my routines, as it has most red-blooded Americans. It started in college with cream-and-sugar concoctions that the thought of makes my stomach churn and has since changed into a purer enjoyment of plain black brews. Nowadays it's a standard,…
For the last month or so my team at Shutterstock has been going through a death march. It has negatively impacted my blogging, personal life, and open source contributions. Also, it has only increased my commitment to the company and strengthened our team's dynamic.
So, what is a death march in this…
Phergie, an IRC bot that is written in PHP, is one of my favorite memories of working at DealerFire. One of my coworkers had wired up an old local box as a chat server and, after monkeying around a bit, got the bot up and running. And it was awesome. From random YouTube videos to more than a few…
The word 'brogrammer' has gotten a fairly bad rap over the last year or so. It was never a particularly popular word but lately it has come to symbolize a genuine and ever-growing concern over sexism in technology. Whether you're talking about booth babes or male-focused conferences, women are not…
Looking back at my previous jobs it's interesting to look at both what skills I gained while working there and how they shaped the direction of my career. At Michigan Technological University I learned about databases and priority management. SparkNET taught my about object-orientated programming,…
My career in web development started with delivering products, not necessarily expectations. Starting as a lone web developer I've previously made the mistake of trying to put the product specifications before the client needs, focusing on what I can do technically and not what I should be doing to…
Snap. Where did 2011 go?
Yup, last year was a bit busy. I've barely mentioned this on here, but I now work at DealerFire in Oshkosh. We mostly create custom websites for automotive dealerships, but there's a good mix of digital marketing, social media, and app development mixed up in there too. I'm…
Katie and I lived with her parents from the summer of 2009. After I lost my job at Michigan Tech they graciously opened up their doors for us until I could get a solid income again. What we hoped would be a several-month period grew to 18 months, since my SparkNET job wasn't enough to afford moving…