Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
When Chris and I talk about going out on a hike together, it always starts with a general idea of where we want to go and quickly devolves into long phone calls with dozens of possible destinations discussed. Weather forecasts, trail conditions, endurance, points of interest, time constraints are…
Now that 2017 is officially up and going it's about time to solidify some of my goals for the new year. I already talked about how 2016 was for me and hinted at a few areas of growth that I want to focus on moving forward. Which may be a bit optimistic, as Katie and I will be welcoming a little girl…
As 2016 draws to a close, I've been more reflective than normal about how the year went. In a lot of ways it's been a good one. Work is going great, especially considering how I was thrust onto a brand new team using unfamiliar technologies in early January. My boys are growing up fast and I can…
Looming over AZ-87 like a great green giant, Mount Ord climbs to over 7100' and is the most accessible peak of the Mazatzal Range. The Beeline Highway (AZ-87) crests at 4000' in a narrow saddle next to the mountain, and FR 626 branches off from that saddle and winds its way up to the summit. Another…
Thanksgiving Day is one of the few weekdays that I truly take off from work. Katie is busy with cooking and I like to spend the time with my boys doing things that we usually avoid on the weekends, like checking out popular hiking areas in the Supes. There was one destination in particular that I…
Over a year ago I made the decision to publish the custom framework behind my personal website. There were a few reasons why I wanted to share the code, though the main driver was that I wanted to actively modernize my code base. And it worked. Since pushing my custom framework I've updated huge…
Four Peaks is a landmark that is visible from most anywhere in the Phoenix valley. Unless there's a building in the way, the rugged profile can always be seen to the northeast, a distant landmark some sixty miles away that may shine brightly under a hot sun, glisten with a fresh cover of snow, or be…
A few months ago I started building a Swagger resolver library, with the intention of having a parser that understood different inheritance properties of the spec. About halfway through I realized that this library was going to be huge, with dozens of objects, and that it wasn't going to work the…
A cool breeze flowed around me as I stood on the summit of Amethyst Peak. The sun had been up for an hour, barely enough time to warm the earth, and last night's low temperatures still lurked around. Chilled, I pulled out a sweater from my pack and put it on, and then continued to eye up the three…
Middleware is a powerful concept that modern frameworks use to bridge between separate parts of a stack - namely, a HTTP layer and application. A request comes in, is validated/manipulated by middleware, triggers behavior in the application, and then the response goes back out through the same…