Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
The day had such a promising start. There was some spitting rain over the night, just enough to lull me into some of the best sleep I've ever gotten while backpacking. I woke up before dawn and had my gear packed without waking up the two men I had shared a campfire and stories with last night. The…
With the cooler temperatures of the Arizona winter something unexpected happened - backpacking in the Superstition Wilderness suddenly sounded appealing. And I'm not talking about the eastern end, the green hills around Reavis Ranch and Campaign. The western and central Superstitions, the desert…
Back in 2009 I was working at a company in De Pere called SparkNET. I was still a fresh developer then, just getting used to working with a team and building on modern web framework principles. One of the tools that they introduced was a profiler from Particletree that kept track of simple…
A few miles from our house in Gilbert is a little county park that I have barely explored. Well, maybe I misused the word 'little'. San Tan Mountain Regional Park is over 10,000 acres and offers miles and miles of trails. Until now the only loop I've really explored is the Goldmine/Dynamite, both…
Unit testing is something that I'm still rough around the edges with. I don't do it nearly enough at work and never really pushed myself to pick it up on the side. With my core site refactor, though, it seemed like a good time to wander into testing. And it made a lot of sense to write unit tests…
I've always been a bit wary about ORMs. While I understand the appeal of modeling a data structure in the application and how much fine-grained control that gives you, it just feels like a heavy-handed solution. It's a lot of extra code to write and maintain and to build it out 'properly', with…
It's not easy to get my two sons out on a hike these days. Their nap schedules conspire against family activities, being offset just enough to limit the amount of time everyone is awake. The days are short with the coming winter. And then there's the weather to deal with. Even though we live in the…
For the last two years I've been regularly flying to New York to sync up with my coworkers. See, I work as a remote engineer for Shutterstock, and while we do a lot of things to maintain healthy communication over different channels there is nothing like some solid face-to-face interaction a few…
This week I finally made the leap and pushed my personal MVC to a public GitHub repo. I didn't do this because I'm particular proud of the code - a good chunk of it is six years old and isn't representative of current (or past) best practices. Nor did I do it because I think other programmers will…
Queuing and messaging are two super-dandy things that I've had plenty of opportunities to play with while at Shutterstock. And with such a diverse company there are plenty of options to choose from. For a while I played with Resque, then it was RabbitMQ, then it was Kafka and Amazon SQS, all the…