Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
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…
Frost sparkled evilly on the tent's rainfly under the dim light of my headlamp. Against my will my teeth began to chatter ferociously and I shuffled in place in a vain attempt to warm up. It was terribly cold this morning in the eastern Superstitions, much colder than either Chris or I expected, and…
Over the years I've played a lot with Twitter and different bots and interactions. Shoot, there are write-ups on this blog about authenticating raw Twitter requests with OAuth, extending that to handling Twitter streams with Guzzle, and then doing it again with raw streaming requests. Using these…
Trying to get motivated to go for a hike in the hot Arizona desert was tough after Isle Royale. Nine days of midwest weather on Lake Superior had spoiled me, and I still had sore knees and feet to heal. Chris finally convinced me to head out on a relatively easy loop, one that we had been eyeing up…
There are a lot of hiking options on Isle Royale that are more reasonable than my ambitious perimeter loop. Most people would rather have short days and time to relax at camp, with the additional bonus that this could lead to repeat visits in the future. This was apparent by the discussions I had…
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…