Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
Continuous integration and deployment is one of my favorite parts about working at Shutterstock. The team can push, run automated tests, and deploy many times in a single day. I've been wanting to try to build up something like this for my own projects and, by using a combination of Digital Ocean,…
Last year I started building out domain repositories in order to encapsulate the data retrieval for my website. They were easy to build, straightforward to implement, and simple to test. At the time all of the data retrieval was through a standard sql database, so all I had to do was pass in a…
Over the last few backpacking posts I've mentioned that my pack has been getting lighter. I'm still pretty new to traditional backpacking, with only twelve adventures over the last year, and it's taking some time for me to understand my gear and comfort level. My first trip out on the Cabin Loop had…
The thermometer on the car read 112 when I stepped out into the parking lot in Apache Junction. Hot air rushed over me, feeling more like an oven than not, and I took an unsteady breath in. I was about to tackle a hike that I probably should not in temperatures that I probably should avoid and I was…
Several weeks had passed since the boys and I had gone out on a desert hike. I try to take them out on semi-regularly on a little loop in the San Tans near our house, an easy 1.3 miles that Noah is now running through and Thomas rides in the back carrier for the first half and wanders around the…
Now that Katie is freshly inducted into the cool backpacker's club it only made sense to try out something that I've been playing around with a long time now: a large group outing. Chris and I had gone on adventures, and then Katie and I - why not all three of us? Plus Kirsty, their cousin? Four…
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…
Morning light shone bright over Mesquite Flat, the small clearing east of Tortilla Flat where Mesquite Creek crosses AZ-88. A number of low green trees crowd this area (maybe Mesquite trees?) and a winding network of tracks mark the passage of countless car campers from years past. I parked the van…
Deep blue water snaked up from Canyon Lake into lower La Barge, pushed back against its natural flow by an unnatural dam on the Salt River. Katie and I looked down at the cool waters, at the people swimming and splashing and kayaking, and wondered why we were doing it wrong. Instead of being near…
A problem that I've run into during the unending quest for complete test coverage is mocking of internal PHP functions. Unit tests are easy to write as long as a class method returns everything it does, but when a method starts to call out to certain internal PHP functions things get difficult. It's…