Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
Flushed with recent successes I quickly rushed Noah through his morning routines. Last week him and I had a great time on the Goldmine Loop of the San Tan Regional Park, a fun adventure that I was hoping to turn into a regular occurrence. For today I had picked out a nearby destination (South…
Dim light seeped in from the east over the ridge, just enough to highlight the impressive rocky peaks of the Superstition Mountains. Everything else was dark. Our trail was dark, the cacti surrounding us was dark, and the mid-sized rocks that waited to roll under our ankles were dark. We carefully…
A few months back I started building a streaming Twitter bot, an idea of mine that had been stewing around for most of the year. As with most projects I got sidetracked, this time by a cross-country move, and it took me to the first day of 2015 to release the prototype. A rough prototype at that.
My…
Flowing south from the iron mining highlands of Champion and Negaunee, the Escanaba River spends most of its length trickling through swamps before emptying into Lake Michigan near Escanaba. It has three main branches, the middle and east ones meeting up at Gwinn and the west some ten miles…
Bringing Noah along for a hike has been a long-standing desire of mine. A love for the outdoors, for the dirt and trails and campfires, is something that I largely attribute to my parents. Well, my parents and some family friends growing up. We knew a family who camped and hunted regularly,…
On the morning of January 5, 2015, Thomas Neal Emerick was born, our second child. He arrived in a small hospital in Mesa, Arizona after a drawn-out pregnancy that was filled with anticipation and far too much stress. We had a few close encounters over the last few weeks, late-night visits that we…
I'm not sure if I'm excited or not for 2015. Noah will be hitting two, we'll be having a new baby in a few days (oh golly), and working for Shutterstock just keeps getting better. On the other hand, I'm 2000 miles from my beloved Upper Peninsula and living in a desert. Everytime I think of the next…
This would be my fourth time up Camelback Mountain. I had previously braved the crowds of Echo Canyon twice and the relative seclusion of the Cholla Trail once with Chris. He had some friends in town this weekend, some friends who were interested in a desert hike, so we decided to take them on the…
For several hikes now Chris had made the drive down the 101 to meet up with me. It's not a long drive from his place up in Scottsdale, maybe thirty miles to our usual meeting spot in Gilbert, though rush hour can double or triple travel time. To balance things out we decided to aim for a hike closer…
One of the traditions at Shutterstock is a quarterly Coderage or Hackathon, when all the developers group up and build something outside of planned workflows. These projects could vary from quick prototypes of internal service mashups to large-scale refactors of problematic areas in the codebase.…