Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
There's been something bugging me about interacting with Twitter through its API. Sure, it's easy enough to pull data for records, even if you're building your own OAuth request by hand. Its not too hard to take that logic a step further and post tweets on a schedule either, something that thousands…
Houghton County is home to plenty of interesting high spots. St Louis Bluff up by Laurium, Silver Mountain, the peaks of Haystack and Kallio, Beacon Hill, even Whealkate Bluff outside South Range all sit within the county boundaries and offer spectacular views. However, none of these can claim the…
This year started with a big change for me - a new job with Shutterstock in New York. At least the company is based in New York. I'm working as a remote software engineer, staying right here in Wisconsin. Anyways, one of the cool things that Shutterstock does with its remote developers is fly them…
There was a certain set of tools in Photoshop that I really enjoyed using back in my days of graphic design. Whether it was the color match, the magic wand, or some sort of filtering mask, the ability to pull objects out of a flat image seemed pretty cool. And, thanks to some of the different image…
Schemes of epic hikes always seem to pile up when winter slowly lumbers along. This month has been especially filled with shiny ideas. Its been a long three months since my last trip to the Upper Peninsula and now, thanks to a busy work schedule and the constant threat of record-setting cold…
Onboarding, for those unfamiliar with the term, is the stretch of time after an employee is hired. It's often used by development teams to describe setting up a new person and getting them fully engaged with the workflow - everything from signing paperwork to installing hardware and software to…
Another year has passed. It felt like a long one for me, longer than most.
For Katie and I, last year was one dominated by a single dramatic event: the arrival of Noah. With both of us being first-time parents we found the long pregnancy dreadful, the birth scary, and seeing our son for the first…
Around this time last year I was playing around with fuzzy dates - that is, formatting a machine date (like the UNIX timestamp) as a human-friendly string (like, 'last week'). At the time I was working on my lifestream site and wanted to display elapsed time in a convenient manner. Now that I'm…
My Saturn Ion shot through the late-summer woods along a narrow two-track. The road to Echo Lake Nature Preserve, a walk that had taken my tired legs hours to walk last winter, was an easy drive for my little sedan. There were a few mud puddles, a few splashes to cake the sides of the car, and then…
Finding geographic proximity is nothing new for me. While I've played with the Google Distance Matrix API before I've also had some fun using alternative (Warning: Mathematical!) methods for measuring distance with flat planes, spherical approximations, and tunnels. When I looked at adding a simple…