Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
It's been a long year since the initial Midwest PHP conference kicked off in the Twin Cities. During that time the community has changed, new technologies have cropped up, and other things that once seemed so shiny and cool are starting to show a bit of tarnish. Also, I've personally had the…
Trying to hide my nervousness I glanced around at the snowy trees and hills around us. Emily and I were driving up M-26 towards Atlantic Mine, one of the most notorious stretches of winter roads this side of the Mackinaw. Sputtering snow and strong winds cut down our visibility and kept our…
Emily and I pored over her ten-year-old McNally Atlas looking for a good snowshoe destination. The wind howled outside the small Ontonagon house as I checked the clock out of the corner of my eye. It was still early in the afternoon, with hours of daylight left in the snowy February day, but I still…
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…