Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
When developing applications it is easy for programmers to think in terms of successful occurrences. Code is built to expect certain results because the programmer is thinking of how the application should work. Whether the specifications are being outlined or the code itself is being tested before…
I was only a few months into my waterfall adventures in the summer of 2008 when I learned some distressing news. A dear friend of mine was leaving Houghton for the summer, someone I had hoped to spend a lot of time with and who meant a lot to me. At that time I was searching for some waterfalls in…
Twitter has been slowly changing up their API over the last few months. When I first set up a cron to pull my Twitter timeline over a year ago I was able to pull a public RSS feed without too much difficulty. If they were over capacity, either just on the API side or with the entire application, my…
Sometimes things go wrong. I have been very fortunate over the years considering the number of adventures and idiotic ideas I've had, but sometimes bad things can and do happen. Among the problems that have cropped up during hikes I've had to deal with car problems, injuries, exhaustion, and…
Looking back at my previous jobs it's interesting to look at both what skills I gained while working there and how they shaped the direction of my career. At Michigan Technological University I learned about databases and priority management. SparkNET taught my about object-orientated programming,…
It was so, so early in the morning. I watched sunrise try to seep over Ives Hill in the east but got impatient and headed downhill before the rays touched my chilly outcropping. There was a long hike in front of me and I didn't want to waste time, especially on a lazy sun. Most of this hike would be…
Moving to Wisconsin from the wilds of the Upper Peninsula was a difficult move. Living in a small duplex on Wheatfield over the last two years with few friends nearby didn't help the transition. It was a nice place for Katie and I to start in but we were anxious to have a more solid footing. We…
Dull grey seeped into my tent signalling a long-awaited end to a miserable, sleepless night. I scrambled around in the frigid air, pulling on stiff clothes and grabbing prepared gear in a rush to start moving on a long hike. My campsite was less than ideal even though I had took pains to pick the…
Far from my usual haunts in the Huron Mountains, Wolf Mountain rises 1,826 feet and is the highest point in Gogebic County. Emily and I drove north along a forest road off of US-2, bumping up and down on the rough two-track past Little Presque River through thick, green woods. It was a short drive,…
PHP was the first programming language that I understood fluently. Sure, I had dabbled in BASIC, Java, ActionScript (3.0 is pretty awesome), and a few others, but PHP was the first language that I felt truly comfortable with. It wasn't until I moved onto JavaScript that I started to understand a…