A bit about Jacob's blog

Whether it's a post about some epic adventure in the northern reaches of the Upper Peninsula or an open discussion about web developement, this blog covers some pretty solid stuff. Find out more about the man, technology, and ideas behind the content. And yes, there was an encounter with a wild moose in Jacob's past.

Bull moose staring down at me

The Man

Allons-y! My name is Jacob Emerick and I am a displaced (wanna-be) Yooper living in the Phoenix area. I work in the field of web development and spend a lot of my time focusing on best practices, project management, and client interaction. When I'm not working in code or reading books I like to hike in the wilds of Michigan's Upper Peninsula and the Superstition Wilderness of Arizona.

The Technology

Well, this is a blog, so it's running off of Wordpress, right? Wrong. This blog, as well as all of my other sites linked up in the footer, is all custom code. Everything runs off of a central custom framework that I manage through version control with several testing nodes. It is an MVC inspired by my work in Zend, CodeIgnitor, and CakePHP, but is an entirely new beast. Because this is all custom code I have a lot of freedom when it comes to testing and optimization, something that scratches my programmer itch very nicely.

The Content

All of the content on this blog have been roughly grouped into three categories: hiking, personal, and web development. The hiking posts cover my adventures in the Upper Peninsula, encompassing an area from the Porcupine Mountains to Copper Harbor over to Marquette. Web-related posts are a bit more varied, with topics ranging from basic tutorials to discussions about best practices and team development. Occasionally I write about things that are going in on my life on a bit more personal level that get grouped in the last category. Yes, I realize that this isn't following the whole 'niche' idea for SEO, but meh.

Activity Stream

  • Read 'Salem's Lot by Stephen King.
  • Read Elantris (Elantris, #1) by Brandon Sanderson.
  • Read It by Stephen King.
  • Read Mistborn Trilogy (Mistborn, #1-3) by Brandon Sanderson.
  • Read Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson.
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