Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
As I discussed in a recent post about my 2013 plans, I've started working on my waterfall site again. This was my first large-scale side project, outdating my blog by a few months and including over a hundred waterfalls and 50-odd journal entries. The website included driving directions, photos, and…
After reading and practicing a slew of different methodologies in development projects I've noticed an interesting trend emerge, especially when working mid- to large-scale. In an effort to get an initial working example I'll write code very quickly, only slowing on occasion to optimize or clean up…
I haven't been too many conferences. DealerFire only pushed vendor conferences, fancy get-togethers in cities like Miami and Las Vegas where we all rubbed elbows with industry leaders and vied for customer attention. When I found out that Blue Door Consulting, my current place of employment, wanted…
Content Management Systems (aka CMS) is being grossly misused in its contemporary usage. Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, ModX… All of these are open-source web publishing applications that have a robust backend (depending on your needs) that are frequently described as being CMSes. They aren't,…
Recently I had the pleasure of reading Killer UX Design by Jodie Moule. This book goes over the basics of a user-focused design process, explaining some methods and practices to ensure user experience (UX) stays paramount throughout the discovery, concept, and delivery phase of a project. It really…
The word 'brogrammer' has gotten a fairly bad rap over the last year or so. It was never a particularly popular word but lately it has come to symbolize a genuine and ever-growing concern over sexism in technology. Whether you're talking about booth babes or male-focused conferences, women are not…
There's been a lot of changes to a few of my websites lately, including this blog. Inspired by the whole idea of responsive web design I've been going through and refactoring the front end logic. This involves more than just updating CSS. Removing jQuery, adding some HTML5, and cleaning up the…
In an effort to streamline and homogenize code a number of design patterns and best practices have sprung up in the programming field. One of the ideas that has moved across programming disciplines is the vilification of long strands of meandering logic, or called spaghetti code. For many in the…
Best practices can be great for a language like PHP. PHP is almost too easy to work in. Its low barrier of entry and high flexibility allow for many possible solutions to any given issue. Being a programmer, especially a PHP developer, you find that coming up with a fix or writing a new script is…
Over the last few days I've been working on a relatively large change to my image linking logic. This change involved some reorganization on the server side, adding name-spacing, changing the url structure, and placing 301 redirects to all 1200+ of my photos. I made this update both in hopes of…