Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
Sometimes a small introduction leads you on a lifelong path. Learning HTML and hunting down waterfalls were both college whims that launched Jacob in new and unpredictable directions. It's hard to say what will chart your route, but if you're going to head down a path than start big and run hard.
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…
Katie and I were married on a beautiful August afternoon. After the wedding a lot of our family and friends jokingly asked how long it would be before we had kids, a question that we would respond to with a good-natured laugh. We're in our late twenties, and while some of our peers have a decent…
There were plenty of friends who told me that the wedding would be a blur of activity, a sudden glorious rush gone in a blink. They were right.
Katie and her parents did most of the planning for wedding weekend. My involvement was minimal, kept to a small sounding board and infrequent errand…
Running has never been a strong skill of mine. That didn't stop me from trying, though. A combination of lukewarm interest and parental pressure kept me in sports all through middle and high school, which included many years of track & field. I typically competed in the 400 and 100 meter,…
I was soaked. It was mid-morning, and I was following Bluff Creek downstream trying to find Rock Bluff Falls. The rain had finally stopped a few hours ago, but the twelve hours before that had been a steady downpour. Now the sun was slowly heating the woods into a steaming sauna. Everything around…
HTML forms are a great way to collect information directly from your users. There are plenty of input options available, even for the most basic, non-javascript enhanced forms. This post will go over the steps for creating, validating, and handling an elementary contact form with PHP and…
Working directly with the database is something I rarely do any more with the applications I work with. Instead of creating a raw connection and pulling data directly, I usually utilize some sort of customized data layer. (If you don't know what a data layer is, imagine creating a PHP application…
When I first decided to create an online blog I wanted to avoid a common pitfall of many other blogs: lack updates. While there were a few empty months in 2009, it feels like a did a good job with regular posts every week or so... Until the New Year rolled around. This is the first blog post in over…
While the last two posts focused heavily on theory and fundamentals of SQL it's time to start on the actual usage. There's a ton of good tutorials out there that skip right to the code, but as a young developer, I wasn't convinced that SQL was a worthwhile tool until I was forced to use it. I wanted…