Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
One of the traditions at Shutterstock is a quarterly Coderage or Hackathon, when all the developers group up and build something outside of planned workflows. These projects could vary from quick prototypes of internal service mashups to large-scale refactors of problematic areas in the codebase.…
Six years of hiking in the Upper Peninsula has taken me to a lot of cool places. Mulligan Plains, High Rock Bay, Ives Hill (Lookout Mountain), and the McCormick Tract are all locations that I never dreamed existed during my years at Michigan Tech, places I only found after research and exploring…
Many people avoid using regex in their application because of speed issues. When you're developing a site and are looking for sub-second response times a regex that takes a few hundred milliseconds is not very appealing. Especially when that slow pattern is being matched against several dozen…
It's pretty easy to shuffle a list/array in PHP. There's a function, shuffle(), that will simply randomize the order of elements. It also assigns new keys to the array, possibly a side effect of the internal algorithm that it uses. However, if you want to partially shuffle an array, there is no…
Grouping is an insanely powerful regex feature that is often underutilized. Sure, a lot of PHP developers know that if you wrap part of a pattern in '()' than you can pull that chunk out using preg_match and the optional $matches variable, but there's so much more you can do. Direct matching is just…
Over the last few months I've been playing around with Twitter's streaming API. I'm still at the tinkering stage, with a grand project in mind that's slowly being imagined. For a while the thought of a steady of stream of information was something that PHP just couldn't handle. Then I bumped into…
Over the last few years I've found myself writing and implementing a number of client libraries for different APIs. PHP to scrape dailymile and twitter, PHP to post updates to twitter, and even more PHP to interact with customer.io. Okay, so maybe most of my API building and consuming experience has…
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…
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…
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…