Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
A few weeks ago, during normal working hours, something interested happened in one of our team's Slack channels. One of the engineers (from a different team) came in, asked a question about a project they were working on, and, after waiting less than ten minutes, decided to "@here" with a rude…
After spending quite a few years working with services, and, more recently, API gateways, I've become intimately familiar with the desire to add layers and layers of middleware. When a service is initially designed it focuses only on pure functionality - each endpoint offering a unique business…
For the last two years I've been working in the role of an API developer at Shutterstock. This was, initially, a career move that seemed to be both simple and stable. After all, working on an API is just making sure some lightweight application spit out JSON to match an interface, right? Wrong. The…
In early 2014 I started a new, shiny job working for a company based in New York. Shutterstock was my first fully remote position and my first time working for a 'big' technical company - that is, they had more than a hundred employees. Up until then I had worked for small, local shops in Wisconsin,…
For the last month or so my team at Shutterstock has been going through a death march. It has negatively impacted my blogging, personal life, and open source contributions. Also, it has only increased my commitment to the company and strengthened our team's dynamic.
So, what is a death march in this…
A cool event that happens every quarter at Shutterstock is Coderage, a 24-hour period of time where all of the developers can work on whatever they want. The project doesn't have to be related to work, though we often leverage tools that we use everyday to bootstrap something together quickly. Some…
Guzzle is a wildly popular PHP client that makes it simple to perform HTTP requests. The latest version, Guzzle v6, implements PSR-7 standards when handling requests and responses. By enforcing this standard HTTP messaging protocol it is now easier to have inter operable exchanges between packages,…
For the last two years I've been regularly flying to New York to sync up with my coworkers. See, I work as a remote engineer for Shutterstock, and while we do a lot of things to maintain healthy communication over different channels there is nothing like some solid face-to-face interaction a few…
Queuing and messaging are two super-dandy things that I've had plenty of opportunities to play with while at Shutterstock. And with such a diverse company there are plenty of options to choose from. For a while I played with Resque, then it was RabbitMQ, then it was Kafka and Amazon SQS, all the…
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.…