Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
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…
Five years ago I played around with a PHP class to contain my resume content and abstract out optional pieces. This work ended up being unwieldy and largely unused - I had to create custom exporters to get the data out and rarely needed alternate versions of my resume. Shortly after building a few…
As of a few weeks ago my website used PHP to route static assets. That is, every time a request hit my server for css, js, or the like, a PHP process would kick up to process and stream the response back. This was done to handle versioning and compiling of different assets, which was very helpful…
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,…
Back in 2009 I was working at a company in De Pere called SparkNET. I was still a fresh developer then, just getting used to working with a team and building on modern web framework principles. One of the tools that they introduced was a profiler from Particletree that kept track of simple…
Unit testing is something that I'm still rough around the edges with. I don't do it nearly enough at work and never really pushed myself to pick it up on the side. With my core site refactor, though, it seemed like a good time to wander into testing. And it made a lot of sense to write unit tests…
I've always been a bit wary about ORMs. While I understand the appeal of modeling a data structure in the application and how much fine-grained control that gives you, it just feels like a heavy-handed solution. It's a lot of extra code to write and maintain and to build it out 'properly', with…
This week I finally made the leap and pushed my personal MVC to a public GitHub repo. I didn't do this because I'm particular proud of the code - a good chunk of it is six years old and isn't representative of current (or past) best practices. Nor did I do it because I think other programmers will…
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…
Over the years I've played a lot with Twitter and different bots and interactions. Shoot, there are write-ups on this blog about authenticating raw Twitter requests with OAuth, extending that to handling Twitter streams with Guzzle, and then doing it again with raw streaming requests. Using these…