Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
A few months back I started building a streaming Twitter bot, an idea of mine that had been stewing around for most of the year. As with most projects I got sidetracked, this time by a cross-country move, and it took me to the first day of 2015 to release the prototype. A rough prototype at that.
My…
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.…
After playing with Twitter's streaming API this year I started to think of all the cool possibilities out there. If you could depend on a bot for a real-time response to any query… Well, there's a lot you could do. Targeted results, calculations, even two-way interactions, all from the…
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…
There are few tasks that I cringe about more than putting together a presentation with a standard slideshow program. With my background in web development the drag-and-drop process, mixing of content with design, and maintaining consistency through an evolving forty-plus slideshow is clunky and…
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…
Finally. After years of neglect and false starts the Waterfalls of the Keweenaw site has a new look. It was my first website, predating this blog by several weeks, though I haven't touched it in close to five years. It was about darn time that it got a fresh coat of paint.
So what is this site?…