Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
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…
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…
Around this time last year I was playing around with fuzzy dates - that is, formatting a machine date (like the UNIX timestamp) as a human-friendly string (like, 'last week'). At the time I was working on my lifestream site and wanted to display elapsed time in a convenient manner. Now that I'm…
Finding geographic proximity is nothing new for me. While I've played with the Google Distance Matrix API before I've also had some fun using alternative (Warning: Mathematical!) methods for measuring distance with flat planes, spherical approximations, and tunnels. When I looked at adding a simple…
Outside of fetching elevation information for each point on the upcoming waterfall refactor I decided to add a new feature. Listing the county and exact latitude/longitude is helpful for explaining where a waterfall is located (as well as showing it on a map, of course), but listing the 'closest…
A related piece to the new waterfall site (that I'm still actively working on) is geodata - that is, the coordinates of each waterfall and nearby features, paths, etc. The existing waterfall site had each coordinate saved inline with the fall record, a very sloppy and elementary implementation.…
Earlier this week I had the pleasure of learning about Sculpin, a sweet PHP tool, from Ben Benesh at the local PHP meetup. Sculpin is a static site generator that takes a bunch of Twigs and/or Markdowns and compiles them into a set of static HTML files for easy deployment. There are some rather cool…