programming

It's been ages since I've written a blog post, mainly because I haven't done enough that's been public enough to talk about (and what I have done isn't as interesting as I'd like!). Today, though, I've got another small code snippet of something I just finished to make my life a little bit easier.

I've alluded to in the past, I'm sure, that my day job involves a lot of legacy and mission-critical code, and with...

As a followup to my last post , I'm going to assume that based on my previous thoughts you've now gone to your management team and advocated successfully for some work-from-home days in your life. More likely, of course, is that you're fortunate enough to be in a corporate environment where remote work is already embraced, whether that's for just some days during the week or month, or all of them. However you got to this point, though, this is where I come back in to impart my advice for working remotely in a...

And the time is still now, even if you're in a different time zone from all of your coworkers!

I've had a blog post in mind for months about how to most effectively work remotely, as I've been doing it for virtually the last ten years; in fact, I've been in my current organization over nine years now and of that time, all but eighteen months has been either partially or fully remote, mostly from more than a thousand miles away. Before I get to that post, though, I want to do this shorter one about why exactly it's valuable to work remotely for both individuals and the organization...

As someone who didn't come into software engineering from a traditional path, it was way down the line before I first heard the term "Rubber Duck Development." Everyone else out there probably knows full well what I'm talking about already, and there's really not that much more I can say about the core principle. I will do so anyway - in short, it describes a simple trick of the human brain: when trying...

I'm a middleman when it comes to my own webserver. My sites collectively are too large to exist as separate shared hosting with a webhost, but I also want to keep them all organized together and have the flexibility of managing each individual site that would come with a colocated or private server. If you're familiar with non-enterprise web hosting at all, you've probably just said to yourself "he must be on a VPS, then," and you're exactly right.

I host only a half-dozen sites or so ( though I'm looking for more clients! ), so I've got...

A couple months back, I read in Wired (in hard copy, no less, because I'm one of those weirdos) Clive Thompson's column "The Next Big Blue-Collar Job Is Coding" . It resonated with me at the time, but I sat on the article until I could also link to it, and now it's too late to really weigh in on it, because as soon as it hit the web it blew up. The post has nearly 125k shares on Facebook as I write this, in fact, and way more Facebook comments than any of their recent posts that don't involve...

A while back, I had a project in which I had a series of buttons that needed to be styled in a rainbow of candy colors, for a list of items that all lead to different spots in the same content hierarchy. The design mockups I was given for the project were detailed but did not appear to be internally consistent from color to color; the base colors were chosen from a brand guide, but the guide did not provide any detail for how to lighten or darken the colors for user interaction states. I started by developing CSS to match the mockups, but the problem kept gnawing at me. If these were solid...

The "Arkeg" is, as you might be able to suss out if you think long enough, a combination of a stand-up arcade game cabinet plus a "kegerator," another portmanteau describing a mini-fridge with a small keg of beer inside. This is, in fact, a real thing, and it's one that...