On Sunday we celebrated 30 years of the PHP programming language. It was kind of cool to see some people’s stories of their journeys with PHP come up on social media. I was actually writing PHP for most of the day on Sunday – trying to fix an issue with a WordPress plugin – so […]
Whether they’ve written it or not, I’m willing to bet that nearly every developer with a certain amount of experience under their belt has a rant ready to go about Agile. As such, I doubt anything I say here is particularly new. It’s just my personal take. I often say I love Agile. That shouldn’t […]
Over on FantasyHockeySim.com, specifically with the National Simulated Hockey League, we have the concept of a Supplemental Draft. This is a player draft that gives access to veteran players for teams who have historically not performed well. How do we define “not performed well” though? From the league rulebook: “Teams with a regular season winning […]
Determining a person’s age should be easy. The difference between the current date and their birthdate, right? Over at FantasyHockeySim.com, though, it’s become a touch more complicated than that. Among other places, player profiles over at FHS display a player’s age. In the summer of 2023, upon the death of Maple Leafs prospect Rodion Amirov, […]
Well, this is my third one of these Random SQL Reviews, so I guess we can call it a series, though I’m still not sure how regular they’ll be. Today I want to take a look at something new over at DetroitHockey.Net. I decided recently that I wanted to have a little more automatically-generated social […]
It’s been awhile since I’ve played around with the Trello API but my “To-Do” board was annoying me recently and I found something new to automate. As I’ve previously mentioned, I’ve got a webhook listening to my “To-Do” board. I’ve also mentioned that this board consists of “Not Started,” “In Progress,” and “Done” columns. In […]
I mentioned last month that I’d been sharing “interesting” SQL queries from my own code with a coworker as a way to spread some SQL knowledge that I think sometimes gets overlooked. I’m still not sure that I want to do a whole series of blog posts around that but I have another query that […]
A recent conversation about solving hard problems reminded me of a lightning talk I gave at an internal micro-conference in 2012 for my then-job. The idea was to point out cases where perfectly reasonable assumptions turned out to not be so perfectly reasonable, challenging ourselves to question such assumptions, with two specific examples. The first […]
I’ve always thought that, in the realm of “full-stack” development, SQL has the tendency to be left out. I’m hardly a DBA but I love SQL, so this is disheartening to me. As an example, a few weeks ago I was on a call with a bunch of my team. We were looking at a bit […]
Last fall I wrote about how I had changed the design of the “matchup images” at DetroitHockey.Net. This marked a new design after one season with the previous one. It turns out, the “new” design didn’t even make it a season. As I previously noted, last fall’s redesign was intended to inject more color onto […]