At my day job our codebase is kept in a handful of self-hosted Git repositories. We have a tool that runs nightly, emailing out a digest of all of the previous day’s commits. It’s kinda cool but I have the tendency to ignore it as a wall of text. I prefer more granular messaging and […]
I have a tendency to like to reinvent the wheel in my development, just to prove that I can. I’ve gotten better about it over the years. I replaced my custom-built blog engine with WordPress on DetroitHockey.Net, for example. I still roll my own classes for interacting with the Trello and Twitter APIs, though. Lately […]
I wrote last month about launching FantasyHockeySim.com and replacing the old DetroitHockey.Net Community Forums with a Slack team. At the time I promised a future post about the work I did with the Slack API. The Slack API uses OAuth for authentication, which isn’t really a surprise. It does open up problems if you want to […]
After launching a new site that wasn’t all that new, my next project was a redevelopment of DetroitHockey.Net that removed features rather than adding them. With the fantasy side of the site gone and no longer reliant on the rarely-used DH.N Community Forums, I reworked DetroitHockey.Net to remove the forums. I also pulled out my […]
A few days ago I launched a new website. Kind of. FantasyHockeySim.com went live last Thursday. The site plays host to a couple simulated fantasy hockey leagues using the FHLSim software. Through FHS, league members can manage their teams in real-time, as opposed to all kinds of manual data entry that is required by FHLSim out […]
Martin Biron was the last player in the National Hockey League to wear #00. It’s one of my favorite stories because it mixes hockey with the pitfalls of software development. Biron, then a rookie goalie for the Buffalo Sabres, appeared in three games in the 1995-96 season wearing #00, which he had worn during his […]
I love agile development methodologies. Specifically the ability to fail fast and adapt as necessary. I love cloud services for making failure cheaper and therefore easier. We can try new things because the risks are lessened. We have the process for failure figured out. We have the technology for failure figured out. I think we’ve still […]
I was in a pairing session with one of my teammates earlier today and we stumbled into an interesting little bit of inspiration. Working in Javascript, we were thinking about splitting some values while iterating through an array but that didn’t really feel like the right answer. Looking for some kind of better solution, my teammate Googled […]
When I started my professional career at Michigan State University’s Division of University Relations, I was a web developer. I wrote PHP and ASP and JavaScript and HTML and sliced up images in Photoshop and designed MySQL databases. I had to do a little bit of server management. I also trained clients in how to […]
So I’m a bit particular about how I keep my finances in order. To the point that I wrote my own web-based ledger software to help myself keep it all straight. Yeah, there are third-party solutions out there, but I wanted something that worked exactly the way I wanted. Every couple days I pull receipts […]