It seems weird to justify what I write in my own blog but I was recently sent a piece by Mark Llobrera that resonated with me and I wanted to spin off of it. The fear of stating the obvious is one of my primary personal roadblocks to writing. I have a horrible time deciding […]
Like any self-respecting nerd, I have capital-t Thoughts on The Force Awakens. I didn’t see it on opening night but I did make it before the weekend was out. I’m sure my thoughts aren’t anything new but I want to get them out of my head so they’re coming out here. It should go without […]
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 […]
When the Grand Rapids Griffins announced their alternate jersey design competition this year, I didn’t quite know how to feel about it. Last year I entered, posted my predictions on the winners, and was disappointed with the jerseys that were picked. Since then I’ve disliked the Griffins’ 20th Season logo, their new primary logo, and […]
So a little while ago I was thinking about Ricky Robinett‘s blog post about using Twilio to get notified about World Series ticket deals. Specifically, I was questioning the use of Twilio to drive the notifications. Personally, I prefer my notifications via email. To the point that I look at that post and think, “Come […]
The team I’m on recently released a new product. We’ll call it ShinyNewThing. Several weeks of work and discussion and a soft roll-out to some beta users and we were feeling pretty good about ourselves. People were excited about ShinyNewThing. Oh, sure, testing had revealed an issue early on, but that was clearly an invalid […]
My friend Jenny operates as NextJen Mobile, which led to me creating a NextJen logo last fall. Recently, Jenny decided to pull her development blog – Code, Crafts, and Craic – off of Blogger and onto the NextJen site. I ended up coming up with a type treatment that ties Code, Crafts, and Craic into […]
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 […]
One of the first things I wrote about when I started this blog was my workaround solution for exporting from TechSmith Snagit to Amazon S3. That worked okay for Windows but I’ve started working on Mac significantly more of late and I missed that functionality. As such, I took another look at options for this […]