fbaum dot dev - a blog of sorts

Recognizing the PNW Journey

Working remotely during COVID-19 has been an incredible experience, but moving more than 1,600 miles from Minnesota certainly added an interesting aspect to the whole experience. When you mesh all that with (in no particular order): trying to keep a team and a

Dev Life

Test Tangential Development - TTD

We have all heard the TDD Test-Driven Development. This is, of course, the Right Way™. I am certain that in the last decade or so I have heard TDD evangelized at least a couple times year during various conferences, meetups, podcast, talk tracks, etc.

Dev Life

On Being a Capable Impostor

I've been doing some form of computer engineering or another since I was about 4 years old when I first copied a bunch of lines of BASIC out of a spiral bound systems' manual for the family RadioShack Tandy TRS 80. My father showed

workflows

How to: Cold Brew

#DeveloperRocketFuelCoffee is, arguably, the greatest thing that has ever existed ever. It is also, however, one of the most laborious things you can do for yourself and expensive things you can have done for you. The world belongs to Starbucks (and Amazon.. keep it

php

How PHP 5.4's Closure::bind Saved me From Reflection

A few weeks ago I was faced with a problem: I needed to access private variables within a Library class in our Laravel 4 based web application. The library we're using, installed with Composer, did not offer a way to access any of its

MAMP

MAMP Pro 3 + PECL + Extensions = Working MEMCACHE

Through a twist of fate well beyond my control I find that I must use a development environment every day that requires MySQL, Apache, PHP and Memcached. As it happens, through various personal life choices, very probably also well beyond my control, my daily

javascript

Thingdom JavaScript Wrapper

Of late I have been working working on several different projects in my day to day. Our team has been pushing out the release of a new tool called Thingdom and I'd like to talk a bit about it and the JavaScript wrapper I

Array

Array.prototype.diff(meaCulpa)

So, it turns out that when you go off all half-cocked all willy-nilly extending a core functionality of JavaScript it's bound to result in a hiccup now and then. It was, then, a few days after posting about my new 'diff' function that I

CSS

OMG CSS LEDs!!!

I don't know if it's really necessary to provide a lot of preamble for this entry. Recently I needed indicators. I decided to go with some semi-skeumorphic LEDs and you can see the result in this handily embedded codepen: [ See the Pen djhAt by

prototype

Array.prototype.diff()

Sometimes in the day to day you find some problem that is just fun to try to solve without a Google (Stack Overflow) search. Recently the problem I needed to solve was this: I have a list of 'feed' items on a page where

Having Fun at Work

This might seem completely obvious, but it's important to have fun with your work. Here's a good example. My boss mentioned that he wanted links on the project I'm working out to stand out. So, I gave him what he wanted: When I showed

macOS

My Friend Alfred

... and the Monokai Glass Theme. Alfred LogoIf you're a Mac user and you're not using Alfred then you're not nearly as efficient as you could be. The advantage of using a GUI based OS is that you don't have to type all of your

javascript

(My) JavaScript Style

There isn't exactly a style standard for JavaScript. Douglas Crockford has a good list of conventions. The Google JavaScript Style Guide is an excellent resource and there's even a styleguide from jQuery that I'm not terribly fond of, especially because they so strongly recommend

jQuery

(How I) Use Multiple Cached Selectors with jQuery

I am embarrassed to admit how often it really happens, but I frequently forget how to use multiple cached selectors with jQuery and usually just fire a quick Google search and then kick myself when I see a Stack Overflow post like this one