Engineering Control

It’s interesting to me to think about my job as “Engineering Manager” and the words “Engineering” and “Management”. Then I think about what might it mean to engineer management? We do that through process. Through trial and error. Through iterative adaptation. Today I spoke with a fellow traveler on

javascript

Web Scraping 101

Sometimes you might want to get some data from a webpage, and sometimes you might want to do that using some code.

In Linux, Jobs are Useful!

One of my favorite features of POSIX systems is the ability to make use of jobs for multi-tasking. Often I have seen other devs who, for a variety of reasons, may just not know their way around this functionality.

Bremerton

On Falling in Love with Your Town

There is something magical about actually falling in love with where you live. Loving Where You LiveA shot of a journal page about this very topic!Necessary backstory... ???I have been trying to move to the Pacific Northwest for a very long time. So has Manda. And since we both

Zoom

Unnecessary Zoom Fatigue

It happens, the unnecessary zoom, and it’s pretty frustrating. when it should've been an email pic.twitter.com/C1eJFX8tyTFebruary 4, 2021It’s frustrating because you can’t help but lament the sheer volume of time wasted, and not just your own, but everyone else who was pulled into the

Leadership

Leadership: People & Process

It's About the People, StupidIt’s easy to lose sight of the people element. Recently I attended a training led by Bill Joy who reminded us again how important it is to coach the person not the problem. This is a common trap that is remarkably difficult to avoid even

journey

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 variety of legacy projects from coming

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. Stop me if you've heard this

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 me how to do it and

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 coming Seattle!), but as much as

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 properties, instead it offered two public

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 driver is a MacBook Pro and

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 worked on. What is Thingdom?To

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 found my JavaScript choking on exactly

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 F. Stephen Kirschbaum (@fskirschbaum) on CodePen.

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 a long poll is watching for

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 this to him he said that

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 commands into a terminal and you

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 the use of double quotes over

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 and immediately remember how I do