Saying Goodbye
It’s hard to describe in words how painful it is to lose a best friend – so instead, I’ll simply tell you about how amazing having a best friend can be. I...
Building a Heroku Addon - Planning
NOTE: You’re currently reading part 2 of a series I’m writing called “Building a Heroku Addon”. If you haven’t read the previous installment, you’ll want to...
Building a Heroku Addon
I hope it’s no surprise to any of you that I’m a big fan of Heroku. If you’re not already familiar with the service, it’s probably the most popular, well...
Why I Love Basic Auth
One of the disturbing trends I’ve noticed over the past few years is that more and more API services are slowly ditching support for HTTP Basic...
Leaving Things Better Off
When Sami and I first got married (almost 5 years ago, now!), our biggest source of marital frustration and unhappiness was chores. More specifically: the...
Enjoy Your Life
Life can be really hard sometimes. Everyone has a million responsibilities: family, friends, work, hobbies, ambitions, etc. It can all be a lot to deal with...
The Best Thing I Ever Did
I’ve got many different interests. Chances are, if you’re reading this, you found this site through my technical writing (it’s what I’m best known for). What...
Finding Your Passion
I’ve been incredibly lucky in my life as I’ve always known what it is I enjoy doing – what I love. I realize that not everyone is so lucky. When I was just a...
For Loops in Node
As of late, I’ve been spending a fair amount of time writing Node.js code. While I’m not a huge Node.js fan (yey Python + Go!), I find myself liking some...
Tech Marketing and Spam
Earlier today I was accused of spamming the Flask subreddit (you can see a link to the offending post here). What essentially happened is that I wrote a post...
Heroku and SOA
In the past, I’ve written a bit about service oriented architecture, what’s great about it, what’s bad about it, and how I’ve used it extensively in past...
Quality
Since I first started working as a “professional developer”, my primary focus has been building a lot of different things – fast. Even when I was younger and...
My Experience as a New Developer Evangelist
Three weeks ago I joined Stormpath as a Developer Evangelist. This is my first Developer Evangelist job, and so far it’s been a lot different than anything...
Moving On
As I wrote the other day, my startup OpenCNAM has been doing really well over the past two years since it’s launch, and lots of exciting things have been...
My Startup, A Retrospective
Wow, the past ~2 years have been totally crazy. Almost two full years ago I launched OpenCNAM, with this post here on my blog. Since then I’ve learned a ton,...
Making the World a Little Bit Better
For the past few days, I’ve been reading an excellent new book: The Tipping Point, by Malcom Gladwell. Despite the relative wordiness of the book, it’s an...
How Caller ID Works
Oh man. I don’t do this often, but, I’m going to do a bit of ranting >:) Why? I’ve been working with telephony stuff for almost 5 years now, and have a...
Instantly Improve Your Month
Two months ago I was having a pretty lousy time. I was in a serious rut. The new project I’d been working on was struggling with various scaling issues...
Fucking Do Something!
A little bit of life advice to myself for future reference: the next time you’re not feeling great – feeling lonely, sad, whatever it may be – just get up...
Quickly Extract XML Data with Python
Today I had the unfortunate luck of having to integrate an XML web service into an application I’m working on. As you might already know, parsing JSON data...