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Some Constants
Everyone has their constants--a spouse, a ritual, parents, friends, whatever. Even with shit gets crazy in your life and you've got a million things going on, your constants are the things you can...
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Freeing Up Your Time
I'm a huge proponent of being lazy. And of course, by being lazy, I mean being smart.In my line of work (building tech companies), there are constantly a million separate things to do, worry about, and...
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Hack Things at the LA Hackathon
I know several things about you right now:You are more than likely a programmer. I know this because most of my writing here on this site is dedicated to programming, and I doubt you'd be here unless...
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Too Short
Some quick thoughts about how life is just too short to do stuff you hate.If you're an engineer working on a product you can't stand, it really isn't worth it to stick around and keep working on the...
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Ambitions
It's about 1am right now, and instead of sleeping I'm thinking about all the things I want to accomplish, and what I need to do to get there.While I'm currently really happy with my day-to-day life: I...
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Sometimes You've Got To Kill It
I've noticed that sometimes, doing the things you enjoy just isn't enough. Sometimes you need to do more.I often get that feeling deep down that I'm not being the best I can be--I'm not pushing myself...
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Time Off
This year for Thanksgiving, I did something I don't normally do: I took some time away from the computer.Since both my work and hobby involve programming, it is rare that a day passes for me in which I...
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A Year in Bakersfield
For the past year, I've been living in a relatively small city in central California: Bakersfield.Last year (a week before Thanksgiving Day), my wife's employer gave her an immediate (urgent)...
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Why You Might Enjoy Using DNSimple
Practically everyone I know involved in the tech industry has a preferred domain name registrar / DNS provider. I've used quite a few different companies myself over the years, and have come to really,...
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Being Awesome
If you wan to be awesome, then go be awesome.Code the stuff you want to code. Build the business you want to build. Lift the weights. Lose the weight. Go the extra mile.Don't listen to anyone else,...
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postgression - A PostgreSQL Database for Every Test Case
The following are some facts about me:I write a lot of software.In order for me to write good software, I often write tests for my software. Code that makes sure my business logic works on data from my...
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:(
Yesterday I came across this post, written by a really great programmer, and it immediately struck a chord with me. If you haven't read it already, I'll sum it up for you here.Heather Arthur published...
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Building postgression (an API Development Story)
Last week my friend Alven and I launched a new service for developers using PostgreSQL: postgression. postgression is a simple web service that allows you (a programmer) to instantly provision a free...
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Productivity and Calmness
While there are certainly many productivity hacks available to you, I can think of none greater than calming yourself.I can't tell you how frequently I find myself completely overwhelmed with things to...
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Heroku Dynos (in Depth)
NOTE: This article is all about Heroku. If you've never heard of them, you may want to skip this one >:)So, I'd like to talk about dynos with you (not dinosaurs, although, I do love talking about...
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A State of Exhaustion
Over the course of the past month, I've been completely exhausted. Last month I packed up all my stuff and moved into my friend Alven's spare bedroom with my wife and dog while we looked for a new...
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API Company Mistakes - Part 1 - Serialization Formats
Over the past few years I've been spending more and more time building and working with web APIs. To me, APIs are absolutely fascinating, and they've quickly become my favorite branch of technology to...
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The Positive Programmer
Is it just me, or is the technical community developing a more and more negative outlook in recent years? I hate to complain, but it seems like every week the development community is up in arms about...
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Sacrifice
One of the problems I (and apparently a lot of other people) have is that there are a million things I'd like to work on at any given time, and not nearly enough time in the day to work on them...
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It's All Perspective
A few days ago I wrote an article about being positive that ended up getting quite popular and generating a lot of reader email. Since then, I've had the pleasure of chatting with numerous interesting...
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High Standards
While I'm not one to advocate many personal development hacks, there is one hack that I think everyone dedicated to personal growth and success should know about: have high standards for...
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Improvement and Perfection
I just finished watching a truly excellent movie, Jiro Dreams of Sushi. If you haven't seen it, I'd highly recommend you watch it (it's available on Netflix if you're a subscriber).I'm all about...
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motivation.io
A couple of weeks ago, my friend Alven and I built a small webapp together that I wanted to share with you today: motivation.io.The idea behind motivation.io is simple: when I go workout at the gym and...
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Some Thoughts on Bitcoin
Last month I started actually using bitcoin for the first time. I've used it in the past, but never had any serious interest in the stuff until recently. Since I'm a relatively new bitcoin user (and...
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CD
There are certain practices every programmer learns at one point or another, which greatly improve their productivity. All the best productivity hacks for programmers are obvious things (in...
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5 AM
All my life, I've been the sort of person that likes to sleep until 2pm, then wake up and do things. For as long as I can remember, I've been more awake and active at night than during the day.Being...
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Fearless
Ever seen a truly fearless person? If so, you're likely one of the few people on earth who have.Truly fearless people are incredibly rare. Having the courage, willpower, and dedication to your goals to...
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Easy Fuzzy Text Searching With PostgreSQL
I've been using PostgreSQL for the past few years as my primary database of choice. I figured I'd take a moment to write about one of the coolest features I use on a daily basis, that you may find...
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Twenty Five
Today is my 25th birthday. I promise you I won't bore you with the details of what I'm doing for my birthday, but I did want to spend a few minutes and write about some of the things I've learned in my...
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Building an API Company - A Series
In this article series, I'm going to show you how to build an API company from the ground up, step-by-step.I'll be covering the entire process (in depth), so if you're a programmer who's always wanted...
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How Hard Can You Work?
Lately I've been rereading one of my favorite books of all time: The Passionate Programmer. While every page of this book contains an important lesson, I wanted to write about a particular one...
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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 with Python is really simple thanks to some...
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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 and fucking do something. No excuses. Want...
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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 (something I'm going to cover in subsequent...
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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 pretty decent understanding of how things work....
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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 incredibly great read, and I'd highly...
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My Startup, A Retrospective
Wow, the past ~2 years have been totally crazy.Almost two full years ago I launched my startup, OpenCNAM, with this post here on my blog. Since then I've learned a ton, and wanted to take some time to...
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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 happening.While I will always love OpenCNAM and...
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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 I've done before. As many of you know (if...
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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 spent all my free-time after school...
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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 ventures with incredible success.Today I'd like...
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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 on the Stormpath blog about the new Flask...
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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 parts of the language quite a lot.Over the past...
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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 kid, my family received a computer as a...
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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 you may not know, however, is that technical...
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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 on a daily basis.Over the past several years...
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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 fact that I didn't do them.Growing up, my mom...
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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 Authentication (aka: Basic Auth) in favor of OAuth.As...
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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 designed, oldest, and best all around...
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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 go do that before continuing.Welcome back!...
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