I am a musician. My instrument is Saxophone. My influences are many, but my sound is informed by a few of the greatest saxophonists who ever played. John Coltrane. Lee Konitz. His contemporary Paul Desmond whose sound was once compared to a dry martini to which he responded, Awww, I always thought it was two dry martinis More specifically, I am a music technologist. Not only do I have the tr…

Do DevOps and SRE teams have customers? They must, right? I mean, don't they just fix the servers when something breaks? To put it another way, DevOps successes are invisible, but their failures can be extremely disruptive. Kind of like plumbers. How often do you think about plumbers? I would venture to guess that many people only ever interact with a plumber when their pipes freeze and brea…

#10. git Happy might be a bit of stretch with this one. So named because when you use it, it makes you feel like a git. But my developer age has granted me the gift of learning git just after it started becoming really popular for all kinds of programming work. I didn't need to learn cvs, bitkeeper, svn or mercurial. Writing code of any kind without git is like... taking a unicycle to the g…

A fortunate find... I recently stumbled on some wonderful material by a guy named Greg Wilson. While I was reading, I saw that he had contributed a chapter to a book (you know, the physical object with paper pages?!) that I happened to have on my shelf. It's called 500 Lines or Less: Experienced programmers solve interesting problems. I enjoyed Greg's material so much that I decided to see w…

I suppose my love for the vast landscapes of the American west also carries over into my digital life. I like having extra storage space for code, photos, backups, email, audio recordings, random database experiments, and my music library. So I recently decided to upgrade the storage capacity of my network attachable storage (NAS). I also needed to move a bunch of files from some old external…

I was recently surprised by the realization that my dabbling, or perhaps more appropriately bumbling, with Haskell may have actually degraded my performance as a PHP developer. To be clear, I happen to think PHP is a decent language. It is the language I used for my first honest-to-goodness web application that was useful to someone. Liking PHP is unpopular - as one could easily discover wit…

I'm going to give you two crucial pieces of information, and I want you to answer one very simple question based on this information. 1: The name of a file: hourly_sync.py 2: This file is a cronjob The question is, how often does this job run? If you thought to yourself, I don't know yet, you might be a developer. If you are a normal human being, you thought, That job runs every hour. You nor…

Part II In part 1 I discussed why I chose Jekyll to build this site and presented a high level overview of how Jekyll works. In this post, I'll dive into the depths of Jekyll and show off some of its features. Liquid Templates The template engine used by Jekyll is called Liquid. Liquid makes it easy to create a layout and pull in page elements dynamically. Jekyll will compile content into a …

Jekyll is a static site generator written in Ruby that uses the Liquid template engine. In combination with git for version control and Jenkins for deployment, Jekyll is a powerful tool not just for blogging, but also for small to medium- sized websites. Give Jekyll a try, and you can blog like a hacker. First, a minor diatribe... Web sites used to be simple. A little HTML, some text and may…

When first learning PHP, it is quite easy to shoot yourself in the foot. PHP is forgiving and you can get away with writing some seriously crappy code. Consequently, PHP programmers often follow a similar path as they develop their skills. I started off writing horrendous code that was utterly unmaintainable. Of course I ended up rewriting all of it. Twice. And through that process, one whic…

Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky Incredibly relevant, hilarious, and snarky Joel Spolsky - you love him or you hate him, but you know he's right. His writing may be a little unorthodox, but his anecdotes about the software industry are chock full of practical wisdom. This book is fun to read and it will make you think. The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas Well writ…

At my former job, I was involved with a group called the SWAG - The Secure Web Applications Group. One hotly debated topic was identity management and central authentication. For months the SWAG discussed plans we could implement to improve the security of our network and the various web applications that run on our network. Of course, this is a group of computer nerds. So we discuss things …