Programming

Everything I learned to manage my career I learned from Soccer

When I started working as a web developer, there wasn’t a lot of guidance about what that meant as a career choice. Of course, back then we were getting over the excitement of the blink tag and the new design opportunities afforded by table tags. I had to figure out a career path, and I did manage to do just that by watching a lot of soccer.

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Procedural Map generation

This post explains an approach to generating fantasy maps that is really interesting. One part of generating a non-grid based map, is to use create Voronoi polygons around some random number of x,y points on the map. There’s a lot of heavy math involved, but there are libraries for calculating them with Python and even

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Smelly PHP code

Adam Culp posted the 3rd article in his Clean Development Series this week, Dirty Code (how to spot/smell it). When you read it, you should keep in mind that he is pointing out practices which correlate with poorly written code not prescribing a list of things to avoid. It’s a good list of things to

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Automating FTP uploads

I needed to automate copying files for a website that I was building. Since this site was hosted on an inexpensive shared hosting plan, I didn’t have the luxury of shell or rsync access to automate copying files from my local development environment to the host. The only option was FTP, and after wasting too

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Back to SQL it is

An honest write up with first hand details of the shortcomings of couchdb in production. There’s a reason to stick with proven technologies and not simply chasing the latest shiny. Not saying sauce labs did that, just sayin’. This post describes our experience using CouchDB, and where we ran into trouble. I’ll also talk about

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