Software Posts

I figured I should write some takeaways since I only read one book every five years or something

Is Laravel better than Remix? Is JavaScript better at the front-end? Which one should I use? Who's on first?

I quit my job and focused full-time on side projects for four months. Here's what I learned during this time and what I plan to do next.

I've been working at Shopify for one year now. Here's what I've learned.

How we enable Concert Ad Manager users to upload, crop, zoom, and optimize their images — completely in-browser without any external services.

I talk about building my new website with some fun new technologies.

Why we did it, how we did it, and what we learned.

A quick tip for handling raw input in your software library.

The set of guidelines our mostly-remote engineering team established to make giving and receiving feedback on a pull request a pleasant experience.

I'd love to have you become a member! And share it with others.

What we learned by experimenting, working and learning together

I built Fresa, a library that makes WordPress development more enjoyable using object-oriented standards and fluent, expressive interfaces.

Let's build a realtime chat application using Laravel 5.4 and VueJS, and then we'll test it with Laravel Dusk!

Learn about the "just enough" principle I borrowed from Erika Hall and how I apply it to my web development process.

As an active CodePen user, I've been wanting to host a CodePen meetup in my area for a while. In the spring of 2016, I decided to bite the bullet and enlist the help of my pals Justin Lobaito and Ryan Young to plan Iowa's first CodePen meetup! Spoiler alert: It was really great.

I'm working on a project which contains a collection of 40 to 50 items. None of the items have photos or other distinguishing visual indicator, so I wondered... Could I add a difference in color based on the date of each item in the collection?

I go on a week-long challenge to only use Vim as my text/code editor. Goodbye, Sublime Text! See you never! Totally kidding.

How much traffic is a lot of traffic for a DigitalOcean droplet? I test out a couple different heavy traffic scenarios with CloudFlare and WordPress.

When you're building out a website with full-width background images, you've probably run into an issue with resolution and size. Screens are getting huge, and images keep getting larger. But how large is too large for images?

Did you know there exists a native HTML solution to those beloved Autocomplete widgets? It's called datalist, and you can use it today (sort of).

I took part in a worldwide Hackathon called Static Showdown. It was a lot of fun, and here is a writeup about it (with a link to the game we made).

If you know anything about me, you probably know that I'm madly in love with MailChimp. Their email templates are responsive out of the box, and their drag-and-drop editor is to die for. But what about when you can't use MailChimp?

I've made a lot of changes to my web development workflow recently, and doing so made me reflect on how much my process has changed in the last 12 years. I have written these changes down for you here.

I've been doing a lot in the command line lately, so I've gotten to use the tar command quite a bit. Here are a few useful tips that helped me get started.

While redesigning this site, I was inspired by Dave Rupert's About page. Dave has built a responsive HTML timeline, and I thought, "Hey, that's pretty neat." After playing around with the design, I decided I wanted to integrate it into my Wordpress site. Here's how I went about it.

I announce the next step in my career.

My first week at KCCI: A day with Steve Karlin, "Next Gen News," WHY we do what we do, learning the ropes of producing, and an introduction to investigative reporting.

I discuss how the ISUtv website has been launched and what went into developing the site.

What goes into redesigning a higher education website? Find out what I did.

An in-depth look at the construction of a scholarship database for the Office of Student Financial Aid at ISU.

It took me a year, but I finally did it: I switched from Iowa State University's Webmail program to Google's Gmail. I can't believe how beneficial the switch ended up being!