All entries of my technical and business blog

Speaking at Milwaukee Wordcamp 2013

May 6, 2013 wordpress

As you may or may not be able to tell, I use Wordpress on this website. So, I guess that makes me a fan… (trust me, as a programmer, I’ve always toyed around with writing my own custom blog software just for my domain - but alas, other aspirations always trumped that. Plus, wordpress is perfect for what I need.)

Developers: How to get your estimates right

May 1, 2013 business programming

Estimates can be one of the hardest things to create as a developer. The word estimate is a misnomer in our industry. It’s almost as if they should be called “agreements” or “promises” according to some bosses. Yet we all know that they are just that: an estimate of the amount of time, not a guarantee.

The Very Bad Things That Javascript Can Do: Part 1

Apr 9, 2013 javascript security

I have the argument a lot with product managers about allowing custom HTML and Javascript into our projects. I don’t want to do it. I want to only put in predefined, sanitized information. But more about my reasons after this… let’s look at the arguments I get first…

FirePHP4Chrome Chrome Extension

Apr 2, 2013 google

2019-11-11 Update This extension has been removed from the Google Chrome Extensions store and the repo has been archived.

I use Chrome almost exclusively now. One thing that drove me nuts was the lack of support for FirePHP in the console of Chrome. Google even released some extensions for it - but they either didn’t work or were out of date. So I created my own.

Feedly Background Tab

Mar 26, 2013 google

After transitioning away from the doomed Google Reader to Feedly, I found it to be awesome! I only had one gripe with the shortcut key scenario… when you went to view the entire article in a new tab, it was always focused. This meant I’d still have to middle click with my mouse to put my tabs in the background.

Make sure not to "too" future-proof your code

Mar 19, 2013 programming

When doing a bit of code review, I saw an incredibly ornately architected future-proof module written by one of my programmers on my team. It had taken him roughly 3x as long as I had estimated, but the code was very complete. It was created in such a way that every single portion of it was modular and could be interchanged quite easily.