I’ve been using Codekit since it was in pre-release beta and haven’t looked back. Recently, I was building out a single-page app for YouNow and needed a build system to merge and minify my JS files. I was on the hunt for several setups and here’s what I settled on. There are many tools available... Read More

On the first day of Database Systems, I asked the instructor about the introduction of "Artificial Keys" in a table’s schema (more formally known as Surrogate Keys). I had used surrogate keys in almost all of my DB schemas prior to this class. He urged us to avoid surrogate keys (and use natural keys from... Read More

Here’s a quick tip that should save you some hair and a few debugging hours when dealing with errors generated during Backbone.Events pub/sub. Monkeypatch Backbone.trigger with a try/catch to see errors that were previously trapped like so: var oldTrigger = Backbone.trigger; Backbone.trigger = function () { try { oldTrigger.apply(Backbone, arguments); } catch (e) { console.error(e);... Read More

I was in St. Louis in September speaking at the Powered by JavaScript conference. My talk was about reducing boilerplate and avoiding build tool configuration files by extracting a core set of processes into an adaptive tool that generates and maintains your configuration. The talk touches on the basics of Grunt, Static Analysis, and techniques... Read More

The initial prototype implementation for the YouNow profile app was a pure jQuery, single file script. In this post, I’ll talk about the point at which the code became unbearable and how that led to the appreciation of Backbone.js. This post is part 2 in a series of posts about building the profile app. See... Read More

Disclaimer: I’m posting this mainly as a means of remembering the described process.  Scraping government data is supposed to be legal in most cases. The Task The NYC Data Mine is a government project that exposes popular datasets about many governmental agencies/departments. I’m a huge supporter of the transparency of governmental agencies in this regard... Read More

If you need “copy to clipboard” functionality for your website, then you’ll likely need a library that uses flash to facilitate this feature. For a share panel that I built out for YouNow, I used the ZeroClipboard library. Here’s how to get it to work properly with Twitter Bootstrap modals. Zeroclipboard works well if you... Read More

I’d like to share some of the books that I read over the past year or two that have been memorable. In general, the selections deal with programming, entrepreneurship, or finance. Finance I remember filing my taxes for the previous year and being furious at the amount of taxes my wife and I paid. It... Read More

Dedicated to Joel Kemp Sr. 1961 – 2011. He was not blind, but a poet. This was his favorite of my pieces. Rest in peace dad. You wrote one hell of a story… Do not tell me what the world is like; for the times are more beautiful in the darkness. No sights of the... Read More

I really wanted a read-eval-print-loop (repl) that I can use for learning PHP and tinkering with various parts of the language in isolation of a project’s codebase. I couldn’t find one online, so I built it. It’s super simple and only took a couple of hours to create – which means that I didn’t spend... Read More