Blog
Transitioning from Google Wallet to Android Pay
I feel like I'm in the minority among my peers. I use Google Wallet and Android Pay pretty religiously. I choose to shop at establishments that allow me to use this technology as often as possible. I ask my peers [...]
Generate random hex color with PHP
There's many ways to skin a cat, or generate a color. You could randomize a number between 0 and 16777215 then convert it to hex: $rand_color = '#' . dechex(mt_rant(0, 16777215)); Or you could do what I like to do [...]
Run a block of PHP code a certain percentage of the time
Sometimes, you may want to run code all of the time. Other times, you may want to run code some of the time. This is how garbage collection in PHP works. Based on your configuration for gc_probability and gc_divisor, garbage [...]
CSS :not issue in Safari on iOS9
Seems that every time that Apple releases a new version of iOS I encounter some weird rendering issue. This time around with iOS9 I encountered an issue where the full / desktop version of the site looked like it still [...]
My experience with the Mandela effect
Remember that time I was bit by a dog? I sure as hell do. It was a choatic ordeal where I was living in fear of potentially contracting rabies as we waited to see if the dog that bit me [...]
It's never too late to start tracking metrics
Dashboard-driven development, metrics-driven development, whatever you may call it, it's super important. I'm embarassed to that this, but after running a successful site for over four years, I didn't have a dashboard with even the most basic of metrics like [...]
Stop submitting feature requests for Open Source Software
A few years back I wrote about my experiences contributing to and maintaining open source projects. Since then, I've done my share of forking, pull requesting and even starting up new projects that people are forking and pull requesting. I [...]
Bitmaps vs. Sets to track Monthly Active Users in Redis
Recently I was building a piece of functionality to track the daily and monthly active users on one of my sites. I already track this data in MySQL but retrieving the data was sluggish, even after creating a few new [...]
ERROR: Invalid position '1'
This error drove me mad. I had searched the interwebs at least a few times for it and couldn't find a solution. All I wanted to do was block some lame ass script kiddie from scanning my server. I know [...]
Don't try to speak my language
You may think you're being cute. You may even think you're being relevant. The fact is, you come across like someone that's out of touch and trying too damn hard. I know you don't mean it that way, and I [...]