webdev

The blog is currently being ported from WordPress to over 12 years of static pages of content. If there's an article missing that you're hoping to see, please contact me and let me know and I'll prioritize getting it online.

Denver hosts the first Go Language conference, GopherCon, April 2014

The first Go Language conference, GopherCon, held in Denver in late April will have over 700 attendees! 28 of those are from SendGrid. Still can't believe the first @GopherCon is going to have 700 attendees! — Erik St. Martin (@erikstmartin) February 25, 2014 Not all of us made the photo:

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In support of Miguel Grinberg, I bought the pre-release of 'Flask Web Development'

I’ve chatted with Miguel several times online and we met up in person for the first time at PyCon in 2016. I was excited to meet him in person and started explaining how he might remember our chats, etc., and he interrupted me with “Yes, Ian, I know who you are, I remember you.” Heh. Sorry, let my fanboy show a little. Miguel is the author of the much-acclaimed “Flask Mega-Tutorial” which he explained on his blog was updated for Python 3 and written into book format, sponsored by O’Reilly.

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Live Template for PyCharm to support Emmet codes in HAML

Weekend project: write up a Live Template for PyCharm (should work on other JetBrains editors) for basic emmet.io shortcuts to use within #HAML documents. Examples: start a new HAML document, type just an exclamation point and hit TAB and you should see a basic html/head/body structure take form just an ‘a’ and hit tab to get “%a(href='' title='')” and so on. Contributions are more than welcome. The first pass at this basically copied the “Zen HTML.

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Flask App, Gunicorn and Nosetests, help requested.

I have a Flask app that’s successfully accepting POST/PUT data via JSON input (tested through curl while gunicorn is running) but running nosetests is failing. (okay, technically I’m using Flask-Restful too…) I’m curious if there’s a better way to debug this than tons of logging/printing, etc. I’ve been using PyCharm for development but its debugger doesn’t seem to actually run any of the tests. I can go into detail on anything that’s unclear but cannot post the project publicly.

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Has PHP evolved? Or is it the same ol' same ol' that everyone loves to hate

Has PHP evolved? Or is it the same ol' same ol' that everyone loves to hate? I love to call PHP the “Nickleback of Programming Languages” – everyone loves to give it crap, but there are still some die-hard fans out there. Some thoughts from Blackshawk In which I do a little digging about the choices I've made with PHP. This is a long read, but it isn't something that can be explained in one or two paragraphs.

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multi-threaded Perl, I've missed you...

When I was a senior engineer at The Rubicon Project, I inherited some Perl code to analyze log data for online advertising impressions. It eventually hit a maximum on the multi-core systems I had at my disposal and so rewrote my code to use threads. In Perl. Yes, you read that correctly. It was actually one of my prouder engineering feats in my career, to scale some software that could analyze a few million ad impressions per day to scale up to handling more than a billion data points per day.

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New Mitch Hedberg site went live tonight

I used to do web development. I still do, but I used to, too. I’ve been pleased to have helped out over at http://mitchhedberg.net/ in the past, with some phpBB programming to keep spammers out of the memorial forums for the late Mitch Hedberg, by far my most favorite comedian ever. Lynn Shawcroft, Mitch’s wife, contacted me about a week ago, asking if I could help redesign the whole web site into something classier and and easier to manage.

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Why I have a rotating masthead banner

Facebook allowed me to reconnect with a friend from high school named Lee-Ann, who is currently studying graphic design. Being the avid little RSS subscriber, I’ve been reading her blog for a while, and saw a post back in late November about some graphics work she wanted to make public. One of her assignments was to create some poster ideas, and her designs impressed me enough to hire her to my roster of graphic artists who I use for my various freelance projects.

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mod_rewrite hack in PHP for redirecting old URLs with question marks

A previous blog engine I used to use, e107, created links like “http://iandouglas.com/page?3.0" (my old SpamAssassin trainer tutorial page) so I decided I should at least attempt to toss in a few mod_rewrite rules to even up the playing field so search engines and people with bookmarks could still get to the tutorial text which I’ve started adding to the new CMS. Trouble is, mod_rewrite doesn’t support something simple like:

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