Longform posts written over the last few years organized by personal and technical.

2017

Our 7 Rules of Travel Spending

(Minafi) These 7 rules have served us well on dozens of trips.

Use Savings Rate as a Lifestyle Inflation Canary

(Minafi) By tracking monthly expenses and computing savings rate over time, it can become crystal clear if your finances are moving in the right direction.

Why I Don’t Want to be a Landlord or Invest in Real Estate

(Minafi) A terrible experience with a tenant soured me to the idea of being a landlord for years.

Why I Don't Want to be a Landlord or Invest in Real Estate

(Minafi) My investing experience from 2006-2011 was full of ups and down.

Avoiding the Lifestyle Inflation Trap

(Minafi) How to recognize when your lifestyle is growing and make steps to keep it in check.

What is Your Personal Mission?

(Minafi) How a simple question spawned a day of reflection.

2016 Year in Review

Code School, travel, product, feelings.

2016

Tech Stack Behind CocktailFly

Why I used Rails 5, Bootstrap 4, jQuery and dependable favorites to create something new.

How UX research at Code School led to Projects

(Code School) How UX research at Code School led to Projects

Tracking and Forecasting Expenses with Mint, Todoist and Google Sheets

(Minafi) How I leverage existing tools to help understand and plan my spending habits.

(Minafi) What you can do to reset and be more mindful of your own happiness.

What is Financial Independence?

(Minafi) What would it be like to not need to work? That’s financial independence, and this is how you get there.

Practice Poverty

(Minafi) What if you were to get up tomorrow, or for the next week, and make a choice not to spend a cent unless otherwise essential?

(Minafi) Try measuring your desire for something for a number of days before acting on it in order to buy less.

(Minafi) How do you handle blame?

Newspapper Mindfulness

(Minafi) Try this exercise to ease a troubled mind.

Decision Minimalism

(Minafi) Focus your attention by lowering the number of decisions you make.

Growing Up With Computers

How using them from an early age helped me learn

2015 Year in Review

Code School, Pluralsight, Travel, Blogging, Cocktails

2015

Making ng-guess.com

Creating and launching a side project in a week

Creating Photo Albums with Lightroom

Lightroom and Middleman sitting in a tree

How I Ended Up – and Stayed – at Code School

A transcript of a story told to the Code School team.

Investment Literacy

Managing your investments is easier than you think.

How Code School Verifies Student Submissions

Published on the Code School Blog

Mastery is a Trap

You don't need to be a master to accomplish your goals

(Re)Introducing Our iOS Path

Published on the Code School Blog

How I Create Photo Albums

A lot of work goes into each -- here's how.

How a Bug in My Ruby Code Cost Code School $13,000

Published on the Code School Blog

Blasting Off With Bootstrap

My latest course at Code School

5 Ways to Blast Off Your Site With Bootstrap

Published on the Code School Blog

2014 Year in Review

Code School, travel, audiobooks, Angular, Marilyn.

2014

The Audiobook Habit

How listening to audiobooks shaped my media diet.

Resources for Learning Ember.js

Some places to get started that helped me learn Ember.

The Making of Warming Up With Ember.js

Published on the Code School Blog

Seeking Mentors

How finding mentors in different areas of your life can help.

Getting Started With Ember.js and Firebase

Hooking up an Ember.js app to an external database.

2013 Year in Review

A year of Marilyn, CrossFit, audiobooks, Ember.js and Piano.

2013

XKCD Style Graphs With R

With statistical proof I'm bad at CrossFit.

2 Years of CrossFit

How adopting a fitness habit affected my life.

Teaching iOS 7 at Code School

We had a lot of fun teaching this course.

Native Notifications with JavaScript

Using HTML 5 native notifications with JavaScript in Chome, Safari, Firefox and on Windows.

Response Streams with Rails 4 and Redis

Long running connections to the server using Rails 4, Redis and a publish/subscribe model.

Designing eval everything

Using Octopress, Sass, MVCSS with the help of Code School courses to design eval everything.

Tagged with Personal, Travel. Written on June 18 2013.

2012 Year in Review

Tagged with Personal, Goals. Written on January 1 2013.

2012

Uncluttering Manifesto

Tagged with Personal. Written on June 22 2012.

2011 Year in Review

Tagged with Personal, Goals. Written on January 1 2012.

2011

Adding Tasks to Remember the Milk with Alfred

Tagged with Personal, Productivity, Short. Written on November 19 2011.

Write Your 'Year in Review' Post Now

Tagged with Personal, Self Improvement. Written on August 4 2011.

My LASIK Experience

Tagged with Personal, Self Improvement. Written on July 11 2011.

Home Backup Like a Boss

Tagged with Personal, Preparation. Written on June 27 2011.

Technical Podcast Recommendations?

Tagged with Technical, Short. Written on May 26 2011.

Launching a Project in a Month

Tagged with Technical, Self Improvement. Written on April 30 2011.

2010 Year in Review

Tagged with Personal, Goals. Written on January 1 2011.

2010

Latest Project from IZEA - WeReward

Tagged with Sponsored, Short. Written on August 6 2010.

jQuery Driven Tokenizing Additions

Tagged with Technical, JavaScript, Short. Written on March 30 2010.

Getting Rails 3 Beta Setup

Tagged with Technical, Ruby, Short. Written on February 7 2010.

2009

Facebook App in a Week

Tagged with Technical, Short. Written on December 23 2009.

Giving Heroku a Try

Tagged with Technical, Ruby. Written on November 25 2009.

Naming Conventions the Fun Way

Tagged with Technical, Short. Written on October 8 2009.

Resize a Crossdomain

Tagged with Technical, JavaScript. Written on October 1 2009.

Setup RSS Feeds using FeedBurner

Tagged with Technical, Wordpress, Short. Written on September 5 2009.

Snow Leopard Upgrade Not Always Smooth

Tagged with Technical, Short. Written on September 3 2009.

Handcrafted CSS Book Review

Tagged with Technical, Books, Review, Short. Written on September 2 2009.

The Amazingness of Delayed_job for Rails

Tagged with Technical, Ruby. Written on August 18 2009.

Railscast Style Syntax Highlighting for Wordpress

Tagged with Technical, Wordpress. Written on August 4 2009.

A Week Without Social Media

Tagged with Personal. Written on August 2 2009.

8 Awesome Uses for DropBox

Tagged with Personal. Written on April 3 2009.

Building the Ultimate Media Center, Part 3: Backup

Tagged with Personal. Written on March 22 2009.

Building the Ultimate Media Center, Part 2: Plex

Tagged with Personal. Written on March 16 2009.

Building the Ultimate Media Center, Part 1: Hardware

Tagged with Personal, Hardware. Written on March 9 2009.

Adding a Lifestream to Wordpress

Tagged with Technical, Wordpress, Short. Written on February 8 2009.

New Languages for a New Year?

Tagged with Personal, Goals, Short. Written on January 3 2009.

2008

If Quicksilver isn't working for you, you're not using it enough

Tagged with Technical. Written on November 27 2008.

Cloudshout Alpha 2 Released!

Tagged with Technical, IZEA. Written on November 21 2008.

Blogging as a Habit

Tagged with Personal, Short. Written on August 30 2008.

Your Office: Fun or Functional?

Tagged with Personal. Written on July 9 2008.

Groups know better than Google

Tagged with Personal. Written on May 24 2008.

Design Books for Developers

Tagged with Technical, Books. Written on April 18 2008.

Harnessing GameFaqs with Ruby on Rails and Hpricot

Tagged with Technical, Ruby. Written on April 15 2008.

2007

ColdCourse: Search Engine Safe URLs for Fusebox, Mach-II, Model-Glue and ColdBox

Tagged with Technical, ColdFusion. Written on March 4 2007.

Book 3: Head First Design Patterns

Tagged with Technical, Books, Review. Written on January 26 2007.

Book 2: Fusion Authority

Tagged with Technical, Books, ColdFusion. Written on January 17 2007.

Book 1: Joel on Software

Tagged with Technical, Books. Written on January 11 2007.

2006

Routine changes from 2006

Tagged with Personal. Written on December 31 2006.

One More New Member of 9Rules

Tagged with Personal. Written on December 30 2006.

MicroID, the coolest technology from 2006 you've never heard of

Tagged with Technical. Written on December 21 2006.

Tagged with Technical, Books, Self Improvement. Written on December 10 2006.

Aardvark'd - 12 Weeks with Geeks

Tagged with Technical, Review, Movies. Written on December 2 2006.

Moments of Enlightenment

Tagged with Technical. Written on November 22 2006.

State of Coldfusion Response

Tagged with Technical, ColdFusion. Written on October 29 2006.

Bulletproof Web Design Book Review

Tagged with Technical, Review, Books. Written on October 26 2006.

Choice Between Learning and Doing

Tagged with Personal, Self Improvement, Education. Written on October 10 2006.

Who's Reselling my Email?

Tagged with Personal, Short. Written on October 2 2006.

Flex and Yahoo Maps Integration

Tagged with Technical, Flex. Written on September 20 2006.

Fulltext and Distance in MySQL

Tagged with Technical, SQL. Written on September 19 2006.

Tagged with Technical, Flex. Written on September 18 2006.

Windows Live Writer Review

Tagged with Technical, Review. Written on August 31 2006.

Prototype vs JQuery?

Tagged with Technical, JavaScript, Short. Written on August 29 2006.

Tagged with Personal. Written on July 8 2006.

Programming Update

Tagged with Technical, Books, Self Improvement, Small. Written on February 20 2006.

2005

Tagged with Personal, Books, Short. Written on June 28 2005.

2004

Recent Progress and Goals

Tagged with Personal, Progress, Short. Written on October 7 2004.

2003

Engineering System software fun?

Tagged with Personal, School, Short. Written on September 25 2003.