I'd been a Software Engineer for nearly 10 years when I had a recruiter call to talk about a job opportunity they thought I would be a fit for. It was for Nike, on their Globalization Team. I had no idea this job was about to change the direction of my professional career.

Let's talk about one of the most under-utlized tool in a localization professionals toolkit.

I know it's a common problem: You've got what you think is a valid BCP-47 tag but you're just. not. sure.

Zustand's middleware was a pain to figure out. Here's a quick guide.

I recently borked my Python 2 installation on Mac OS Mojave. I couldn't reinstall because brew removed python@2. Or did they?!

The fantastic Can I Use website has some great information on which browsers and versions support Intl.NumbeFormat:formatToParts(), however their data around Safari largely says "Support Unknown." I needed to know specifics, so I did my own test using BrowserStack.

I let an XCode project sit unchanged for a while, and when I got back to it I was getting the following error

I have a few different projects that all rely on a different version of node. In a perfect world, I'd be able to use the Node Version Manager. However, currently the nvm command breaks when passing the --with-intl=full-icu argument (see GitHub Issue here).

I wrote a method to check whether or not the given environment (the browser or the node environment) has native Intl support.

With the release of the iPhone X, I've found myself needing to have special conditions in a few of my React Native styles. Below is what I'm using to do that check.

A lot of the current React Boilerplate projects feel so bloated to me, with a ton of extras that I don't need. I've created this simple React Boilerplate that has the absolutely bare minimum that I need: webpack, stylus, and karma. No other bells or whistles. Enjoy!

A few years ago I was watching a documentary called Cooked. One episode was about bread; sourdough, specifically. I became utterly fascinated by the fact that sourdough has only 3 ingredients: water, flour, and salt.

There are many different links recommending you update many different config files to disable the screen from sleeping on a Raspberry Pi, but this is the simplest solution I've come across:

I have a simple Backbone app that is being compiled down using gulp and browserify. I wanted to be able to include my template file with a simple node require() method, but node doesn't like importing anything but JS files.

I'm knee deep in Swift these days, and am working a lot with the UIImage object. I couldn't find a quick extension method that allowed me to resize an image based on the largest side, so I wrote one:

While creating a custom Wordpress template, my site would crash when adding the search query string in the url. The url website.com/ worked fine, but once it became wordpress.com/?s=search+string it crashed without any kind of obvious errors.

I've had a hell of a time finding a high resolution Android device on a blank background. Most of them have annoying glares or a dumb shadow that's hard to cut around.

I've created a custom UiTableViewCell nib with a text field, and I've had a hell of a time figuring out how to register text changes in my parent view. I didn't find anything through Googling, so I figured I'd contribute the solution I figured out, using Swift:

I'm always fascinated when companies post their expenses publicly. I thought it'd be interesting to do something similar for Brew Notice, despite our small size.

For no reason in particular, I've added SSL to this site. Yay me! Turns out you can get free SSL certs from, among several places, a site called StartSSL.

I'm pretty new to the Django Rest Framework in general, but I had a hell of a time figuring out how to add a confirm_password field to my UserSerializer model.

I've made the switch from the endlessly buggy PyCharm to the beautiful (and kind of slow sometimes) Atom. The thing I missed most about PyCharm, though, was the awesome autocomplete with working in Django.

I just got my Synology DS416j and it's awesome. The bummer is that the package source at SynoCommunity don't work with it.

Ten years ago I got it into my head that I really, really wanted to go to South America.

This problem has plagued me for months now. One day, PyCharm boots up my app fine. The next it gives the following error:

Mixpanel is a great service, but their iOS Integration page doesn't even mention the word swift, let alone how to get it integrated into a new project. There are a few resources on how to get Swift and Objective-C to work together, but it seems really cumbersome and annoying.

Appium seems to be the best option out there for functionally testing your iOS apps. However, there doesn't seem to be great documentation on how to get your iOS app built and ready to be used with Appium. Below are the steps it took for me to get it going

It took me a long time to figure out the best workflow for my media center setup. After a lot of trial and error, I've finally found something that works for me.

I've been using a subdomain to point to my home IP address for years now. It's great, but pretty annoying when my IP address changes randomly. I decided I wanted a bash script to keep my Digital Ocean A Record updated with my external IP.

On Day 1 of the new Continuity features on Yosemite & iOS, it wasn't very easy for me to find a guide to setting it all up. Here's one.

Long git branches happen to the best of us. This is a great way to add tab-complete to your git commands - including your branches.

Swift is very, very new. As such, there aren't a lot of tutorials out there for people who have done literally zero iOS development in the past. I've only been tinkering around with it for a few days, but there's not a lot of information out there for starting from zero.

It took me some time to figure out the best way to get Django going on my Mac OS X 10.9. Here is a guide to what I eventually started doing.

I've recently become obsessed with obtaining the perfect backup strategy. I've previously used Backblaze, but a few things have always prevented me from being fully satisfied.

Testing IE on a Mac is always a pain. Luckily, Microsoft provides free VMs to use for testing. Those, along with VirtualBox, can create a not-horrible way to test your sites in IE.

After needing a transparent, high-quality vector or png of the Glassdoor icon, I was forced to make my own.

Since I was a kid, I've had a natural bent toward technology. When I learned of programming, my interest exploded in that specific category and I've never looked back.

A year ago I quit an awesome job. I had a lot of ideas of what would happen, and what my life would look like a year in. Some predictions were accurate; some weren't even close. Here's what I've learned:

I've been thoroughly enjoying my exodus from PHP to Python. My first self-assignment was to develop a Flask project, which came easily enough. The more difficult step was deploying it to WebFaction. The below guide are the steps I took to go from 0 - site, hopefully they'll come in useful.

In an effort to start making some of my code public, I decided to open up one of my more recent jQuery plugins. I'm not very good at naming things, so I'm calling it Awesome Dropdown. You can view the BitBucket repo here.

I came across this link giving 10 tip to reduce stress at your work. The first tip made me scoff:

Last week I bought the Samsung Chromebook. A few days before, my sister was telling me that she needed something between an iPad and a laptop. The iPad was too expensive (and she couldn't type on it very well anyway). A laptop would go mostly unused since she just browsed the internet and wrote documents.

If New Years has taught me anything, it's that it's really, really easy to declare a new goal. It's absurdly simple for me to feel that electric shock of motivation and make a vow for change.

I spent last week in San Francisco. I honestly didn't know what to expect from the place. Maybe a few parts Portland, a few parts pretentiousness, and a few parts scenery? Well, my predictions turned out to be spot-on.

A few months back, when I would picture myself freelancing, it always involved one thing: waking up whenever I wanted.

I've spent most of my life in Midland. Roughly 75% has been spent in this West Texas desert - among the mesquite trees and the heat.

For whatever reason, my PHP mail() function stopped working a few months back. It hasn't been an issue until now, so some searching brought me to this solution.

I'm a compulsive emailer. If there's an email sitting in my inbox, it's because that's where I want it - not because I haven't read it. A new email rarely remains unchecked and organized for more than an hour. The complexity of my filters and labels make an Opus 12 look like a child's toy.

8 days of being back in Texas. The best thing so far has been having an excuse to use my sunglasses, which were very underutilized in the Pacific Northwest. Here are some random stats from my drive back. It's really an unimpressive amount of data - I'm mostly just putting it up here for me to reference later.

After 31 hours of driving, 6 fill-ups, 1 cigar (much less than expected), and a lot of podcasts, I rolled into the driveway at 4am on Tuesday morning. The view along the way wasn't bad.

One of my favorite things to do is daydream. You'd think this would be a simple hobby to have, but it turns out there aren't that many opportunities in a responsible adult's day-to-day life to let the mind just wander.

In this picture with terrible quality is everything I count as worth keeping. Don't be fooled: I accumulated a ton of stuff over my ~2 years here, but it turns out that, when it came down to it, I only have a few things worth the precious space in my 4Runner.

I've been a huge fan of This American Life for years now. I love not only their integrity to the facts, but their care in story telling. I knew when I heard this quote from Ira that it was something I needed to remember, but it quickly got knocked off the edge of my memory until this post from Zen Pencils (which is also worth checking out).

Over my ~1.5 years spent in Portland, I had only spent one evening enjoying Seattle. This week I decided that if I didn't make it back now, I'd never do it. I hopped a train and was in the center of downtown in 3 and a half hours. It turned out to be a fantastic decision.

This is an insanely interesting book that I've been devouring the past few days. I heard about it from Bill Gates' Summer Reading List.

In light of the fact that I'm leaving Portland soon, I've been thinking about the idea of transition.