Photo Courtesy of Molly McLeod

This past weekend ~100 hackers from all over Massachussetts (and Eliot, ME :) generously donated their time and expertise for the National Day of Civic Hacking event for Western Mass. This inspiring event was one of 95 held across the country.

The event will bring together citizens, software developers, and entrepreneurs from all over the nation to collaboratively create, build, and invent new solutions using publicly-released data, code and technology to solve challenges relevant to our neighborhoods, our cities, our states and our country.

Some great and practical tips for logging.

When a developer writes a log message, it is in the context of the code in which the log directive is to be inserted. In those conditions we tend to write messages the infer on the current context. Unfortunately when reading the log itself this context is absent, and those messages might not be understandable.

Original Article: The 10 Commandments of Logging

I recently had the need to run some code with each server restart. update-rc.d provides a great and easy way execute your own code on server startup (in my case, Ubuntu 12.04).

One of the servers I’m working with started running out of disk space recently. The machine is running on a Ubuntu VM in Windows, about 200 miles from my desk. I have remote access to the VM, but I don’t have access to the virtualization software. After requesting a disk resize through the IT company that manages our Windows network, here’s what I saw:

I recently pushed a Django TwitterCard to GitHub. The project simplifies the process of working with Twitter cards in Django.

Twitter cards make it possible for you to attach media experiences to Tweets that link to your content. Simply add a few lines of HTML to your webpages, and users who Tweet links to your content will have a “card” added to the Tweet that’s visible to all of their followers.

Images are the main contender when it comes to page weight.

According to the latest HTTP archive stats, the average Web page weighs 1286KB, and 60% of that is image data.
…
Yet, when we look at the actual numbers “in the wild”, we see that few developers actually compress their images, and even for those that do, the results are not always ideal.

This articles provides a range of options for optimizing any image type. There wasn’t much new here for me. Perhaps most importantly, this serves as a reminder that we should all be thinking about image compression during any sort of build process.

Original Article: Giving Your Images An Extra Squeeze

2012 Recap

Of all the highlights of 2012 (there are a lot, only a fraction of which will be here), my family has been the best part of my year. My wife is a rock and helped me through some personal struggles. My girls (6 and 3) never fail to make me laugh. They’re both at such fun ages. We spent more time this summer upta camp which was a nice change from 2011. I’m already looking forward to opening up camp this Spring.

Over the past four months I have been doing a lot of work in Python and Django. Naturally, while recently playing around with Appcelerator Titanium Desktop (which seems to have good Python support), I wanted to see how Django and Titanium would pair.

As someone who:

1. has made a framework choice, and developed numerous projects on that framework (CakePHP) and,
2. is always poking around with other frameworks

I am often asked about the tough choice of picking among all the great framework choices (both in and out of the PHP world). My advice is always the same.

I just finished a great Digital Web Magazine article about improving page load times with lazy loading techniques. The article (by Jakob Heuser) was very well written and described proximity, timeout, and event based lazy loading. If you continue to read you will see how I was able to reduce page load by 300+kb by implementing lazy loading.