My last blog post was almost eight years ago. A lot happened in the few months after I wrote that last post...

I loved writing the Hometown Tourist, and it got great feedback from site visitors and community members. Though I haven't written an article for several years, the website continues to get a good number of monthly page views. I've wanted to get back to it for a long time.....

I had used Vagrant a little bit before, and this felt like the perfect opportunity to make it a regular part of my development workflow. Vagrant is a great tool that works with VirtualBox or VMWare to set up and manage virtual environments. I really like the idea of keeping my machine as clean and light as possible and having each project compartmentalized in its own environment. It should also help to build apps in a dev environment that closely matches the production environment...

One of the Intermediate Front End Development projects for FreeCodeCamp is to build a Local Weather App, a single page app that uses geolocation and a weather API to show the current weather in a user's location. They recommend using the Open Weather API. Requirements include providing a button that toggles units between Celsius and Fahrenheit and setting a different icon or background image based on weather conditions...

In today's world, we expect businesses and organizations to have a website - even small businesses. Small business owners may feel overwhelmed and not know where to begin this process, especially early on when they're focused on building the business from the ground up and trying to keep costs low...

As a student at Dana College, I graduated with majors in English Secondary Education and History. I was able to meet my math and science requirements through my ACT scores and AP credit, so I didn't take a single math or science class during my undergraduate years. I did take a statistics class for my master's degree, but even that was geared toward education majors and involved more general concepts rather than specific math application...

I started Udacity's Intro to iOS Development with Swift course this past weekend. I can't believe how much I've learned in just a few days. Our last assignment for Lesson 3 is to write a blog post about what we've learned so far. It would take way too long to write it all up, but here are some of the cool things I learned about XCode...

I've been hunting for the perfect Rails host for sites that I've built for two friends. One owns a small business, and the other needed a personal website for his music. Cost is a big factor, but speed, reliability and security are important, too. I've researched several options - Heroku, WebFaction, Digital Ocean, and OpenShift. Each has different pros and cons, but after trying all of them, I think Heroku is still the best solution for smaller businesses and individuals...

January: I commit to focusing on JavaScript and the FreeCodeCamp program. I even write a blog post about it. February: I get recommendations for Java learning materials and start studying Head First Java. Oh - and I write a blog post about it. March...

Upon further examination, my wonderful date picker solution didn't work out quite as expected. It seemed to work fine in some cases, but other times the record would fail to save. This only happened in browsers that used the jQuery UI Date Picker. (Things worked fine on Chrome, which has a native date picker...)

This week I learned that Safari and Firefox handle date fields differently than Chrome. Chrome provides a really nice, native date picker, and it ensures that entries conform to the correct pattern. Safari and Firefox don't support date fields and treat them as regular text fields instead...

It's been exactly one week since Head First Java and Core Java arrived on my doorstep. I finished reading through chapter 5 of Head First Java last night, and this morning I typed up the code for the SimpleDotComGame, compiled it, and played a quick game against the computer...

My first experience with remote pair programming was in Berkeley's Engineering Software as a Service class on EdX.org. The prospect of a video conference, sharing my screen, and trying to code with a total stranger was intimidating to say the least. It turned out to be a fantastic experience, though. I met great people and learned way more than I could have on my own...

It's hard to stay focused when there are so many awesome out there to learn. I want to get into Wordpress and build mobile apps for iOS and Android. Swift is especially intriguing... I spent a little time exploring Objective C in a CodeSchool course last year, but I've heard that Swift takes its cues from languages like Python and Ruby that have a simpler and more readable syntax...

After a couple of rather frustrating experiences today, I wrote down some things I want to keep in mind whenever I'm working on a site. Nothing new or earth shattering, but these are some reminders to myself as a developer, from myself as a user...

This morning I worked through the binary search tutorial in the Algorithms class on Khan Academy. The concepts were familiar from when I took MIT's Introduction to Computer Science and Programming on EdX, but this time I learned to implement the algorithm in JavaScript rather than Python...

The first cohort of Viking Code School officially wrapped up last week. It was a great adventure. I got to help some amazing students experience an amazing amount of growth in 3 months. I also got to build some tests for the VCS website...

As I started work on a new Rails project recently, one of my first priorities was to set up my test environment and tools so I could use test driven development (TDD) from the beginning. Here are the steps I took, some snags I ran into, and some things I learned along the way...

This week marks the beginning of an exciting new adventure - the maiden voyage of the Viking Code School. I had a fantastic experience as a TA with Omaha Code School last spring, and I'm excited to play that role again with a new group of students in a whole new format...

Ruby is a beautiful programming language and a fantastic language for beginners.  It's clear, simple syntax makes it accessible, and it's amazing how much you can get done in a few short, simple lines of code.  Combine Ruby with the Rails framework, and newcomers can hit the ground running fast.  This speed is both a wonderful and a terrible thing...