It’s been all over the news all weekend, so I won’t bore you with yet another retelling of Mike Pence’s reception at Hamilton on Broadway Friday evening. After he was greeted with boos from the audience, the cast closed the show with an impassioned outreach and a plea for understanding.

Twenty-three years ago I went looking for an album. Friday night I heard it for the first time. — Mondo 2000 was a strange kind of magazine. It was part techno-utopian visioneering, part subculture sideshow. And that suited me fine because in the 1990s I was a strange kind of teenager waiting for a vision to stroll up beside me in a pair of fetish pants. If you…

Originally published on Storehouse May 21, 2015 I try to run at least 20km (12.4 miles) a week. That’s usually split between two 5km runs (3.1 miles) and one 10km run on the weekend. So a 5km run for Tourette Syndrome awareness shouldn’t have been a big deal. Except it…

The paperboy is an American icon. We’re all familiar with the image of a young scamp on foot or pedaling a bike, delivering the morning paper and learning the value of a dollar. My paper route taught me much different lessons, ones which still drive how I approach my work decades later. — My route had me delivering a free advertising supplement for a suburban newspaper. If you’re in the Chicago area, you might know it as a certain Daily newspaper. Every week, my dad & I picked up a couple hundred bound papers from our contact and an equal number of red…

Monads and Immutability — Parts one and two of this series discussed how modern PHP treats functions as first class data, and how functions are the main focus in functional programming. And, I showed how a WordPress plugin can be built by just partially applying parameters and combining functions together to make new functions. …

First-class functions, composition, and point-free style — In part 1, I introduced the basic concepts of Functional Programming. In part 2, we cover first-class functions and point-free style. First class functions PHP 5.3 introduced anonymous functions, and more importantly made functions a first class datatype like strings and integers. They can be assigned to variables, passed as parameters to functions…

Functional Programming basics you can start using today — f of x. Those words probably give you nasty flashbacks to a middle school math class with your algebra teacher laboriously graphing a function across the chalkboard. We all had $100 graphing calculators sitting on our desks in my day, but they all still drew out those graphs by hand…

I see the next 3–5 years as a time of transformative growth for the world’s most popular CMS — It’s the day after Christmas, and I find myself thinking of the themes that bind religions together. The stories and legends we pass on to our children reflect the seasonal cycles of the natural world. The annual wheel of death and rebirth, of planting and reaping, becomes the lives of…

Researching my family tree answered the question of who I am…or did it? — This is a lot more personal than my usual posts about tech. My mom and I started researching her family’s history twenty years ago when I was still in high school. After my Grandpa Bill’s death, we wanted a connection to the past and to capture the oral history about…