Andrew Shell's Weblog

August 2013

  1. Last week I announced my first Node.js module fs-key-value. I'm new to Node.js and was not having any success making it asynchronous so I released it as a synchronous library. Soon after I realized it made more sense to take a little more time and rewrite it to be asynchronous....

  2. As a developer, I'm always reevaluating what tools I use to do my work. This can be what language I'm using, but also what frameworks, libraries or editors I'm using. I've been doing pretty much nothing but PHP for close to a decade and I love it. I know it's cool to dis PHP and...

  3. Today I published fs-key-value which is my first NPM module. Earlier this week I talked about creating a little wrapper for LevelUp that was supposed to make it work when I spin up multiple processes using cluster. After some further testing I came to the conclusion that my...

  4. Recently I've been working on a Node.js app that uses LevelDB via the LevelUp module. Out of the box it works really well, but I ran into problems when I tried adding multi-process support (via the cluster module) to my app. So I created a little wrapper script that uses a...

  5. I'm probably going to be moving my site soon to be powered by Dave Winer's Trex but that means that my RSS feed URL will change. Right now it's either https://blog.andrewshell.org/feed/ or https://blog.andrewshell.org/feed/index.xml but as of right now the new location is...

  6. I do most of my blog reading on my iPhone so it's really important for me that my blog looks good on the iPhone. One feature that I really like is the "Reader" feature that shows up in the address bar on both mobile and desktop Safari. One issue with it though is that...

  7. This blog (and a couple other sites) have been hosted via GitHub Pages which has been great. However I wanted other features that required plugins which are not supported on GitHub Pages for security reasons. The way around this is to generate your site locally (with plugins) and...

  8. I'll be honest with you. I had kinda stagnated over the last couple years when it came to improving my skills as a developer. When I first started developing professionally I went from not knowing much PHP to being well regarded as a developer in a few years. Part of my...