Senior engineering leader at Twilio. Platforms and APIs at scale, and a long-running blog about building software.
Growing up, I lived about a block from my elementary school, and by 2nd grade, I was walking to and from school on my own each day. To get to Turner Elementary, I had to cross National St., which isn't a particularly busy road, but had enough traffic that the school hired a crossing guard. The crossing guard that year was Mr. Kenneth Beardsley, a retired letter carrier for the US Postal Service.…
Apple wish lists are nothing new. Over the years, Apple has released better software on a pretty consistent schedule. Sometimes those releases have things we expect. Other times they surprise even fanboys like me. Most Apple wish lists cover big-ticket items. This is not that list. This wish list is a bunch of little things that I encounter in my day-to-day use of Apple products. If I’m lucky, an…
More than a few people have written about being a software architect. It's a surprisingly diverse role in the industry. The title rarely means the same thing from one company to the next. The stereotype is someone who designs stuff and then hurls it over the fence to engineers, who do the actual work of building it. If that's the only kind of software architect you've met, you've been…
I have a first world problem. Actually, I have many. One of them is moving HDMI cables around from device to device. At any given moment on my office desk I have a desktop, two laptops and an Xbox. But I only have one monitor. This means that switching between devices can be awkward, as I unplug an HDMI cable from one and move it to the other. Admittedly this isn’t so bad with the laptops because…
I admit late to the party on this one, but PDFScanner is a must-have for any macOS user who scans documents. PDFScanner isn’t a new app, but it’s new to me. Over the years I’ve tried the native software that comes with my HP Scanner with much disappointment. I default back to using macOS Preview’s Import functionality. Most of the time it works. When it doesn’t, it’s spectacular though. Preview…
Spoiler Alert: I'm going to discuss the TV show WandaVision in its entirety. If you haven’t seen the show yet go watch and then come back here. On the podcast , we’ve spent the last 9 weeks discussing each episode of WandaVision. In last week’s podcast , we were joined by friend of the show, Patrick “Patty” Sturdivant. Patty is our resident Marvel-expert. He first joined us for a live recording to…
Last summer during the World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) , Apple announced the introduction of a new processor and architecture for the Mac. I cannot overstate the significance of this change. It’s a big deal. In November Apple started shipping Mac laptops and the Mac mini with this new processor named the M1. The reviews were shocking because almost everyone loved the new processor. Even the…
lectionary.stanlemon.com is a hobby project of mine. It started when I was in college at Concordia University, River Forest. My dorm floor started praying Matins in the morning before classes together. This was before the Lutheran Service Book had been published. We relied upon a set of Word documents to pick daily readings. I thought it would be neat to have a webpage that did this for us. My…
I’d like to think I have a modest yet informed smart home game. We are an Apple HomeKit house. I love Apple’s position on security, especially when it comes to technology for my home. While HomeKit is great it can make it challenging to find affordable devices. I’ve used smart plugs for a long time and recently decided I wanted to try bulbs. Each of my master bedroom lamps plugged into a smart…
After 10 months I'm ready for the Super Bowl. I'm not as excited about it as I thought I would be, though. Despite not having pre-season games, this season felt a lot longer than normal. Perhaps it's because games got moved around each week. Or maybe it's because I never knew who was actually going to play for my team. Nonetheless here we are at Super Bowl Sunday. I love football and I love the…
There is a rumor that MagSafe is returning to the Mac. Even Mark Gurman buys into this rumor. I hope it’s not true. In the early 2000’s Apple released improvements to their products that seemed minor, but often had dramatic improvements in day to day use. It was this attention to detail that set Apple apart and helped to create a new generation of Apple fanboys. MagSafe was one of those features.…
It amazes me that I meet folks who haven’t heard of the Apple One bundle . Nonetheless I’ve met a lot of people who missed Apple’s announcement and subsequent rollout at the end of October 2020. The Apple One Bundle takes the various services Apple has built out over the last few years and packages them up into a single billing structure. With the Apple One Bundle you’re charged once a month for…
The internet is like the Wild Wild West, without the awesome soundtrack and dance moves of Will Smith. The truth is it’s a really dangerous place, for kids as well as adults. It gets harder every day to know what is safe and understand the consequences of interacting with all of the digital services that make up our world. As a father of three who are increasingly becoming connected it’s even…
I’ve got mixed feelings about New Years Resolutions. They typically seem gimmicky and too often are unrealistic even under the best of circumstances. Both last year and again this year Jon and I discussed New Years Resolutions on our podcast through the lens of goal setting and in the context of what habits we wanted to establish. I like habits because they often involve some ceremony, and…
What a mess of a year! If a global pandemic wasn’t enough to ruin it, throw in civil unrest and a nightmare election cycle and you’ve got 2020 in a nutshell. When the year started our family was already home-based, with me working remotely and my children being home schooled by my wife. We had a ton of activities outside of the house, all of which came to a screeching halt in March and many…
I did not set out to read 64 ( and counting ) books in 2020 but, like so much this year, it just sort of happened. I was pretty convinced that after 40 books last year I had peaked and I would never read more in a single year. Was I ever wrong! I read a ton of really fantastic books this year, the full list of which you can see on Goodreads , but I thought it would be interesting to pull out my…
Hulu is increasing the cost of its monthly live TV subscription service. A service that started at $40/month in 2017 will end 2020 at $65/month (or $70/month if you have the no ads for on demand streaming). Live TV streaming services have been increasing their monthly subscription costs over the last few years, gnawing away at one of their main competitive advantages. When these services first…
Recently my oldest daughter, Lucy, asked me if she could let a friend borrow a book she had. “Of course”, I said, ”why wouldn’t you be able to?” What I didn’t realize at first is that she was referring to a book we had recently bought on Amazon Kindle, which she had plowed through in record time. It was the latest book in a series that this particular friend of hers had first introduced to her.…
When I was younger I griped a lot about Christmas music and lighting the tree before Christmas Day. Christmas is a season on the church calendar and it doesn't start until the 25th. The next 12 days then, are where we can bust out the Christmas music and celebrate. That period before Christmas, which is usually most of December, is Advent and in the Christian tradition is a penitential season.…
In March, 2019 Apple released their “Apple Card”, a credit card with a truly Apple experience. Apple has been in the electronic payments business for a while now, first by letting you store credit cards securely on your devices in the Wallet app to use via Apple Pay and then with Apple Cash, a PayPal/Venmo type service for sending cash between people. The introduction of the Apple Card was a…
The HomePod Mini is the culmination of a long hard road for Siri. For those of us loyal Mac-addicts and Apple fanboys it's the fruition of a long slog to the ubiquitous smart assistant that many of us have been hoping for. Finally we have a smart speaker that lives up to the dream and at a price that any Mac aficionado can deploy into their home. When I look back at iPhones it was the 4 that…
macOS Big Sur was announced at Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) on June 22nd, 2020. It was released on Tuesday, November 10, 2020. This year I decided to pass on using the beta versions, probably due to the trauma of my last beta experience. I installed Big Sur on release night after some rocky attempts to download it from Apple’s update servers. After several days of using it, I…
The iPhone 12 Pro was announced at an Apple Event on October 13th, with preorders that Friday the 16th. My order was placed shortly after 8am and it arrived on October 23rd. Now that I've had it for a few weeks I have a few thoughts, especially in light of the device it replaced, my iPhone 122 Pro. After upgrading to the iPhone 12 Pro from an 11 Pro and getting to use it for a bit I have some…
Evelyn is the household donut connoisseur. She's the one responsible for getting me out of bed early to go get donuts, and she also usually decides where to get the donuts. She'll tell you the best donuts in Indianapolis are at Long's Bakery, but that Jack's Donuts is closer; and if you want one of the cinnamon twists they're bigger at Jacks, but Long's has the better cake donuts. She's got it all…
When I made my Pizza Night at the Lemon's post and video I mentioned I would share my red sauce (aka "pizza" sauce) recipe shortly thereafter. Well, here it is! This recipe came about due to the difficulties my wife and I had finding a good pizza sauce for our pizza. Prior to this recipe we also never ate pasta, for similar reasons. It seemed like whenever we found a good sauce we would snatch up…
As long as my wife and I have been married we've been making our own pizza, every Friday night. I grew up in a suburb of Chicago where pizza and Friday nights were pretty much synonymous. Ordering pizza from your local parlour was just what you did. For my family most Fridays we ordered pizza from Campagna's, which made a crispy and often very salty thin crust. Later in life we'd frequent…
After nine seasons 76 million people tuned into watch the last episode of the TV Show Seinfeld. That episode was a profound middle finger to the audience of Seinfeld, basically telling every dedicated fan that after all those years the show was pointless. It was an extremely polarizing episode, some loved it, some hated it. But 76 million viewers! Do you ever wonder how they came up with that…
Awhile back I wrote an article about visualizing my mortgage after my buddy Jon and I discussed buying a house on our podcast . Since then my wife and I have aggressively gone after our mortgage and I was happy to report (on Facebook) that at the end of June we made the final payment. I hesitated posting about this on Facebook (I don't post often), but I was pretty proud and happy and wanted to…
For close to a year now my friend Jon and I have been recording our podcast, Life with a Twist of Lemon . Jon and I have been friends for a long time, and he had been advocating for us to do a podcast for a while when I finally caved, contingent on one condition: I would do nothing. I knew if Jon was serious this wouldn’t be a problem, and we could simply replace one of our usual phone calls with…
I’m a big fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I don’t hesitate to get a baby sitter and see new releases in the theater and I’ve pretty much preordered every release (sans Guardians 2). I love the genre, but even more so I think the MCU represents some of the best movie writing of my lifetime. Consistently the MCU rolls out great content, so that even the worst MCU movie is still a great movie.…
Last night I released a new library to GitHub and npm called React PouchDB components. I'm excited to share this library, which started as an experiment to illustrate to my friend Jon how easy it could be to leverage PouchDB in React . After enough tooling around I suspected that the pieces could be extracted and shared more broadly. There are a number of different ways to deal with state in…
A working example of what I'm going to describe here can be found at https://github.com/stanlemon/example-relay-app. For awhile GraphQL has looked interesting to me, like something I wanted to learn. I love the concept of strongly typing expressive queries that can be batched into a single request. That's GraphQL, a technology that really seems to shine in UI work for single page apps (SPAs).…
I do my best to avoid social media, and even when I do participate I consume a pretty narrow set of content. For example, my twitter is highly curated to focus on Indianapolis municipal happenings, Apple product rumors and javascript news. On the rare occasion I login to Facebook it’s mostly to respond to messages on my podcast page or to look at old pictures of Chicago North Western trains. I…
In Episode 8 of Life with a Twist of Lemon my friend Jon asked me about buying a house and for part of that discussion we talked about mortgages. One of the things that I mentioned our family does is visualize our mortgage on a piece of paper hanging on the side of our refrigerator. On the paper is a drawing of a house, which my lovely wife made to look like our actual house. It’s on graph paper…
For more than a couple of years now my friend Jon Kohlmeier has been trying to persuade me to start a podcast with him. We’ve routinely joked about it, but I’ve resisted getting it started because of time and other trivial things. Jon and I have been friends for well over a decade now and our roots to podcasting go way back. Jon was the cohost and producer of the Higher Things Radio podcast with…
Recently a friend of mine, Rev. George Borghardt asked the internet to rank Star Wars movies, best to last. Presumably this was inspired by a discussion he and I had over some of Kentucky's finest just the week before. Arrange the Star Wars Movies from your favorite to your least favorite! Mine List: V, VI, VII, Rogue One, IV, III, I, II — George Borghardt (@revborghardt) May 7, 2017 Some folks…
I recently went on a bit of a Twitter rant with a friend over the release of Star Trek Beyond. This is the third installment in the reboot, and unequivocally the worst. My original tweet which sparked the discussion read, "Beyond was a good action movie, but it wasn't Star Trek." I've not been shy with my friends that I am NOT a fan of the reboots. It's not because they erased the timeline of four…
I am a strong believer that the power of the internet is best leveraged when it is used for funny memes, pictures of cats, and that really amazing video about Tom Brady’s balls. However, I feel that I need to break from my strong belief about the internet for a moment and instead bend it to my will and rant. Recently while chatting with a friend I regurgitated a sentiment from a tweet I saw, or…
LemonRestBundle 0.8.0 has been released. The theme for this version is compatibility . While several significant bugs have been fixed since the last release, the focus has been primarily on ensuring that the bundle is compatible with a wide range of versions of PHP, Symfony and Doctrine. Additionally the bundle now comes with support for MongoDB and better support for other implementations of…
Work on LemonRestBundle continues, last night I merged in support for PATCH. This is an interesting beast because there are some strong opinions on the proper way to implement PATCH in a REST API. Initially I assumed I would just avoid it rather than subject myself to the judgment of poor implementation. However, the more I researched PATCH the more I realized that I wanted to add it, and…
tl;dr You can try out LemonRestBundle with ng-admin here. Last week I shared that I was working on a Symfony 2 bundle that would create REST end points from Doctrine entities . I've been continuing to work on that bundle, adding features and flexibility and I decided to re-evaluate the way I was demoing it. The truth is that I didn't want to sink a lot of time into writing a demo, but I also want…
For a little while now I’ve been working on a bundle for Symfony to easily create REST apis for Doctrine entities. My goal was to be able to create a REST api with nothing more than a Doctrine entity and it’s metadata, including custom metadata from bundles like JMS Serializer . I wanted to invest very little time in the actual api part, and get to writing applications that used it. I’ve hit this…
Symfony 2.5 was released on June 1 . I've been following blogs and listening to podcasts about the release and there are a lot of really awesome additions in this release. But there is one feature in particular that I don't believe is getting enough attention and deserves some. Back in April I wrote about my frustration with Symfony & Absolute Paths . I was excited to see in May that this concern…
Extending Symnfony by Sébastien Armand is a tutorial-style introduction to a variety of the ways that you can extend a Symfony 2 full stack installation. I’m a big fan of Symfony 2 and I’ve done a fair amount of app building with it, so I was interested in Armand’s book and seeing what new things I could discover about hooking into sf2. The book is filled with code samples, far more than you’ll…
I recently decided to signup for Pley , a service that supplies lego sets by mail for a monthly membership price. They advertise that you're safe to lose a piece or two and that the kits are always sanitary using their special FDA grade process. Unfortunately I found both of these claims to be false . First off let's set the record straight, I'm an adult Lego geek. That's a technical term, you can…
About a week ago I released v1.3 of jGrowl . This is for all intents and purposes a maintenance release, containing primarily packing info for npm and bower, as well as a Grunt config for future development. More importantly is that the ' develop ' branch is underway and this contains some significant changes to the plugin. The 1.4 release intends to address the following things: LESS for CSS…
I'm pretty excited about a contribution I recently made to Aura.Sql . For those not familiar with Aura , it's the brain child of Paul M Jones (a decent dude despite his hate for design patterns starting with the letter F) and strives to be a set of standalone components with no outside dependencies and 100% test coverage. Aura.Sql v2 is also known as ExtendedPdo, and it's a drop in replacement for…
My love affair with Symfony 2 has hit a rocky spot. I have an atomic deployment system for a Symfony 2 app that I've been working on. Basically it works like this... The app gets built on my CI server, Bamboo . That build results in an artifact, a tarball of the entire application. This tarball is intended to represent the final product, meaning tests have all been run - they passed - and any…
Do you want to get started shaving with a double edge razor? Mark and I cover The Basics on Shave with Swagger .
Today's post on Shave with Swagger discusses why I hated shaving . Keep an eye out, later this week Mark and I will cover "the basics" of what you need to get started wet shaving.