lovetap.org, my current side-project, sends people pictures from their Google photo albums directly to their phone at random intervals. I wanted to make sure that people who sign up for the service actually own the phone number they're signing up with. I found a lot of tutorials on how

TL;DR: I built a weather station using a Tessel that posts data to Firebase. I'm displaying the temperature/humidity in a live-updating highchart that you can see here. Big "but": The Wifi on the Tessel isn't that reliable and locks up fairly frequently. Sometimes after 30 minutes, sometimes after

s3cmd is a simple command line tool for managing data in your S3 storage buckets. I use it to store lovetap backups. It's very easy to set up - the first time you run it, it asks for your S3 settings and stores them. Once that's done, syncing data to

I've used the MacBook Pro Retina for over a year now as my everyday (.NET-) development machine. I still think it's the the perfect laptop for a .NET developer. The one little thing that doesn't work flawlessly is Hyper-V. If you boot directly to Windows and try to start Hyper-V,

Meteor comes with two great packages that make it easy to display login buttons to the user: accounts-ui and accounts-ui-unstyled. As you may have guessed, the unstyled version gives you a pretty bare bones version of the login buttons. But what if that bare bones version isn't quite enough because

I recently heard the expression "tending your garden" applied to software. Most importantly, taking care of the weeds before they take over. It's such a great analogy. We've all had to deal with poor codebases. Or we started with a great codebase and just made one quick change that we

OK, you say. What does Knockout have to do with this? After all, there are plenty of ways to create a custom checkbox without Knockout. To which I say: You're right, grasshopper, but it's so much more elegant with Knockout. A lot of the pure CSS solutions rely on the

I just finished the pluralsight class "Parent-Child Data with EF, MVC, Knockout, Ajax, and Validation". While it's a good class and the author has some great insights on how to cleanly implement a web application that uses knockout on the client, I was struck by how many hoops we jump

I have been using Sublime Text 3 on Mac for meteor and node development for a while now. I really like the very minimalist UI. Don't let that fool you, though. Sublime is an extremely powerful and extensible editor. There are tons of packages for Sublime that let you add

I haven't been on a bike since mine got stolen about 10 years ago when I still lived in Berlin. I moved to the US pretty soon after that, and haven't lived in a particularly bike-friendly place since. Here in Philadelphia, it seems like everyone's on a bike. And it

My trusty Lenovo W500 which I truly loved (well, in the end I hated it) finally gave up the ghost, so it was time to look into a new laptop. Researching gadgets - or anything for that matter - is one of my favorite things to do, so I did

I've always wanted to get into mobile development and I played with phonegap a little bit, but was pretty disappointed in the bad performance and the fact that apps built in phonegap just don't "feel" native. Because phonegap is really just HTML and javascript running in a webview on your

This is just a small tip, but one that I use in all of my MVC projects. When you add javascript to a view (which I do quite often), it is rendered inside the page body, along with the rest of the view content. That's not best practice. Ideally, we