Author Archives: Mike Crittenden

My 4th kid is now almost a month old, so it seems like as good a time as any to write up some random tips I’ve learned for dealing with young kids. Here they are, in no specific order. Sleep A friend of mine with 3 kids, when asked for parenting advice, said “just think […]

I spent the first few months of 2018 working through the Book Riot 2018 Read Harder Challenge. I had gotten stuck in a rut of reading dumb suspense and murder mystery books and wanted to break out of that, so this seemed logical.

How often each day do you feel like an idiot? Hopefully, the answer is “just enough.” I believe that measuring idiotic feelings per day (IFPS) is a decent method of predicting or identifying burnout. Here are your options: I feel like an idiot all the dang time! This is likely a sign that one (or […]

For those of you who work on a lot of unfamiliar servers, you probably use vim a good bit. It can be useful to have a simple, small .vimrc file that you can just copy to wherever to set some sane defaults. Here’s the one I use for that. It fixes indenting, syntax highlighting, and […]

If you’ve never heard of the 3 C’s, here’s some context. Basically, it’s a strategy for writing issues/tickets that breaks them into the Card (user story), the Conversation (documentation and detailed requirements), and the Confirmation (testing steps and acceptance criteria). Here’s a concise little template that you can copy and paste when creating JIRA tickets. h2. […]

This is the post that I’ll use as a living dumping ground for random useful git snippets that I come across. Enjoy! git blame -w # ignores white space git blame -M # ignores moving text git blame -C # ignores moving text into other files Use git blame to see when a change was […]

If you’ve never heard of it, Grav is a pretty neat little flat-file CMS. If you’re a Drupal developer, words like “flat-file” and “neat” and “little” are probably foreign to you. This post is an attempt to explain what Grav is, why it’s neat, and how to use it, in terms that you’ll understand. Wait, […]

The cold harsh reality is that we have to balance the budget.Michael Freaking Bloomberg “But I don’t want to budget! Sticking to a budget is such a chore! Entering all my transactions is so hard!” Yeah, whew, that’s a tough one. But you know what is even harder? Being hopelessly, desperately poor. Or, maybe try […]

The thing about babies is that they’re idiots. They can’t even sleep right, which is like the easiest thing ever. You have to teach them. You’re a parent, that’s what you do now. Let’s get one thing straight though. Your baby sleeps plenty. It (yes, your baby is an “it” for the purpose of this […]

Once your site’s database dump file gets to be 1GB or more, phrases like “oh, just download and import a DB dump” can’t really be taken for granted anymore. So here are some tips for dealing with large databases, especially those of the Drupal variety. Exporting Before we can import, we must export. With a […]