I recently needed to download a bunch of files from Amazon S3, but I didn't have direct access to the bucket — I only had a list of URLs.

Nearly a decade ago, I launched my first SaaS application. It was a new take on content management — a hosted CMS that reads/writes directly to a web server and uses class attributes to define content regions.

I use Spotlight more than I like to admit, usually for launching apps. Recently, some of my apps and files stopped appearing — even ones I access frequently.

Here's a simple way to create your own CSS spinners (i.e. loaders) without any images or JavaScript. It's lightweight, easy to use, and completely customizable.

When I first started using Sass, there was one thing that drove me crazy about it compared to Less. For some reason, including a plain CSS file just wasn't something the compiler wanted to do:

Determining your app's base dir (or document root if you're from a PHP background) isn't as straight forward as you'd think in Node. Here's a little trick to get a globally available reference to your app's root directory.

The bcrypt library on NPM makes it really easy to hash and compare passwords in Node. If you're coming from a PHP background, these are roughly equivalent to password_hash() and password_verify().

For me, upgrading to MacOS Sierra broke a lot of things that use SSH, including Transmit, Sequel Pro, and a handful of other apps. In fact, it seems to break any app that uses an SSH key with a passphrase. 🤔

Back in 2011, I released the first version of SimpleImage for PHP — an open source project for working with images.

Here's a challenge that a friend of mine came across yesterday. He needed to iterate over an array of file names one at a time in a specific order, stopping at the first one that existed. He was, of course, using Node.js and the checks were being done asynchronously.

Today I launched the third major iteration of DirtyMarkup, a free tool to clean up HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The original version launched back in 2009.

It wasn't long after launching a major open source PHP project until I started hearing things like this:

I recently made the decision to stop using modal dialogs in my apps. What once was a good way to obtain information or confirmation has become undesirable and taboo in the world of UX.

At just over 200 lines of code, you'll never want to deal with AJAX-based form submission any other way.

As a web developer, your code is often visible to anyone who wants to review it. If you're like me, you might get stressed out about the thought of people looking at your work and critiquing or criticizing your app's design.

How many times have you seen something like this in a config file?

Need to update your version of Node.js? Here's how you can upgrade or downgrade from the command line using NPM.

If your PHP mail() function is slow or failing, it's probably because sendmail isn't installed on your server. Here's how you can fix it.

Here's a cheat sheet for working with virtual hosts on an Ubuntu server. The instructions assume you're not logged in as the root user. Change example.com to your own domain/subdomain.

Last week, I launched Particle on Kickstarter. Today, I pulled the plug and canceled the campaign. We had 50 backers and were 5% funded. So why would I do this with 25 days left to go?