I am a software developer. After teaching myself to code on Apple II computers in junior high school and building software for our family-owned telecom business, my degree in Computer Science from Harvey Mudd College gave me the grounding for a career in software development where I was able to let my programming freak flag fly: I worked for Knowledge Adventure, an educational/games software company (where I first started leading teams of developers), HomePage.com, an internet startup (where we developed a white-label free web hosting platform), and MySQL Ab (where I led the web development team and then transitioned over to the server development team).
Through this time I was also involved in the open source community. In college, I was involved in the very early days of Linux, and I took over maintenance from Linus of the "root" disk used to install Linux before distributions. While working on websites for Knowledge Adventure, I got involved with the the PHP project, and became a founding member of the PHP Group. I helped set up and maintain some of the collaborative development infrastructure, including the mailing lists and online documentation feedback system. Then at HomePage.com, I contributed work we did related to mod_perl, and became a member of the Apache Software Foundation.
After MySQL Ab was acquired by Sun Microsystems (and then further by Oracle), I co-founded Raw Materials Art Supplies, a retail store in downtown Los Angeles which I have been operating as general manager for the last 15 years. I built Scat POS, a point of sale and ecommerce system using PHP and MySQL that we are using to run the business. It has involved a lot of integration work (payment processors, product feeds, shipping), and I automated as much as I could to focus on our artists' needs. This enabled us to build our business from scratch into one of the top independent art supply stores in the country.
I'm looking for individual contributor roles. PHP/MySQL is the core of what I do best, but I'm comfortable with full-stack web development, Linux system administration, C/C++, Docker, and confident in my abilities to jump into any tech stack and get up to speed quickly.
View my LinkedIn profile for some dates and details. And contact me to discuss opportunities.
witch king by martha wells, probably best known as the author of the murderbot diaries series, is a fantasy novel with fantastic world-building. i think it ultimately felt a bit incomplete, but i hope that just means she’ll be continuing the story as a series and really putting the rest of the meat on the bones.
Raw Materials Art Supplies is closing
tl;dr We love you, but Raw Materials Art Supplies will be closing permanently at the end of the year.
that was really hard to write. it was a decision that has been looming for a while, but our hand was forced by the looming legal threat explained there. now i am out in the market looking for new employment, which is not something i had ever really planned on having to do. but the more i uncover new opportunities, the more excited i get about the possibilities. certainly not the best timing, either calendar-wise as everything slows down for the holidays, or market-wise as the tech job market goes through an upheaval, but i am remain cautiously optimistic.
burn it down: power, complicity, and a call for change in hollywood by maureen ryan is an epic survey of the terribleness of the business they call show.
the entertainment industry has a reputation for liberal-ness that really falls apart when you look at it deeply. it has a complicated labor situation, as shown by the recent writers’ strike and ongoing actors’ strike. it has moved incredibly slowly to embrace diverse talent both on the creative and business sides.
it is shifting, too slowly, and i think this book helps move that along.
it has been a few months since i finished all you can ever know by nicole chung, and pretty much all i can say about it at this point is that i enjoyed it, immediately put her next book in my library queue, and have probably had to postpone that delivery a half-dozen times since then because i haven’t had any time for reading lately.
pet project la has closed their location on spring street. they moved around and changed owners a few times, but had been around almost as long as our store.
when we were looking for a new location, we looked at the rest of the retail space available in that parking garage. it wasn’t right for us, but it did have real alley access and being in a parking garage would have been convenient.
i ran across a reference to oscommerce in the slides of a tutorial i presented at o’really oscon in 2002(!) where i ran through of a survey of major php applications, and i thought that meant i had missed one in my round-up of open-source php point-of-sale applications.
but it’s an ecommerce platform, not a point-of-sale system and it doesn’t look like it has a module or add-on to provide a point-of-sale interface.
speaking of that, there are some point-of-sale add-ons for woocommerce, which is itself the ecommerce add-on to wordpress. it looks like the only open-source/free ones are built specifically for use with square or paypal terminals.
at some point in my life i got tired of writing all my SQL queries by hand, and was casting about for a database abstraction that simplified things. but i didn’t care for anything that required that i specify my actual SQL tables in code or another format. i wanted something that would just work on top of whatever tables i already had.
i don’t know what i considered at the time, but where i landed was using Idiorm and Paris, which bills itself as a “minimalist database toolkit for PHP5” which gives you a sense of its age. it was long ago put into maintenance-only mode by its developers, and eventually i ran across something that i wanted to fix or otherwise do that i knew would never be accepted upstream.
so i took the code that was in two distinct repositories, merged it together, tossed it in a new namespace, and renamed it Titi. i haven’t really done much with it beyond that, but i know there is code that i should be pulling back in from scat. an advantage to being a solo developer is you can kind of punch through abstraction layers to get things done, but that also leaves cleanup work to be tackled eventually.
should anybody else use this? maybe not. but it has been useful for me in my projects, and it’s also been a good playground to learn more about new php language features and tools.
(like most of my open source projects, this is named for a type of monkey, the titi monkey.)
while i folded all of the website/ecommerce parts of scat into the same repository as the point-of-sale system itself, it doesn’t really work out of the box and it is because of the odd way in which we run it for our store. the website used to be a separate application that was called ordure, so there’s a little legacy of that in some class names. i still think of the point-of-sale side as “scat” and the website side as “ordure”.
the point-of-sale system itself runs on a server here at the store (a dell poweredge t30), but our website runs on a virtual server hosted by linode. they run semi-independently, and they’re on a shared tailscale network.
ordure calls back to scat for user and gift card information, to send SMS messages, and to get shipment tracking information. so if the store is off-line, it mostly works and customers can still place orders. (but things will go wrong if they try to log in or use gift cards.)
there are scheduled jobs on the scat side that:
so ordure has a copy of scat’s catalog data that only gets updated on demand but does get a slightly-delayed update of pricing and inventory levels. the catalog data gets transferred using ssh and mysqldump. (basically: it get dumped, copied over, loaded into a staging database, and a generated 'rename table' query swaps the tables with the current database, and the old tables get dropped so the staging area is clear for next time.)
not all of this is reflected within the scat code repository, and this post is just sort of my thinking through out loud where it has ended up. part of the reason for this setup is that the store used to have a janky DSL connection so i was minimizing any dependencies on both sides being available for the other to work.
as a side note, all of the images used in the catalog are stored in a backblaze b2 bucket and we use gumlet to do image optimizing, resizing, etc. when we add images to our catalog, it can be done by pulling from an external URL and the scat side actually calls out to the ordure side to do that work because when we were on that crappy DSL connection, pulling and pushing large images through that pipe was painful.
back in july 2010 i wrote about how i was frustrated with our point of sale system (Checkout, a Mac application which changed hands once or twice and is no longer being developed) and had taken a quick survey around to see what open source solutions there were.
the one that i mentioned there (PHP Point of Sale) is still around, but is no longer open source. here is a very early fork of it that still survives. i know at least one art supply store out there is using it (the closed-source version, not that early fork), but i haven’t really looked at it since 2010.
there are a few more php point of sale systems now.
the biggest is called Open Source Point of Sale and appears to be undergoing an upgrade from CodeIgniter 3 to CodeIgniter 4 right now. i spent a few minutes poking around the demo online, and i don’t think i would be happy using it. it is under an MIT license.
another big one is NexoPOS, which is GPL-licensed. i have not played around with the demo, but the supporting website looks pretty slick.
most of the others look like they are just experimental projects or not being actively used or developed.
something i think about a lot is whether i should be trying to take Scat POS beyond just using it ourselves. part of me feels like i am a seasoned enough developer to know that the work that would be required to give it the level of polish and durability to survive usage outside of our own doors could be substantial.
it is a little strange still developing in php and having done it for so long, because you look at how other systems are built today and it isn’t always clear how that translates to php.
mastodon (the server software) is built primarily with ruby-on-rails, and uses a system called sidekiq to handle job processing. when you post to your mastodon server, it queues up a bunch of jobs that push it out to your subscribers, creates thumbnails of web pages, and all sorts of other stuff that may take a while so it makes no sense to make the web request hang around for it.
for scat pos, there are a few queue-like tasks that just get processed by special handlers that i use cron jobs to trigger. for example, when a transaction is completed it reports the tax information to our tax compliance service, but if that fails (because of connectivity issues or whatever) there’s a cron job that runs every night to re-try.
as best i can tell, the state of the art for php applications that want to have some sort of job queue system like sidekiq is Gearman and GearmanManager and it is wild to me that projects i remember starting up in 2008 are still just chugging along like that.
KTGY Proposes 14 Modular Buildings on LA’s Skid Row
Architecture firm KTGY has designed 14 apartment buildings that could house 4,690 people on L.A.’s Skid Row, the epicenter of the homeless crisis.
skid row is not the epicenter of the homeless crisis, it is the black hole to which everyone wants to abandon the homeless. these buildings sound great. build them all over the city, the state, and country.
AddyOsmani.com - Stick to boring architecture for as long as possible
Prioritize delivering value by initially leaning on stable and well-understood technologies.
i appreciate this sentiment. it is a little funny to me that what i can claim the most expertise in would probably be considered some of the most stable and well-understood technologies out there right now, but i have been working with them since they were neither. perhaps i have crossed from where as long as possible becomes too long, at least as far as employability is concerned.
