Phillip Ridlen

Notes

I don’t write often or very much. Many of the following articles are barely more than links to other, better articles, and the rest are short and unpolished. Read at your own risk. ;)

Elitch's or Lakeside?

Elitch’s or Lakeside?

The story of two imperfect amusement parks.

Denver's amusement parks were never great, but it's not like we had any better options. Here's my meandering memoir.

Wanting Back What We Can Never Have

Wanting Back What We Can Never Have

…and maybe never had in the first place

Growing up alongside the internet, the pull of nostalgia, and the unsettling possibility that what we miss isn’t actually the past itself.

Getting Unstuck

I'm going to be OK with writing things that never get published. I'm going to be OK with writing things that only consist of a few hundred or even a few dozen words.

Book Review: You Need a Budget by Jesse Mecham

Even though I was already familiar with the Four Rules, reading this book gave me a renewed vision and helped me realize I was looking at my budget as a what but I needed to examine the why.

I Lost My Wedding Ring

I Lost My Wedding Ring

(and Lived to Tell the Story)

I have a wedding ring in the Pacific Ocean somewhere. No, it wasn’t some dramatic gesture. In fact, the story is not really that interesting.

The curse of compressing reality

Noah Lorang on Signal v. Noise: But don’t judge your reality against someone else's compressed work. It’s ok if it takes you a day to make a cutting board like one that someone made in six minutes on YouTube; the truth is it probably took them a day too."

Mom’s Secret Sauce for Success

I owe every accomplishment I have ever achieved to three things my mom instilled in me from a young age. She was relentless, frustrating at times, but looking back I know it was out of a deep love for me and my future well-being.

AI is making things better, but worse

AI is making things better, but worse

We thought AI was going to make life easier, giving us time back by automating away the monotonous work. But just like the Industrial Revolution, factory automation, and robots didn't lead to giving workers a life of ease and luxury, knowledge work automation through agentic and generative AI is no Caribbean vacation.

Vibe coding a native macOS app to edit my blog

Vibe coding a native macOS app to edit my blog

I have an awesome new editor for my website. It’s a native macOS SwiftUI app that I can boot up on my Mac and write and edit posts. I don’t know Swift. And I don’t know the SwiftUI API. To me this is the perfect candidate for blind vibe…

Adam Asks: Parity, Blocks, and Enumerators. Oh My!

Adam is a friend of mine learning to program. Every once in a while, he’ll send me a bit of code to look over to learn how he might be able to do it better. The latest one was an exercise involving splitting an array based on the parity…

A Little "Special" Goes a Long Way

A Little “Special” Goes a Long Way

Every client will tell you that they want two things: be on time, and stay within their budget. At the heart of every project, every client also wants a third thing: results.

Google Web Fonts Typographic Project

There are over 650 Google Fonts available for free. But, pairing typefaces isn’t easy and many of those fonts don’t work for typical websites. Part of the 25x52 initiative, this collaborative, ongoing project offers inspiration for using…

Returning Multiple Formats with Rails Dynamic Error Pages

Yesterday my coworker Eric asked me to build out some dynamic error pages for the upcoming version of one of our apps. He suggested a certain pattern that we used in a previous application. Being the adventurous soul that I am, I wanted to make sure his way was the best way.

Thank you, Dvorak!

This year, I am thankful for August Dvorak, inventor of the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard.

Less.app

{Less} extends CSS with variables, nested rules, operators and more.

Head in the Clouds

Valentine’s day was a few days ago, and since I’m still in the mood, I am going to declare my love for the cloud.

Shapeshifting “Classes”

I’ve been using Ruby full-time+ for the last few weeks, working on projects at work and then personal projects when I get home. There are a few things I’ve learned about Ruby that surprised me. Most of these were discovered when, going…

Grace in Gratitude

I can't tell you how many times I've received a gift and meant to say thank you, whether in person, over the phone, or with a note, and completely forgotten. By not making a priority of letting them know their gift was appreciated, I am being ungrateful. This is a sin that can easily slip into habit without notice.

Programming as an Image-Bearer

That you’re building something from basically nothing has long been my favorite thing about programming. I’ve never thought about how it ties in with Genesis in God’s act of creating the universe ex nihilo.

O Come Let Us Adore Him

Have you ever stopped to think who is the "us" in "O Come Let Us Adore Him"?

Being Careful About What We Ingest

Many people are very careful about what they eat. In the same way, we should be careful about what we eat, but on a spiritual plane.

Gumbo

I know it's not "real" gumbo, but let me tell ya, it's pretty tasty.

Telegram Reaches 1 Billion Daily Messages

Not sure how I missed the whole Telegram thing back in February when WhatsApp went down. While nothing compared to WhatsApp’s 600 million active users, Telegram’s 50 million active users each sending 20 messages a day with no money spent…