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Personal Webpage of David Duggins


Well, I was born on a normal day in July, 1981 and have been creating chaos ever since. Born in North Carolina, but raised in the aftermath of the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan, I have been messing around with computers nearly my entire life. I wrote my first program in assembly when I was 11. In my early teens I ran a BBS connected to Fidonet and started building a website for my band. In 1999 I was introduced to Linux, and it was love at first compile. I started my career in IT in the early 2000's doing IT for a Car Dealership in Charlotte NC. I wrote my first major web app in Cold Fusion (an ecom app) at that time. In 2006 I left Charlotte and moved down to Columbia where starting working as a developer, freelancer and consultant. Currently I am working as a freelance developer and DevOps consultant!!


....Creating Chaos Since 1981!


  1. I Hate Subscriptions Part 1 Espresso Review

    So I am not a fan of the subscription model. If I am paying money for something, I want to own it. I understand the appeal for the subscription model, especially with the development houses, but I want the option to just buy it once and that be it! So I am going to be writing some posts over the next year where I will be reviewing some of my favorite alternatives to popular subscription services. …


  2. My Resume Workflow

    I started writing my Resume in Markdown a while ago. I started out just using Pandoc to convert it to pdf. Overtime, I started my own little build process going. I use rake. …


  3. Using Caddy to Develop RoR

    Working on a few projects in rails and I wanted to do something where I could load the site in the browser with a tld and an ssl certificate like people. So going to https://conflict.dev would take me to my local runing dev server for my conflict app. And if I had other things I was working on at the same time, I wanted them to also be able to be loaded in the same way. Oh, and I need them to have ssl certificates so I can test with that as well! …


  4. Thoughts on Rails Freeze

    So I saw a post about a Rails function freeze that caught my attention. I would like to speak on it a bit. So basically, for the uninitiated, The freeze method lets you set an object in rails to be immuttable. …


  5. Updating an Old Python Script

    I wrote a script years ago that let me spin up a WordPress instance, complete with vhost file. I wrote it in python and it was , at least for me a pretty impressive feat! Recently, I’ve been going over some of my old code and giving them a bit of a dust off. I’ve made a few changs to the code that I feel makes marked improvements on it…albiet small! …


  6. Arc Wins The Browser Wars

    I have seen a lot of stuff in the new browser Arc this past year. It’s supposedly a new take on the browser. It only works on the Mac for now and as I was curious, I decided to give it a try. I installed it and after going through it’s wizard, it got stuck and would not let me actually use it as a browser. Web searches and reinstalls have been to no avail! Curious still, I did a bit of a deep dive on the browser and found that it lacks the WebInspector or any kind of Dev Tools. I have noticed that Chrome really gets bogged down with tabs and even Firefox feels a bit stale. I did use Opera for a bit and later gave Vivaldi a try. Several sources seem to suggest that Vivaldi is still a great choice for the power user, so I decided to give it another go. So glad I did!! …


  7. A Return to Rails

    So I have been coding in PHP for a pretty long time. Lately I have been feeling a bit burned out…and I was not sure what was the cause. I started to rewrite a project I had started on in Symfony using Rails and the source of my burn out became clear! So I have been throwing my self back into Rails and I am enjoying it very much! Stay tuned for more thoughts on my return to Rails as I dive deeper! …


  8. Exif Tool

    So I still own and use a iPod. I use gtkpod to manage it. I ran into an issue though, that when I pull all my songs off the iPod with gtkpod, I get all the songs just dumped in my music folder with no organization at all. I like my songs in Album folders under Artist folders. There is a neat little trick that I thought I’d share on how to get it done. …


  9. Why I Use Vim

    So, why do I use VIM? I had a great example of this just today and I thought I’d share!! …


  10. Using Docker with PHP Composer

    So in this installment, I will be talking about how to use PHP/Composer with Docker. I am currently having to work with a Mac for a contract. I could use homebrew and get PHP setup on the Mac, but I am having to deal with multiple versions of PHP and frankly, I really do not want to have to deal with PHP on a machine that is not really mine. I really do not even have to run php locally, I am using a dev docker container to serve up the site locally. So I really just need to be able to run Docker. It’s not a very difficult proprosal. …



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