#iron.io

When using the beautiful unified queue api in Laravel 4, remember to double check the variable scope on your queue callback... are those variables out-of-scope?

It's easy to overlook the variables that are out-of-scope. Just remember: any variables that are not instantiated within the callback must be imported with the USE keyword in order to access them.

For instance:

Mail::queue('emails.hello', $data, function($message) use ($outgoing) { $message->to($outgoing->toAddress, $outgoing->toName); $message->from($outgoing->fromAddress, $outgoing->fromName); $message->subject($outgoing->subject); });

I'm not going to have a day where I wake up and say "today is the day I became a real developer". I think I have been a real developer and am still working at becoming a better. I always thought growth in programming as a thing where you steadily get it and something clicks and you become exponentially better and.... boom you are a legit programmer! not so much.

In between each of my leaps as a programmer there was always a "plateau" a period where I'm not so much learning new materials buy  strengthening the skills and lessons that I did learn so I could be ready for the next leap.

My journey in high school started when I found obsessive enjoyment in over clocking and assembling computer parts and benchmarking. and it nearly ended when I watched the movie "Office Space". At a very impressionable time in my life I had it in my mind that if I chose computer science I would die in a cubicle and so I went to college without much direction and following my sister's path in health sciences. In which I found myself in sterile lab following a procedure which surprisingly felt 10x worse than being in a cubicle.

My Journey roughly picks up steam when I switched to Philosophy in Public Policy and Ethics from my original major in biology. I went from a major that primarily dealt in memorization to one that was heavy in logic and critical thinking.

I followed up by my decision to take a leap in trying to teach myself php/mysql/ruby/rails and compete in startup competitions in Virginia. Another leap was taking the risk, paying the tuition, and doing the unconventional thing and joining Dev Bootcamp.

My current leap appears to be working with the http://ww.iron.io team and building great tools aimed at other developers. In the last few weeks complied my first .NET program, running node.js workers, answering questions concerning PHP, wrote clean OO Ruby, had some time to learn some Go, I'm also getting to learn much about noSQL in the wild(mongo/redis) and the challenges with distributed computing on a scale my mind would've exploded to think about months ago. I also get to interact and help debug problems and issues with our customers(who are all developers) which is hugely enjoyable. It doesn't hurt that www.iron.io chose to plant itself within the amazing enviroment that is http://heavbit.com/

You'll find me at Dev Bootcamp still to this day as a coach usually from the hours of 7:00pm-2:00am. I seriously enjoy exchanging experiences with my fellow boots in the program and helping others fill their gaps and make the jumps in learning. if you don't have my contact tweet/fb @stephenitis or email [email protected]

You'll also see me at http://www.meetup.com/SFRails/ http://www.meetup.com/golangsf/

and likely at many of the hackathons within the sf-bay area.

ruby-2.0.0> "binaryskipper".split(//).collect{|x| x.unpack("B*")}