Motivation is a very hard thing to master. When used properly, you can get great things and enormous productivity. When misunderstood, a whole host of things appear to go wrong. Getting into all of the motivations of an employee or developer would take a book, one that I’m not ready to write yet! But, I wanted to focus on just one, money. And, in that motivation, only three types of the many ways and mixes... (more…)

I’m a huge fan of Alfred - but I had to upgrade to get the pro version to get workflows. Because I use Slack a lot, I’ve been trying to set up status automation and workflows. When using my phone, I have an automated system that sets my status. You can find that here. But, what about using Alfred for some automation? (more…)

The other day I was at a coffee shop and I looked around at all the Mac’s open. It used to be that you’d see people writing manuscripts at coffee houses. Surprisingly, this place held a lot of programmers. I suddenly thought of something interesting: (more…)

Over the course of many years, I’ve heard many variations of the same question “How do I learn programming?” Normally, I’m caught off-guard. I don’t know the answer. Things are constantly changing, and what was around “back then” may not be around now. Plus, I don’t exactly remember all of the steps I took to learn programming. Finally, the way I learned programming doesn’t make sense these days. Technology is much different - you wouldn’t... (more…)

Interactive coding challenges during an interview are common place these days. The idea is that you’ll get an idea of the type and quality of work a candidate will produce by watching them code during an interview. (more…)

As a manager, I spend a lot of time delegating. I delegate small tasks so that I can spend more time adding value to the process and project. The value I bring is my ability to see the larger picture, use my experience as a guide, things like that. If I’m doing too many little things, I can’t do what I’m good at. (more…)

In an earlier post titled Use $this->fail() with Mockery::on(), I explained the challenges of debugging a failing test with the closure passed to Mockery::on(). Instead of returning false, I opted to use $this->fail() - which seemed like a good idea at the time. After all, I was doing my test, then failing with a useful bit of information. (Previous to this, it would just say that you don’t have a matching handler for this assertion,... (more…)

I experiment a lot with thoughts and process. I used to be scared of implementing something new because I felt like I was now married to that. Or, if it becomes habit, maybe I won’t want to stop it, even if it’s annoying (how irrational does that sound? But if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll see that happen a lot. If you ever hear “that’s just how we do it” then you’re experiencing it.) (more…)

You may know that you can host a static site on GitHub pages - but what if you want to have a www redirect and also SSL? This isn’t that hard until you get to the www redirect. That would require a subdomain and a second SSL cert, which they don’t provide. (more…)

Measurement is important. Metrics, while not sexy, are concrete to a good business strategy. When you bring a problem to your superiors, they’re going to want to know what is your measurement, what metrics did you use to determine this is a problem. With tasks I’ve given developers, I’ve always said “show me the metrics that your fix is better” versus just looking at the code. (more…)