I’ve had a lot of people come to me for various mentoring opportunities. They’ll ask for help, follow up once or twice, and then just disappear. I’m left wondering: Did I make a measurable impact on their lives? (more…)

I’ve read the articles and studies about workers creating their own work spaces and I think it’s a great idea. (In fact, the company should too - it increases efficiency by 32%!) But, I never really realized how important it was until recently. (more…)

Oh, PHP - your love affair with arrays is like no other language. You can always tell if someone learned PHP first before all other programming languages. They think, design, and talk in arrays. Have a list? Make it an array. Have a heap? You mean array, right? Collection object? Naw, I’ve got an array right here. (more…)

I created this Udemy course a while ago - but unfortunately they said it was too short and the audio was too poor. In order to post the course, I’d need to add another 10 minutes of fluff and get a better microphone. I decided just to share with you. (more…)

So a couple years ago, I made a commitment to blog once a week for the foreseeable future. I posted a new entry every Tuesday. I kept to this pretty good. I may have missed two or three Tuesdays over the course of many years. I am proud of my goal, I did what I started out to do. (more…)

I actually very much enjoy spreading “the word” on PHP. I go to a lot of conferences, and present a lot. One of the most interesting concepts I’ve developed lately, however, is not a presentation but more of a group coding session. This is how it goes… (more…)

The other day, I was presenting some of my hard work to a group of stakeholders in a meeting at work. I went through the screens, showing all of the fruits of my months of labor. (more…)

I know it should be pretty common sense to RTFM - but sometimes you miss things. (more…)

I’ve been thinking about this idea for a while… (more…)

One of the newer programmers on my team asked me the other day why I hired him. I said “I saw you had a natural talent, and have potential.” We both kind of laughed because we knew his skill level at the time was very low. He was not that experienced. But, he had more questions about how I can detect talent and potential versus just someone who has really polished looking code. (more…)