A fusion of development and business
Sometimes in life it’s important to perform a “reset” and just take a minute to examine where you are and where you want to go. I’m about to embark on a month-long retreat to bolster my mental health and consider what my next steps are as a business owner and person. This retreat will empower me to make better choices, and have direction in my life. It’s important to know where you want to go,… continue reading.
These remarks reflect my personal position alone. They do not reflect the position of AspirePress or anyone else. Today, I am heartbroken. I feel many different emotions. Anger. Fear. Sadness. But most of all, its a feeling of profound loss that breaks my heart. Matt reached out to me on Monday night. I was surprised to hear from him. While I will leave what he said private, I will share the gist of what I… continue reading.
With as much as has been written about turmoil in the WordPress community, I wanted to take a minute to highlight a contributor in the open source space that truly embodies the open source ethos and a community-driven spirit. Many people who know me know that I have problems with the design of Laravel and I object to things like Active Record and the heavy use of statics and globals. And I know I am… continue reading.
There is a lot of upheaval in the WordPress community right now. There is talk of forks, and community repositories for packages, and lots of different ways that the community can establish independence from the status quo. But who really owns WordPress? I’m not talking about the licensing here – I’m talking about ownership in the sense of who owns the copyright? Who has authority over the code? For every open source project there are… continue reading.
As a busy business owner and software consultant who has numerous projects on tap at any given time, I’m always working hard to stay on task and focus on what needs doing, at the time it needs to be done. Over the years I have developed a routine that I use to map out exactly what my days will look like, complete with checklists, to-do items, calendars and time blocks. I wanted to share some… continue reading.
Anyone who has read my work knows that I’m a huge fan of automated testing. I’ve preached automated testing ever since Chris Hartjes (Grumpy Programmer) wrote about it years ago. He converted me, and I have been a dutiful, loyal apostle of the “test everything” movement for years. Similarly, I’ve long been a faithful proponent of code review to catch bugs and improve development processes. But what happens when automated testing and code review fall… continue reading.
Web developers have long sought ways to make their projects easier to run, maintain and work with. From console apps like Composer and Artisan to custom implementations using things like Symfony Console, there’s a myriad of development tools aimed at running commonly needed commands like resetting a database or seeding information. All of these tools, however, depend on a common set of things: the presence of PHP on the system OR access to a system… continue reading.
I’m not ashamed to admit the fact that I struggle with my mental health. Mental health issues are common among technology professionals. Perhaps this is even more common than in the general population, though I do not have any statistics to back this up. What I can say for certain, though, is that the technology world is not conducive to great mental health: we put incredible pressure on developers to deliver the impossible in unrealistic… continue reading.
Everybody loves to make software that is glamorous, beautiful, and amazing. But very few people like doing the grunt work that it takes to get there. Work like devops, deployment, CI/CD pipeline management, project management, and more is required for every project to succeed. Being able to dive deep into the bowels of a framework or package, uncover why the pipeline is failing every so often, or determining the best way to deploy an application… continue reading.
I started writing PHP in 2003 when I needed to build an online game. While I had intended to use Excel formulas for the game, one of the players didn’t have Excel; this prompted me to learn PHP. Over the course of twenty years, I have learned many things. This is part one of the things that I have learned. 1. Programming is part skill, part art It’s easy to think that code is simply… continue reading.