A fusion of development and business
A few years ago, I had an opportunity to serve on a jury. Twelve ordinary citizens were called to hear a case, where we heard from five supremely confident but deeply conflicting witnesses. Our job was to sort out who was credible, what they were credible about, and make a finding of fact out of the witness mess. The defendant did not testify, which made things more challenging – the only evidence we had to… continue reading.
I’m a big believer in the notion that you can’t really critique something until you’ve tried it. With that in mind, I spent some time over the holiday break with AI, working on a couple projects. Here are the results of my experience and my thoughts on AI as a tool for developers. The Setup I had two tasks in mind: first, I wanted to have AI help me write some scripts that would build… continue reading.
Last week, Zend by Perforce wrote a blog post about when and how to migrate from a monolithic application to a microservices architecture. For those that haven’t read the post, the TL;DR is that as your application grows, it makes sense to migrate to microservices in order to streamline development. I find this advice to be dangerous, for a number of reasons. Microservices as architecture Microservices were never meant as a purely architectural pattern; rather,… continue reading.
Recently I had an opportunity to interview with a company that I really respected. Normally I wouldn’t consider taking any kind of role or gig (as I run a small business), but the problem space was particularly interesting and the company seemed progressive and unique. But then came the coding test. And I bombed. Hard. It might surprise people that an engineer of my caliber would “fail” a coding test. After all, I have extensive… continue reading.
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.