All entries of my technical and business blog

This advice is based primarily on an in-person team. I’m sure we could make this work with a remote team, too, somehow.

A friend of mine created a bingo caller at letsplaybingo.io which I found pretty interesting. She got lots of traffic and a lot of appreciative people. This inspired me to make a simple game website to keep my skills up to date. Maybe people would love it, too! (spoiler alert: they didn’t)

So, if you know me personally, you know I’m a bit profane. I tend to keep this out of my professional work. But, I noticed that this pattern of speaking was common among a core group of my previous clients: those who have a project spiraling out of control. So, I decided to brand “Fix My Fucking Project” to their needs.

Remember when the biggest way to show off your quality as an applicant was to have a fancy resume? You’d have a heavy paper weight, fancy fonts and in some cases embossing. I decided it might be fun to duplicate that as an HTML/CSS resume.

Should I be writing more unit tests? Integration Tests? End to End tests? I can’t answer this completely, but I can give you one tip to help you decide 80% of the time.

Since PHP 7.1, visibility has been supported on PHP class constants. Here’s a quick video about how these work and why you might want to use different visibilities.

With a combination of Homebridge, a plugin, Pushover, and a Homekit compatible garage door opener, I can now receive notifications if my garage door was left open too long. Let’s dive into how…

Conventional wisdom says to scope down your initiatives and make small tasks for your team members. It’s best if each can easily work on a single task in a silo, so they can get the project done with the least overlap and delay. But, what are we losing with this methodology?

I’m not a huge fan of todo comments in code because I think they’re mainly forgotten. However, I don’t have the same opinion for PHPUnit tests. Let’s talk about why - and how to easily add them in your code.

Never one to be afraid of pointing out my flaws, I think it’s time to share what I learned from doing a few interactive code review interviews. It may still be a great idea, but it’s much more difficult than I thought.