All entries of my technical and business blog

A colleague once said to me that I’m very lucky I haven’t had to fire as many people as he had. I definitely agree with the fact that my management tenure has not involved many terminations, but I don’t consider myself lucky. I put in work, just like you’re doing, to understand how to manage different types of developers.

When you manage a team, the conversations you have change a lot. No longer are you justifying your own estimates or explaining your coding decisions. Now, you’re responsible for many different estimates, many different decisions, and many different personalities.

Welcome to the New Dev Manager Crash Course! Whether this is your first time managing a group of developers, or you’ve run the gamut a few times, I’m happy you’re here. My goal is to give you some useful tips and direction from my experience managing multiple development teams. I learned a lot of this the hard way, but hopefully you won’t have to!

You’ve been there. The Zoom meeting is over and then everyone looks awkward at the bottom corner of the screen as they desperately try to leave. Nikki Glaser will show you what I’m talking about if you don’t know. Now, if you’re using Alfred (like you should be on Mac), you can easily leave the meeting.

When you’re working on a project with a tight timeline, it can seem really attractive to buy pre-made software to save time. But, there are a number of problems and pitfalls to be aware of before you do this.

It can be hard to take a full-height screenshot of a website. Luckily, Chrome gives us a tool to do this - no more stitching images together. Let’s see how…

Please stop using assertDatabaseHas in Laravel. There are many reasons why this is bad, and there are better options available. Let’s find out why.

Terms like web developer, web programmer, webapp developer, and software engineer get thrown around a lot. But, what’s the difference?

A big challenge when setting up a new Zabbix installation is “how do I test my media+action+notification+trigger” setup? I’ve come up with a pretty easy way to do this that doesn’t require butchering your server or messing with it’s historical data.

For the most part, I’ve containerized all of my dependencies inside of my Laravel projects. But, one thing was missing: npm.