All entries of my technical and business blog

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.

A question I’m asked often is “how do I pay back my mentor?” (If you’ve read other entries, you know I’m a big fan of mentoring.) Well, mentors have various reasons for doing their work, so not one solution fits all. But, I can tell you one thing that they’ll appreciate no matter what.

Currently, there are two pretty common packages for interacting with your database: Eloquent and Doctrine. Eloquent is part of Laravel and Doctrine, while used often on its own, is usually referenced with Symfony. If you’ve come to read this article, you’re probably versed in Doctrine and wondering why you can’t just - or shouldn’t just - use it with your new Laravel project.