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Having many meetings, one after another, is not only tiring, it’s a recipe for memory disaster. You don’t have enough time between meetings to finish notes, gather your thoughts or even use the bathroom. Because of this, I’ve started doing something different:

When you’re creating cookies on your server side application, it’s good security practice to flag the cookie as HTTP Only. This way, it instructs the browser that it should sandbox this cookie from the client side scripts. It still will send it between client and server on each subsequent request, but javascript can’t access it directly.

I started noticing a disturbing trend on one of my projects: developers were doing too much logic in the setup and data provider methods of their PHPUnit tests. However, before we could address this, a “limitation” popped up which helped them kick this habit.

Motivation is a very hard thing to master. When used properly, you can get great things and enormous productivity. When misunderstood, a whole host of things appear to go wrong. Getting into all of the motivations of an employee or developer would take a book, one that I’m not ready to write yet! But, I wanted to focus on just one, money. And, in that motivation, only three types of the many ways and mixes that people can be motivated by money.

I’m a huge fan of Alfred - but I had to upgrade to get the pro version to get workflows. Because I use Slack a lot, I’ve been trying to set up status automation and workflows. When using my phone, I have an automated system that sets my status. You can find that here. But, what about using Alfred for some automation?

The other day I was at a coffee shop and I looked around at all the Mac’s open. It used to be that you’d see people writing manuscripts at coffee houses. Surprisingly, this place held a lot of programmers. I suddenly thought of something interesting:

Over the course of many years, I’ve heard many variations of the same question “How do I learn programming?” Normally, I’m caught off-guard. I don’t know the answer. Things are constantly changing, and what was around “back then” may not be around now. Plus, I don’t exactly remember all of the steps I took to learn programming. Finally, the way I learned programming doesn’t make sense these days. Technology is much different - you wouldn’t consider dialing into a BBS or reading the manual that came from your computer, would you?

Interactive coding challenges during an interview are common place these days. The idea is that you’ll get an idea of the type and quality of work a candidate will produce by watching them code during an interview.

As a manager, I spend a lot of time delegating. I delegate small tasks so that I can spend more time adding value to the process and project. The value I bring is my ability to see the larger picture, use my experience as a guide, things like that. If I’m doing too many little things, I can’t do what I’m good at.

In an earlier post titled Use $this->fail() with Mockery::on(), I explained the challenges of debugging a failing test with the closure passed to Mockery::on(). Instead of returning false, I opted to use $this->fail() - which seemed like a good idea at the time. After all, I was doing my test, then failing with a useful bit of information. (Previous to this, it would just say that you don’t have a matching handler for this assertion, which was really confusing).