All entries of my technical and business blog

One of the applications my team develops is used by a group that we’ve determined to be very much beginners at computer usage and internet comprehension. We attempt to make the product as intuitive as possible - while staying away from the newest trends. I don’t believe our place is to challenge their current notion of what websites do at this time. We stay a bit behind the curve because they need to use this application to solve a task. The task is already hard enough, we shouldn’t be pushing them past their comfort zones.

At work the other day, our designer created an interface that had multiple checkboxes, and then of course a check-all checkbox. The thought was that if you check the check-all box, all items become checked. When our QA person started testing the interface, I noticed that a child item unchecked let the check all box remain checked. I explained to the programmer and QA person that this was not the desired outcome. As soon as one checkbox is unchecked, the checkall should now be unchecked. In addition, if you check all children by hand, the checkall should automatically check itself.

I think it’s pretty awesome that my daily job is making something out of nothing.

I’ve given a number of talks in the last few years. Each time I go to a new place, I have to bring this giant bag of equipment and three or four versions of my presentation. All too often, conferences don’t detail enough of the specifics for their presenters. Let me tell you, presenting and traveling can be stressful. So, to help reduce stress and anxiety, there are a few things you can share with your presenters ahead of time.

I’ve had a lot of people come to me for various mentoring opportunities. They’ll ask for help, follow up once or twice, and then just disappear. I’m left wondering: Did I make a measurable impact on their lives?

I’ve read the articles and studies about workers creating their own work spaces and I think it’s a great idea. (In fact, the company should too - it increases efficiency by 32%!) But, I never really realized how important it was until recently.

Oh, PHP - your love affair with arrays is like no other language. You can always tell if someone learned PHP first before all other programming languages. They think, design, and talk in arrays. Have a list? Make it an array. Have a heap? You mean array, right? Collection object? Naw, I’ve got an array right here.

I created this Udemy course a while ago - but unfortunately they said it was too short and the audio was too poor. In order to post the course, I’d need to add another 10 minutes of fluff and get a better microphone. I decided just to share with you.

I actually very much enjoy spreading “the word” on PHP. I go to a lot of conferences, and present a lot. One of the most interesting concepts I’ve developed lately, however, is not a presentation but more of a group coding session. This is how it goes…

So a couple years ago, I made a commitment to blog once a week for the foreseeable future. I posted a new entry every Tuesday. I kept to this pretty good. I may have missed two or three Tuesdays over the course of many years. I am proud of my goal, I did what I started out to do.