24 minute read Published:
Five months and 200 hours later, I’m standing tall, arms-folded, my first-ever training course live on the video wall behind me. How’d I get here?
I won’t kid you; the road to course creation is riddled with potholes, roadblocks, and sketchy checkpoints. It was hard. But the solution to each obstacle taught me new skills and valuable life lessons. I think it’s time to document those lessons.
4 minute read Published:
You've got a WordPress site you want to migrate to the Hugo static site generator. Now there's a fun course that will help you do it, safely and efficiently. What should you expect from the course?
10 minute read Modified:
The intriguing true story of one programmer's battle with Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, and the multipronged attack strategy which led him to a victorious recovery.
Night is falling as the old cowboy coder pauses his story to stoke the flickering campfire. You lean in slightly, eager to hear more.
A deliberate man, he takes a draw from his tin mug and then exhales contentedly, gazing into the fire. Deliberate? — Maybe he just values a good dramatic pause, you decide.
“Trouble was,” he continues, “click-clacking the day away was hard on the old wrists. Before long, I found myself square on the littered trail to neuropathy. A wise old country doc told me I had…” He pauses briefly, then pronounces each word like a hiker carefully negotiating rocky terrain, “carpal tunnel syndrome.”
You can’t help but gasp.
23 minute read Modified:
You’re a programmer, software craftsman, full-stack developer, software engineer. But regardless of the titles dangling from your Twitter bio, if you want to greatly improve the quality of your code and indeed the quality of your life, there’s one more title you should consider tacking on there: “Runner”…
2 minute read Published:
The only markdown you really need to know.
Markdown is a great way to format text inline, without getting in your way. i.e. it’s not ugly and cumbersome like HTML tags, and your hands don’t have to leave the keyboard to access formatting toolbars like they might in a traditional text editor. Personally, markdown helps keep me “in the zone” when I’m writing. That’s why this site uses markdown for nearly all its formatting needs.
You can learn markdown in about 5 minutes. Here’s a cheatsheet to get you started!
5 minute read Published:
Code flows effortlessly from your nimble fingers, like fine cloth from a loom. Your face is serene, focused, content. Suddenly, a wrinkle appears in your brow, breaking that pleasant mask of serenity. The frown deepens. “That can’t be right…” What happened? A bug! A hairy bug lurks fiendishly somewhere in that elegant tapestry of code love. How did the bug slip past you? You were so careful! A frustrated hour passes, then two. You comb through each strand of code, retrace your steps through the intricate lattice of if, when, and for…
We sink so much time into the deep pit that is debugging. Yet for all the time we spend on it, there is surprisingly little literature written on the subject. A notable exception is Debugging: The 9 Indispensable Rules for Finding Even the Most Elusive Software and Hardware Problems, by David J Agans.
5 minute read Published:
"Minimum Viable Product, ship it, incrementally add value! Yes, we know we shouldn't shoot for perfection - The "perfect is the enemy of the good." That said, nobody wants junk either. How do you know when a feature is "good enough"? That's where the QUPER model comes in.
4 minute read Published:
Spanish for the Inner Gringo helps intermediate to fluent Spanish speakers correct the mistakes they didn't know they were making.
I recently launched a new learning channel, Spanish for the Inner Gringo! It aims to help you polish up (squeak) your Spanish accent and grammar so that you sound more like a native, and less like a Hawaiian-shirt-wearing, camera-laden tourist.
The videos are short (only two-minutes!) and I will be releasing one video every few weeks. The AV is sub-par, so you’re bound to get some laughs too. Subscribe to the channel and sign up for updates so you won’t miss a single video.
5 minute read Published:
With our attention increasingly fragmented, and our work environments increasingly shallow, Cal Newport's book Deep Work helps us fight back by relearning and recommitting to focus. Here are a few tips I picked up.
Deep work – it’s where the right stuff gets done. And it just happens to be the most enjoyable state of mind for a knowledge worker – that illusive state of flow. In his book, Deep Work, Cal Newport does a fantastic job laying out the What, Why’s and How’s of “deep work”.
“I’ll live the focused life, because it’s the best kind there is.”
7 minute read Published:
8 minute read Published: