Five months and 200 hours later, I’m standing proudly in front of my first ever online course. Along the way I hit roadblocks, hurdles, and stumpers — some large, some small — but finding a solution to each problem meant learning valuable skills and lessons. With what I know now, I could produce a future course in less time. The time has come to document those lessons.

Hugo isn’t even at version 1.0 yet, and it’s already of the one of best static site generators in the world. A switch from WordPress to Hugo can save you money, improve site performance, and harden site security. For the shiny gopher-shaped cherry on top, do I dare say it? — Hugo is fun. With your current site stuck in WordPress, how do you get from point WP to point Hugo?

Yeah, I had gumption alright. The candle burned real bright in that twenty-something head of mine. It was like a nonstop choreographed cattle drive of problems and solutions, predicaments and panaceas, back and forth, to-and-fro, a border collie nipping the heels of one code quandary after another.

There was just one hitch…

To get my country choreography up on that silicone stage, I had no choice but to enlist the help of that old contraption known as the “keyboard and mouse”. Trouble was, click-clacking the day away was hard on the old wrists. Before long, I found myself square on the littered trail to Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.

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”…

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!

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.

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.

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.”

If your team uses Git and Continuous Integration, chances are good that your workflow could benefit from git greenbase. But first, strap on your VR headset and experience the perils of git pull through the eyes of our seasoned developer, Karen. Contents Karen vs the broken build Where vanilla git pull falls short git greenbase to the rescue! What about local feature branches? Installing git greenbase But what about Mac and Windows?

The year was 2016. I was a hobbyist with ideas to burn. Naturally, I needed an inexpensive hosting provider for my latest web app. Where would I start? Who would prove to be the elusive “hostess with the mostest?” This is the story of my migration to and from DigitalOcean, AWS, and Heroku – the trial and error, the pros and the pain points. You’ve seen the archetypal hero’s tale.