For a long time I’ve used new startup ideas as catalysts to learn
Learning to Say No
The longer I work as a developer the trickier it is to know where to spend your time and on what. It becomes extra difficult when you throw a social life and family in the mix. I’m already incredibly anal about using time tracking, Trello, and coding techniques to stay on track and focused but how do you know that you’re spending your time on the right things? And furthermore, how do you tell people that you don’t want to work on their project without ruining a relationship?
Local PHP Debugging with PHPStorm 7.0 and PHP 5.4
In b4, “Did I just take a time machine to 2005”? PHP is still a viable language. Maybe you hate PHP and I’m fine with that but there may come a day when that Magento site you built 8 years ago goes down or the WordPress blog you set for your mom (#GreatestChildEver) needs a little bit of lovin’.
Switching to Octopress
A while back I realized something about my blog. I was spending more time fixing issues with Wordpress than I was writing blog posts. Either the database server was getting hammered, or I was getting lock out notifications because someone was scraping my page or trying out exploits on my comments/contact form.
Earlier findings and research
So far the testing has been positive. Through customer feedback I’ve identified a few different market segments and products that can work. Technological risks seem low but no clear winning between B2C or B2B has emerged. The cut off for the course is tomorrow and, while the customer feedback is driving me to change the app, it’s too close to the deadline for me to make feature changes. Most of the customers I’ve tested are also in a skinny demographic. I wish I had access to more people in the baby boomer demo. If I had a few more days I’d buy a bunch of $5 Starbucks cards and creep on people at the local caffination station.