An exercise I enjoyed while working in a previous role was developing an operator’s manual for myself. Essentially, it’s a document my colleagues and friends can refer to in order to better learn what my values are, and under what conditions I best work. I’m posting it here in case it helps people better understand […]
I’m a big fan of giving and receiving feedback. Not just at work, but for all aspects of life. There’s nothing more thoughtful than letting somebody know they are doing a kick-ass job, or that you noticed a trend they may not be aware of that might help them improve. If you frame it right, […]
I’m excited to announce that I’ve recently taken on a new job working with The Engineered Innovation Group as a Software Architect! This role enables me to continue to work on several goals for myself, and I’m excited about new opportunities for learning and growth. Similar to my other past jobs, it is 100% remote […]
It’s a common experience as a developer for a client or colleague to (politely) ask me or one of my teams to just “do” something. As natural problem solvers and wanting to make people happy, our first reaction is often to say “yes” and we either agree to do it in the future, or immediately […]
As I enter month five (!) of searching for a job, I thought I’d reflect on the current job market and the experiences I’ve had while looking for a job. This has been the first time I’ve been unemployed. I’ve worked pretty much since I was 16 (though not always full-time), and I’ve been fortunate […]
A common theme I’ve noticed during my time in engineering leadership is that many engineers dislike estimating their work. Some dislike it so much that it causes them actual stress and anxiety. Though my personal philosophy is that nearly all work should include an estimate, I don’t think this should be a scary or stressful […]
I’m leaving this blog post as a note to myself or to anyone else who stumbles upon this issue in the future. I was recently working on a project and was having issues with my virtual environment not installing dependencies correctly. The root cause was I was using Python 3.12, and should have been on […]
Though I’m sure this post will interest few people, I wanted to document some thoughts on what brought me to close my Facebook account in 2020 and Twitter account in 2022. I’d been using social media since the dawn of Web 2.0, and I’ve noticed an evolution of the platforms that don’t align to the […]
I’ve been leading engineering teams for over 6 years, ranging from smaller web development groups to overseeing multiple teams of engineers. My leadership style has been shaped through the experiences, good or bad, that I’ve had during this time. I’ve also learned a number of important lessons from the following books. If you’re looking to […]
Frequently when I meet with candidates during interviews, I’m asked what it’s like to be an engineer at 10up and what aspects of the job I’ve enjoyed most over the past 6+ years. I usually go into the story of my own personal experience of how I got to 10up and the things I’ve found […]
This presentation was originally presented in Portland, Oregon at WPCampus in 2019. It’s an in-depth overview of a project I worked on for Maine Today Media to transform the publication process for publishing print newspapers to be a web-first process, with data flowing from a central CMS system to InDesign.
The WordPress options database table (wp_options) is where the CMS stores critical information about each website. Since every plugin and theme can easily write data to the table and it’s used on every page load, this table can easily become the source of performance issues on a website if used incorrectly. This presentation goes over […]
Code splitting involves splitting code into various bundles or components. These files can then be loaded in parallel which can help with performance preventing needing to load huge files such as with your Javascript code. Instead of a single ‘frontend.js’ file, we get multiple small ‘chunks’ of smaller files, which can then be lazy loaded […]
