I am a firm believer that if you don’t love your job, you should strive to change that by either finding one you love or making one you love. I am also a firm believer in loving where you live, who you associate with, what you do with your spare time, and every other aspect…
It is a common practice in all realms of business to think of your competitors as enemies. They are, after all, the ones stealing your customers and revenue. Right? While there is certainly nuggets of truth in this, I firmly believe that viewing competitors as enemies and being frustrated with how they “take your customers” is one…
As developers, we should always strive to be become better at our craft, no matter whether you started yesterday or ten years ago. With the rapid growth and expansion of programming languages, APIs, tools, and other items typically available to a developer’s arsenal, there is always an opportunity to learn something new and grow as…
A few days ago I posted my 2014 in review post that detailed revenue and expenses for 2014. In short, it detailed some pretty darn good numbers and showed a greater than 2x growth from 2013. One could easily look at those numbers and think, “damn, he’s got it good”, and to be frank, yes,…
I don’t often write personal posts here, but tonight I would like to do just that. I am blessed to have had several really close friends in my life time. One I have known since I was 8; we met while attending the same dance class, and one I met while in college; we were…
As developers, we get better over time. Each year we look back on what we built the previous year and we see ways that we could improve on it. We notice ways that we could have made a process more performant, or a UI more streamlined. Since we spent the last year honing our development…
About a month ago a developer submitted a pull request to one of my plugins. At first glance the proposed changes looked fine, meaning that the code was clean, formatted nicely, and made sense. After reviewing and thinking about it for a few minutes, however, I realized that I didn’t love the way the proposed change…
I am a workaholic. It is a fact I have known for several years and also one I am trying to change. As I have worked to build a successful business over the last few years for my family, myself, and for others, I have often found myself working countless hours, often late into or…
There are a lot of ways that you can look at people and a lot of characteristics that you can choose to expect people to have. One of those characteristics that I choose to believe in is the inherent good of people. Obviously there are evil people in this world and people that are conniving…
On July 2nd, 2010, Wim Mostmans, an item reviewer for Code Canyon approved my very first plugin for sale. It was called “WordPress Font Uploader” and it allowed site admins to upload font files to their site and apply them to any HTML element on the site by using standard CSS selectors. Not only was…
I have written a lot of plugins. Some I love, others I’m indifferent towards, and others I hate. The plugins I’ve written have been created for a lot of different reasons. Some are for examples to be used in tutorials, others are for custom client work, some are built out of necessity, and others are…
A few minutes ago I finished shoveling all of the snow off of my driveway left there by the snow storm that blew through central Kansas last night. It wasn’t a lot of snow, just a few inches, but hand shoveling it all off of a two car driveway with a 10″ shovel is hard…
On occasion I see comments, usually in plugin reviews, that go something like this: “I tried using the plugin but it was riddled with bugs so I had to use something else”. It occurred to me the other day just why I dislike this kind of statement so much. First, and most obviously, hearing someone…
Generally speaking, we are all really good at saying “this sucks”, “that needs work”, “this is old and outdated”, but, collectively speaking, we are not very good at actually providing meaningful criticism. Everyone that works in software development, design, and implementation has personal opinions about what they love and don’t love about the software they…
Support is hard, really hard, and it’s not something that most people are naturally good at. In fact, I’d say a very, very small minority are even remotely good at it without a lot of practice. That number might even be zero. Being able to provide high quality tech support AND also being able to…
