This year marks my 4th working at Castos on our podcast hosting, analytics, productions platform and Seriously Simple Podcasting, our podcasting plugin for WordPress. Today also happens to be the last. Looking back Craig Hewitt, founder, and CEO of Castos, first contacted me on December 27, 2016. He let me know he’d recently purchased the… Continue reading 4 Years at Castos – and Why It Was Time to Leave.
Migrating My Cloud Virtual Servers to SpinupWP
I’ve never been a fan of managed WordPress hosting. Don’t get me wrong; I appreciate what managed WordPress hosts do, and they are definitely doing amazing work, but it’s just not for me. As a developer and server admin hobbyist, I prefer to own my own VPS (virtual private servers). I started using Rackspace Cloud… Continue reading Migrating My Cloud Virtual Servers to SpinupWP
How Taking the 16 Personalities Test Helped Me Understand Myself Better
For the past three years, I have been having some serious thoughts about my future as a software developer. Since I turned 40 in 2017, I’ve been wondering if the path I was on was the right one for me. This led to a lot of frustration in my work, especially when it came to… Continue reading How Taking the 16 Personalities Test Helped Me Understand Myself Better
My freeCodeCamp Article on PHP Error Reporting
Earlier this year I shared my professional goals for 2021. One of those goals was that I wanted to seek out more writing opportunities for other online publications. While the crux of that goal was to get paid to write more, sometimes an opportunity comes along that is worth more than money. Sometime in 2019,… Continue reading My freeCodeCamp Article on PHP Error Reporting
Why I (still) love PHPMyAdmin
Sometime in 2019, I was sitting at a conference, when we could still do such things, listening to the first speaker of the day, while getting some Castos support work wrapped up. Someone behind me tapped me on the shoulder, pointed, and laughed saying “You should be using the command line!” It took me a… Continue reading Why I (still) love PHPMyAdmin
Zero-configuration debugging PHP with Xdebug in PHPStorm on Ubuntu
As with many of my blog posts, this one also started with a Tweet I’ve been using Xdebug on Ubuntu in PHPStorm for going on 4 years now, and as I’ve been actively blogging about my development set up, I thought for sure I’d written about this. Turns out I had not, and so here… Continue reading Zero-configuration debugging PHP with Xdebug in PHPStorm on Ubuntu
Kicking 2021 into High Gear with an Electronic Standing Desk
I’ve been interested in using a standing desk for about 3 years now. Soon after I moved into my own office space, one of the first things I did was purchase a decent ergonomic chair, and then a standing desk. Not wanting to buy an expensive adjustable desk I wasn’t sure I would actually fully… Continue reading Kicking 2021 into High Gear with an Electronic Standing Desk
Professional Goals for 2021
Yesterday I posted my personal goals for 2021. During the course of drafting that post, I realised I had some goals that were very specifically relevant to my career as a software developer, and therefore my ability to earn income, and some that were not. Those that were specific to my career, and either directly… Continue reading Professional Goals for 2021
Personal Goals for 2021
I’ve never really been the type of person who writes “year in review” posts. Mostly this is because I don’t have any ventures that would be interesting to report yearly results on. What I have done in the past was to set some personal goals for the coming year, which I managed to do for… Continue reading Personal Goals for 2021
Disable the Touch pad on an Ubuntu Laptop When an External Mouse Is Connected.
Featured image by John Petalcurin from Pexels One of my pet peeves when working on a laptop is the position of the touch pad, relevant to my right hand position. Probably due to my large hands, and the way I rest my palms when typing, the part of my palm that’s at the bottom of… Continue reading Disable the Touch pad on an Ubuntu Laptop When an External Mouse Is Connected.