Category: Experiences
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Using a MacBook As a Long-time Ubuntu User – The Week of Mac
This post summarizes my (almost) week of using a Mac, as a long-time Ubuntu user. You can read why I tried this experiment here. Thursday – Day 1 The first annoyance started when I connected the MacBook up to the USB type-C hub I had purchased. While the hub did its job well (more on…
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Using a MacBook as a Long-time Ubuntu User – Preparation
If you read my last post, after 30 years of using computers, I bought my first Apple laptop. I’ve long been opposed to using Apple products for various reasons. However, the combination of the new Apple silicon and a requirement for access to an Apple computer for my work means that I now own an…
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Apple Silicon MacBook Air – Unboxing and Initial Thoughts
If you’ve spent any time reading this blog, you will know that my personal operating system of choice is Ubuntu. I’ve used Ubuntu since 2006, first as a local development server (a physical box hooked up my local network), and then switched to using it as my daily driver in 2008. I had short stint…
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Async Conf – An Asynchronous Online Conference
Ever since the world of tech conferences went to shit last year, I’ve not attended any virtual ones. They don’t appeal to me at all. The main reason is that when I attend conferences, it’s to meet up with my fellow attendees, greet old friends, meet new ones, and discuss all manner of topics. Attending…
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WordPress Developer Educator at Delicious Brains
This week I started my new journey as the WordPress Developer Educator at Delicious Brains. I could not be more enthusiastic about where this path will take me. Why Delicious Brains? Delicious Brains is a WordPress focused company that not only I admire but they have a solid standing in the WordPress community. They build, in…
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4 Years at Castos – and Why It Was Time to Leave.
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…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…