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…
Category: Freelancing
Articles about the world of Freelance development and being self employed
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
Setting Up a Matrix Server on Ubuntu 20.04 – Part 2
In part 1 of this tutorial, I dived into my reasons for setting up a Matrix Synapse homeserver, and how to set up the basics of the server and it’s required software. In part 2, I’m going to register myself an admin account, log into the server using the online chat client, to verify it’s…
Setting Up a Matrix Server on Ubuntu 20.04 – Part 1
For about the past six months or so, I’ve been interested in the open, decentralized communications standard called Matrix. In May of this year, it was announced on TechCrunch that Automattic had invested $4.6 million into the company behind the Matrix standard. The company in question, New Vector (now rebranded as Element) also develop an…
ASUS Zenbook 15 UX533FD review – an Ubuntu friendly developer laptop
I’ve always been a fan of Dell laptops. While often a little more pricey than their counterparts, their laptops are usually well built, typically run Ubuntu without any hassles, and Dell have great after sales service. My last two laptops where Dell. I’d been eyeing the Dell XPS 15 for about a year, and I…