Category: writing.

I’ve been thinking about starting a newsletter.

Over the weekend, I helped my wife get her new website set up for her wellness coaching business. She is graduating with her Associate of Science in Integrative Health next month, and the group events she’s been running have been missing an online presence that she can direct people to...

A few years back, I picked up an AlphaSmart 3000 to try and do some writing without the distraction of an entire computer.

About 20 months ago, I decided to give the 100 Days to Offload challenge a try, and after… oh… about 30% of the way through, I fizzled out.

I’ve done some writing before on sustainability as it pertains to technology, and some of my efforts to keep my own tech (and some salvaged tech) alive and useful for as long as possible. The amount of e-waste we generate is staggering, and as technology becomes obsolete, the throwing-away of...

You know what I like? Arbitrary challenges.

I’ve been experimenting with offline-first technology lately. Typewriters, cassette decks, Game Boys… I like single-purpose tools that can’t distract, divert, or otherwise take my attention away from what I am doing – seriously, why the hell does a fridge need an internet connection?

There’s been a lot of buzz lately about GitHub Copilot mostly as it pertains to code quality and copyright law. For the most part, I appreciate Copilot’s suggestions, but just like with Stack Overflow before it, I know better than to blindly accept code without reviewing it. That said, it’s...

Always write as if your reader is lazy, stupid, and mean… My 9th grade English teacher gave me that piece of advice nearly twenty years ago, and it has shaped the way I’ve thought about writing ever since.

Prioritizing documentation can be a struggle at any organization but, in my personal experience, a well-crafted documentation strategy can make that struggle seem far less real. Included below is a template I have personally used to propose and promote good documentation standards in the past. While it is far from...

Raise your hand if you’ve ever read a README file. Now, keep that hand raised if you’ve ever written a README file. I’m going to take a shot in the dark and assume that your hand is still raised; at least, it’s raised in spirit, since you probably refuse to...

As developers, we like to think of source code as a recipe. All the steps are written out, so understanding code is as simple as reading those steps. But that’s not the way it really works, is it? Programming is an art form, and programmers each have their own unique...

Last week, I had an interesting chat with a peer about the difficulty of finding a balance between using established standards and building proprietary solutions within development projects. Personally, I’m an advocate for utilizing established third-party solutions whenever possible as a way to reduce new developer onboarding time and increase...

For the better part of the last decade, being a software developer has been more than just my chosen career path. It’s been my identity. Honestly, if you had asked me before today what I do for a living (or what my favorite hobby is, or what I want to...