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Engineering Leadership Technology

Feedback: The Gift that Keeps on Giving

I’m a big fan of giving and receiving feedback. Not just at work, but for all aspects of life. There’s nothing more thoughtful than letting somebody know they are doing a kick-ass job, or that you noticed a trend they may not be aware of that might help them improve. If you frame it right, […]

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Engineering Leadership Technology

A Slight Change in Focus

I’m excited to announce that I’ve recently taken on a new job working with The Engineered Innovation Group as a Software Architect! This role enables me to continue to work on several goals for myself, and I’m excited about new opportunities for learning and growth. Similar to my other past jobs, it is 100% remote […]

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Engineering Leadership Technology

Going Beyond Order-Taking: Tactfully Pushing Back

It’s a common experience as a developer for a client or colleague to (politely) ask me or one of my teams to just “do” something. As natural problem solvers and wanting to make people happy, our first reaction is often to say “yes” and we either agree to do it in the future, or immediately […]

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Engineering Leadership Technology

Reflections on Unemployment

As I enter month five (!) of searching for a job, I thought I’d reflect on the current job market and the experiences I’ve had while looking for a job. This has been the first time I’ve been unemployed. I’ve worked pretty much since I was 16 (though not always full-time), and I’ve been fortunate […]

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Engineering Leadership Technology

Engineering Estimates Shouldn’t Be Scary

A common theme I’ve noticed during my time in engineering leadership is that many engineers dislike estimating their work. Some dislike it so much that it causes them actual stress and anxiety. Though my personal philosophy is that nearly all work should include an estimate, I don’t think this should be a scary or stressful […]

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Technology

Specifying Python Version in venv

I’m leaving this blog post as a note to myself or to anyone else who stumbles upon this issue in the future. I was recently working on a project and was having issues with my virtual environment not installing dependencies correctly. The root cause was I was using Python 3.12, and should have been on […]

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Engineering Leadership Technology

Revisiting My Relationship With Social Media

Though I’m sure this post will interest few people, I wanted to document some thoughts on what brought me to close my Facebook account in 2020 and Twitter account in 2022. I’d been using social media since the dawn of Web 2.0, and I’ve noticed an evolution of the platforms that don’t align to the […]

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Engineering Leadership Technology

Recommended Books for Engineering Leadership

I’ve been leading engineering teams for over 6 years, ranging from smaller web development groups to overseeing multiple teams of engineers. My leadership style has been shaped through the experiences, good or bad, that I’ve had during this time. I’ve also learned a number of important lessons from the following books. If you’re looking to […]

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Engineering Leadership Technology

What it’s Like to be an Engineer at 10up

Frequently when I meet with candidates during interviews, I’m asked what it’s like to be an engineer at 10up and what aspects of the job I’ve enjoyed most over the past 6+ years. I usually go into the story of my own personal experience of how I got to 10up and the things I’ve found […]

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Technology

Presentation: From Web to Print: Custom Publishing Workflows

This presentation was originally presented in Portland, Oregon at WPCampus in 2019. It’s an in-depth overview of a project I worked on for Maine Today Media to transform the publication process for publishing print newspapers to be a web-first process, with data flowing from a central CMS system to InDesign.

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Technology

Presentation: Taming the WordPress Options Table

The WordPress options database table (wp_options) is where the CMS stores critical information about each website. Since every plugin and theme can easily write data to the table and it’s used on every page load, this table can easily become the source of performance issues on a website if used incorrectly. This presentation goes over […]

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Technology

Frontend Code Splitting Behind CDN Caching

Code splitting involves splitting code into various bundles or components. These files can then be loaded in parallel which can help with performance preventing needing to load huge files such as with your Javascript code. Instead of a single ‘frontend.js’ file, we get multiple small ‘chunks’ of smaller files, which can then be lazy loaded […]