I’m overwhelmed, tired, and not getting anything done. I know I want to focus on foundational skills and habits to help improve my day-to-day, but there are so many different things I could work on. Do I improve my software development skills? If I need to switch jobs, I should...
In September, I stepped on the scale, and I felt like I would puke. I clocked in at 307.1 lbs, an all-time high. All year, I had been hovering around 300, which was frustrating because I was trying to lose weight. In May, I walked 6,500 steps every day, and in August, I had a...
I've taken on the challenge of resurrecting a website that's been offline for more than a decade. It had a very expansive and well-normalized database using MySQL. I've been out of the SQL game for about six years, as all my recent projects have used MongoDB. It's been fun...
Today is the 30th anniversary of Dave Winer's blog, Scripting News. I've followed Dave's writing and podcasting for my entire career and have had the privilege of many conversations with him over the years. We may not see eye to eye on everything, but most of the time I do...
I've been programming in one form or another for as long as I can remember. Since my family got its first computer when I was five, I couldn't have programmed much before that. However, I knew DOS well enough to help teachers with their computers in first and second grade, so I...
In 2018, I built a time-tracking demo in React for a job I was applying for. I had spent the years prior working with Angular (via Ionic), but many of the jobs I'd seen asked for React. Since then, it's been dormant while I moved on to other things. I still only do a...
Have you ever felt like no matter what you do, the scale just won’t budge? This might be because you're focusing on the wrong type of metric. I've previously written about the differences between lead and lag metrics and why it's important to differentiate between them when...
Many have told us that to achieve our goals, we should focus more on building effective systems rather than setting specific objectives. But this advice skips a crucial first step: setting goals is essential because it guides how we create those systems. Let's look closer at why...
The first question I had while reading the ActivityPub specification was, "How do I find the different feeds and documents defined by the spec?" One of the first things defined would be an actor object that refers to me. An actor object contains my name, avatar, and paths to...
I define a project as something I do with an outcome I want. The problem is when I keep starting projects, then one day, I realize I have created dozens of projects. Every week the list grows longer. Why do I create projects and not finish them? Because I don't know what done...