Given that (in the USA) COVID-19 appears to be here to stay for quite a while, I know several people who are searching for jobs during this time. It does make the interview process rough, or at least non-traditional. You can’t sit in an office surrounded by people grilling you. If the position is distant […]

There will come a time when you will need to add to your team. This can be due to a team member leaving, the workload becoming more than your team can handle, or because you want to expand what your team does. In any of those cases, you will need to start the arduous task of finding someone new to bring to your team.

About the only thing that makes me upset as a lead developer is people that do not play ball. I am completely for questioning authority, asking questions about workflows, and having ideas on making what we do work for everyone, but it really bugs me when someone doesn’t even try to work with the team.

Providing a good foundation for your application pays off in the long run by reducing technical debt, finding bugs earlier, and making it faster to add features. This month we look at how generics could make your code concise, other new features you should be using, practices to keep your Laravel application easy to upgrade, […]

In this issue: Generics in PHP, Maintainable Laravel, Starting with PHP, Project Success, security code reviews, and more

In this issue: Xdebug, Freelancing, Parsing text, MySQL Generated Columns, Gitflow, PhpStorm, and more.

Over the last nine months, I have talked about all of the things you should be doing as a technical and developer lead. There are many things that you should be doing, and I hope that so far the advice has helped. These are some of the habits and problems I have seen as developers […]

The tech industry is a relatively young industry, and in many ways, it shows. In one of my favorite books, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Steven Levy talks about the birth of the open source industry going back to the late fifties and early sixties. Many of his descriptions of programmers then are not […]

The need to onboard new hires is a significant reason why adding workers to a project does not actually increase the project’s productivity. The goal of any new hire, even ones where you aren’t trying to fill in gaps during emergencies, is to get new hires as productive as possible as quickly as possible.

There will come a time, probably once a year per team member, when you will have to assess how well a team member is working. Are they contributing overall to the team? Are they making their goals? Do they know what their goals are? Are they pulling their weight? For as long as there have been companies, there has been a need to quantify how well an individual employee is doing. “Gut feeling” is not the most accurate way to do this. There are also many ways which do not work in real-world situations.