Focus. If I could offer you only one tip for the future, focus would be it. In the next 20 years, we are going to face an extreme shortage of people who are able to focus single-mindedly on what they are doing. Children growing up these days face an onslaught of distractions thanks to news [...]

I’ve worked on a few different types of applications at this point in my career and one sure sign of poor programming I’ve noticed is the inability to program 4th dimensionally. You notice this when the application may be working but implementing features begins to take longer and longer. The performance starts to become an [...]

When starting a new path, it is often difficult to know which way to go. Some good advice I once received is that when people are starting something new, they need to be told exactly what and how to do it. It is only once they have a bit of experience that you can remove [...]

If you are a spiritual person, you may sometimes wonder how programming connects to the bigger picture. Working in front of a computer day after day can seem like an activity most removed from the world, nature and God. Here are some things to do to feel more connected: Awareness of Thought You are a [...]

In programming people sometimes feel they have to sacrifice quality in order to get a product out the door on time. Never do this. You are hurting the customer, the company and yourself if you do. This American Life had a very interesting program on the New United Motor Manufacturing Inc (NUMMI) plant in Freemont, [...]

When I first started using Zend Framework, I was so frustrated when trying to figure out how to get information from the database. I fought against the framework for the longest time. Instead of working with it, I would write the SQL and then simply query the database to get the data back as an [...]

“I don’t want to be a code monkey.”  I’ve heard a few friends say this who are involved in programming.  I don’t get it. Wikipedia says that a code monkey is someone “who writes computer code for a living.”  That’s pretty broad.  I assume a code monkey refers to someone who mindlessly takes orders.  In [...]