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Saturday marked the start of rifle deer season here in Texas. It always seems as if the older and wiser (read: bigger) bucks can read a calendar, happen to possess one and tell the rest of their male counterparts that the hunters are coming. As a result, I get plenty of idle time in the stand. My

Setting up Pi-hole on my home network is one of the best quality-of-life improvements I've made to my browsing experience. I don't know the last time I've seen a display ad on a website except for the time my Raspberry Pi needed a hard restart after a power outag

Happy Mother’s Day to my wife, Rebecca.

It was this day in 2014 that we found out we would be parents. Just over 7 months later we would welcome our son into the world.

Thank you for being an amazing mother and a great parenting partner. I certainly could not do it without you.

A quick video showing the progress on the garden for March 2021

Here’s a little deviation from the garden. I spent most of the day today finishing up the restoration of a child-sized roll top desk. This thing has been passed through and used by four generations of my family. As you can imagine, it was a little worse for wear and due for a new finish. It took

While making the tea light centerpiece I, of course, made some mistakes. Luckily, wood can be a forgiving medium. Here’s a little video on how to fix those mistakes.

I made this tea light centerpiece for my wife on Mother’s Day 2019. This is the first project where I remembered to video the process, so enjoy! Mistakes were made.

This week I was tasked with performing a quick audit on an existing client site for WordPress 5.0 compatibility. The site had already made use of Gutenberg so we were curious just how many blocks were in use.

For those of you who don’t know, Gutenberg blocks are stored in the

When testing many facets of the OptinMonster embed code I find myself needing a clean & quick HTML page on almost a daily basis. For most tasks throwing some code into JSFiddle will do, but testing some of our more advanced targeting rules becomes onerous, i

It will come to no surprise for those who know me. I have a hard time focusing for any significant period of time. Of course, this issue does not mix well with a remote, full-time job.

Thankfully I’ve created systems to mitigate my lack of attention-keeping ability. Here they are.

I was happy in Jetbrains land. Everything was familiar. Everything fit into my workflow perfectly. For 4 years every bit of development was completed in PhpStorm. Then things started to go sour. Constant re-indexing would bring my computer to a crawl. RAM usage far exceeded that of Slack (yeah).

Even when you come back empty-handed the time has not been wasted. Hunting provides us with so much more than meat.

In the stillness of hunting you have time to stop, to liste

My team and I at OptinMonster are in the process of building a true drag & drop solution for the campaign builder. This represents the biggest improvement to the platform in over a year.

We landed on using the excellent React DnD to p

Back in November Jason Fried (CEO of Basecamp) published a treasure trove of an article detailing how they, the team, structure their work. If you haven’t read it yet stop what you’re doing and take a few minutes to do s

The Boy Scouts and many outdoorsmen/women have a code of leaving the campsite better than you found it. That means picking up trash even if you didn’t leave it. When you finish your stay the campsite should be pristine.

That guideline can easily be translated to software development. I hig

There’s an old saying, “Make hay while the sun shines”. It means you should get your work done while the conditions are favorable. No distractions. Don’t even think of dilly-dallying!

You never know when the power will go out. Or you’ll get the flu. Or your kid will get sick. Or a

So many of us (developers) suffer from an extreme form of hubris.

My programming language of choice is the “right” one.

My chosen framework is infinitely better than the one you use.

My build process runs circles around yours.

My IDE makes yours look like a child’s toy

In support of my 2017 tech trends I’ve done my best to look away from screens and create more with my hands. Cooking is one of the ultimate creative outlets. It’s conjuring something (hopefully) amazing from basic ingredients and feedi

It’s difficult.

Being a parent. A team lead. A homeowner. A husband. It’s difficult to know when to rest. There’s always something you could be doing.

And then you get that tickle at the back of your throat. Your energy dissipates. You wake up in the morning feeling as if someone in

Everyone is trying to predict the year’s biggest global tech trends. AI, self-driving cars and VR usually populate the top of the list. While those things are neat it’s tough to see the immediate effect to my life. Instead I decided to create my own list.

1. Bye-bye Facebook. Yeah, the

One of our newest OptinMonster developers has already made a big splash by introducing even more automation to our development flow. For the past two years (TWO!) this has been our usual conversation after pushing some changes:

Comments on pages by default. Not sure why that is a thing but we’re talking about 13 year old software here. It’s easy enough to turn off comments manually. Page by page. Why do work by hand when you could automate it?

Turns out it’s simple enough to turn off comments on every single page

We all face challenges in our daily lives. The difference between those who go to sleep feeling fulfilled and those who don’t is the former group makes the choice to push through the challenge. In a word: Grit.

Yeah, you were up all night with your kid who was vomiting every hour. The next

It’s 2017.

I have no clue if this year will be better than the last. What I do know is my reaction to events has the greatest impact on my experience.

Should I get happy or angry?

Should I mope or celebrate?

That is for me to decide.

I will work to differentiate

Over the last few weeks I’ve begun a push to increase our test coverage in OptinMonster with PhpSpec. Doing so will allow the team to release features with greater confidence and redu

During the design phase of the new OptinMonster SaaS we realized that there was one killer feature that could set us apart from our competition. It wasn’t more beautiful themes, a super-duper form builder or a brand new type of opt

Do you know what I hate the most about CSS? Styling form elements.

Yes, most browsers provide some sensible defaults, but clients never seem to want those in their designs. Good luck getting the form to look the same across all browsers. Some even say it’s