(Not a) Garden Update: Oct. 17, 2020
October 18, 2020Here’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…
Fixing Woodworking Mistakes
May 22, 2019While making the tea light centerpiece I, of course, made some mistakes. Luckily, wood can be a forgiving medium. Here’s a little video on…
First Woodworking Video
May 20, 2019I 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…
Counting Gutenberg Blocks
December 12, 2017This week I was tasked with performing a quick audit on an existing client site for WordPress 5.0 compatibility. The site had already made…
Simple Local Servers
December 09, 2017When testing many facets of the OptinMonster embed code I find myself needing a clean & quick HTML page on almost a daily basis. For most…
Hey, Focus!
December 01, 2017It 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…
Using remote XDebug with Visual Studio Code
November 29, 2017I was happy in Jetbrains land. Everything was familiar. Everything fit into my workflow perfectly. For 4 years every bit of development was…
The Stillness of Hunting
November 07, 2017Photo of landscape from a deer stand. A still pond on the right. Even when you come back empty-handed the time has not been wasted. Hunting…
Accessing React refs in React-DnD
November 04, 2017My team and I at OptinMonster are in the process of building a true drag & drop solution for the campaign builder. This represents the…
Shipping, Not User Testing
January 18, 2017Back in November Jason Fried (CEO of Basecamp) published a treasure trove of an article detailing how they, the team, structure their work…
Leave it better than you found it
January 13, 2017The 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…
Make hay
January 12, 2017There’s an old saying, “Make hay while the sun shines”. It means you should get your work done while the conditions are favorable. No…
Not for long
January 10, 2017So many of us (developers) suffer from an extreme form of hubris. My programming language of choice is the “right” one. My chosen framework…
Cooking is Creating
January 09, 2017In 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…
(Resisting) Rest
January 08, 2017It’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…
My tech trends for 2017
January 07, 2017Everyone is trying to predict the year’s biggest global tech trends. AI, self-driving cars and VR usually populate the top of the list…
Fix your git hooks when using Tower
January 06, 2017One of our newest OptinMonster developers has already made a big splash by introducing even more automation to our development flow. For the…
Disable comments on all WordPress pages at once
January 04, 2017Comments 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…
Grit
January 03, 2017We 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…
Hello, 2017
January 02, 2017It’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…
Using WP_Mock with PhpSpec
September 10, 2016Over 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…
Improving the support ticket submission experience
June 10, 2015During the design phase of the new OptinMonster SaaS we realized that there was one killer feature that could set us apart from our…
Finally. An easy way to style dropdowns (select elements)
May 20, 2015Do you know what I hate the most about CSS? Styling form elements. Yes, most browsers provide some sensible defaults, but clients never seem…