A friend of mine was recently complaining about the price of lawn mowers in his neighborhood. He said (emphasis mine), “Thinking I really should hire a lawn care service this year to do my lawn.  It takes me about 45 minutes every Saturday just to mow, plus buying gas, sweeping the driveway, showering afterwards… Probably […]

So, I’m doing something new this week. Instead of just offering my own thoughts and ideas, I’m taking questions from readers on the list, here, and answering those questions. You ask. I answer. Everyone benefits. This week’s question is the first one that I received from a mailing list member, and it’s a good one […]

Over the years, I’ve received a lot of questions about career goals, directions, how to become a known developer, etc. The underlying theme to all of these questions is this: What’s the secret to my success, and how can that person duplicate it? So what’s my secret? How have I been able to make a name […]

I launched a screencast on a Monday morning… February 24th, 2014. Except, I mean it launched Sunday night. But it was supposed to launch Monday morning, only “Monday morning” was 12 hours earlier in Australia when it was Sunday night, here in Texas. *sigh* Time zones are hard. 1.21 Jigga-Watts This was the first time I’ve tried to […]

Money is a taboo subject in the corporate world. Fortunately, I don’t work for a company anymore so I can tell you everything I know about money – including how I earned a higher hourly rate than than you might believe. 3 years ago when I went in to consulting and independent contracting, my long time consulting […]

If you’ve ever written a line of Ruby, you’ve been impacted by the work of Jim Weirich: developer, teacher, mentor, speaker. By all accounts, he was a great person. Was… Sadly, Jim died recently. I didn’t know Jim, personally. In fact I only recently met him in person for the first time at CodeMash 2014. […]