Category: Blog

  • How did you get started in tech?

    How did you get started in tech?

    Recently, I applied to speak at a local tech group, sharing my journey in tech thus far. I wanted to share what I wrote here, including the prompt. I tried to keep it brief and active. How did you get started in tech and what are your lessons learned along the way?

  • Less Snark, More Spark

    Less Snark, More Spark

    How can you be the developer people want to hire, work with, and promote? Good question! Abstract: Even the most introverted, self-sufficient developer interacts with other people. Sometimes these folks are a joy to work with, sometimes not. Sometimes as a developer, you might be the difficult one to work with (we’ve all been that…

  • The Trifecta of Goodness

    The Trifecta of Goodness

    Since 2012, I’ve been developing websites and web apps, mostly on WordPress, Laravel, and Gatsby, mostly for clients (that is, no real personal projects). I’ve worked on my own as a freelancer and now I work with an awesome group of folks at The Digital Ring in Madison, Wisconsin. The the team of people with…

  • Building and Deconstructing a Gutenberg Block

    Building and Deconstructing a Gutenberg Block

    This presentation walks through the new Block Editor in WordPress, covering: what comes out of the box from WordPress Core plugins that will add blocks to your site importing demo content styling blocks with CSS creating your own blocks with Advanced Custom Fields and ES5 to ESNext.

  • How to Run Your WordPress Site On Local, Gatsby and Netlify… For FREE!

    How to Run Your WordPress Site On Local, Gatsby and Netlify… For FREE!

    Yes! This is a click-bait-y title. BUT, I wanted to see if this was possible, and it is! If you’ve ever wanted a fast and secure WordPress site, here is one way to do it. NOTE: I would NOT recommend this (probably) for a live site. Maybe there’s a slightly different way of going about…

  • Hello Gatsby! This blog is now headless WordPress…

    Hello Gatsby! This blog is now headless WordPress…

    Well, I did it. I jumped on the Gatsby bandwagon, and it seems pretty great so far! Also, there’s been a very nice bump in overall site performance and experience (Chrome Lighthouse audits):

  • Doing Things the WordPress Way
  • Learning React… So I can I can hang out with other things…

    Learning React… So I can I can hang out with other things…

    Maybe it’s FOMO (fear of missing out 😮), or I’m finally starting to see the benefit, but I’m finally getting down and dirty with React, compiling everything I need to be proficient with it, and start using on the regular.

  • Templating in PHP with REST APIs

    Templating in PHP with REST APIs

    Here are the slides for the presentation I gave at Madison Area Technical College’s Advanced PHP class in the spring of 2019 semester. The main objective is to learn some templating principles and see how partial templates can be managed in a larger project, and how templates can work with data, specifically received from REST…

  • Using Local by Flywheel for Local Laravel Development

    Using Local by Flywheel for Local Laravel Development

    Note: This post has been updated to work with the new version of Local. I’ll try to keep things updated if the development environment changes in the future. (last updated: March 2, 2022) While I mostly build with WordPress, I’m going to be working with a few projects coming up that will require a more…