In 2012, I co-founded a company (https://EVALS.NET) that built a SaaS product out of my basement in California (yes, a basement in California—I know, rare). It started with an idea, a friend dropping by, and a prototype that barely held together. That friend made three phone calls…
You're rejecting candidates because they didn't reverse a binary tree in 12 minutes. On a whiteboard. While someone watched. That's not evaluation. That's a hazing ritual with a MacBook. You want to know if someone can build your CRUD app. So you…
In my career, I've had the pleasure of working with and consulting with a lot of companies. As I'm sure we can all relate, there's a demand to improve productivity. As one digs deeper, I quite often encounter a lack of accountability, which stems…
It was a late night in 2012, phone blowing up with texts. "The wheels have come off the wagon!" My business partner was losing it while I was at the gym. Rushed home, jumped on the computer, and found the problem. I had configured an AWS LoadBalancer wrong.…
The number of times someone has mentioned CAP Theorem to me unprompted? I can count them on one finger. One. In 25+ years. Six years ago. Story time. It was an interview candidate. They brought it up and I nearly knocked my Liquid Death over. We talked about it for…
Event systems are something powerful. Whether you're in a microservice, a monolith, or an ACL layer, they make scalability and maintainability actually possible. "After a user logs in, I want to send them a survey!" "Just add it to the code after the login happens.…
It's 2011, and over the last four months I've migrated away from Ruby on Rails and back into the PHP MVC framework realm. My last excursion with any PHP MVC framework was based on CakePHP, CodeIgniter, and Symfony, of which I had a combined six years…