Author Archives: Robert

So I’ve been a little quiet on this blog lately. I’ve been busy devoting a lot of my free time to some interesting contracting opportunities. I’m currently working with Time Doctor, LLC, a company working on the sites TimeDoctor.com and … Continue reading »

A service-level agreement is a useful method for setting expectations on deliverability, and incentivizing quick turnaround. It’s also a great way to motivate a development team. SLAs encourage goal-setting and collective buy-in internally. They improve your users’ perception of your … Continue reading »

I work in the Bay Area at a company based out of the Washington, DC area. I lead a development team with the manpower roughly divided between both offices. On top of that, we have certain stakeholders that work in … Continue reading »

When it comes to “The Real World”, one of my biggest learning experiences was getting fired from a temp job at a Verizon Wireless store the summer before grad school.

Adding a change log to your database is the best way to make sure you’re working on a version of your web application that adequately reflects a given state of your product. However, when working with a branching-and-merging development environment, … Continue reading »

I recently spearheaded a campaign at my workplace to move from a problematic system of building releases using patching and SVN to the more modern, widely accepted Git approach. Things are moving along pretty well, and everyone is starting to … Continue reading »

At my job, I’m currently spearheading a move from an SVN patching model to a Git branching model. This should make it easier to do things like manage releases and streamline development. But we have a lot of finished work … Continue reading »

MAMP is a popular platform for web development on a Mac. As you’re doing web development, working on a Mac generally also results in needing either a Windows machine or a VMWare instance of Windows on your Mac. In my … Continue reading »

Variable variables are a nice, flexible tool for when you’re transforming data types (say, arrays to classes). At the very worst case, they’re good for using some kind of string data that has come down the pipe to serve as … Continue reading »

I took a few minutes today to change up the way the site looks. I thought the original design felt a little heavy. It didn’t seem to be the palette, but rather how it was employed. The fonts were a … Continue reading »