OrchardNest

With some well earned extended summer downtime underway I once again have a more flexible schedule and want to promote my open office hours! Open office hours is a great way for me to give back to the community and hopefully help people...

After dedicating a full time effort towards an Elixir/Phoenix consulting project since October, I’m taking some time off and looking forward to a nice mix of vacation and personal projects. Consulting Retrospective The project...

I’m a privacy advocate. I use Firefox as my main browser. I install adblock browser extensions. I block ads from within my network router. Most of these privacy tools rely on the fact most ads and tracking happen through JavaScripts...

Over the last year I’ve gained a much higher appreciation for the proper documentation of a company’s values. When I was younger I was much more carefree about company values or even the company mission statement, but lately I...

This week I attended the Emerging Technologies For The Enterprise 2021 conference online. Normally hosted in Old City Philadelphia, I’ve been a long time attendee of the show. I find ETE to be a great place to hear about fresh tech...

It’s been a while since I posted here on the blog so figured I’d do a short life update. COVID / Health Check First, my immediate family and I are still healthy. We continue to stay quarantined and limit our interactions with...

During a recent mastermind meeting a member asked the group, “how do you handle customer feedback?” Like everything, it’s complex. I’m going to box my thoughts with the assumption we are talking about single-person...

In today’s post I want to start a conversation around the tradeoffs of using Typespecs and Dialyzer use in your Elixir code. Elixir is a dynamic, not a statically-typed language – and just to preemptively avoid the programming...

Once again I missed my weekly updates so today notes include all items since the last check-in, December 13th. Additionally, I’ve been taking it easy during vacation so this list is lighter than usual. Guildflow Got some...

Over vacation I worked through a small project to use Terraform on Linode to provision a new webserver for my personal website. The following is a collection of notes and resources from the experience. Project Goals / Areas of...

Once again I missed my weekly updates so today notes include all items since the last check-in, November 22nd. Guildflow Finished the marketing campaign on Ethical Ads: Privacy-focused advertising for developers and while I didn’t...

Lots of times it’s easy to feel bad about missing deadlines but when you add it all up, it turns out a lot of things happened last week. I missed last week’s update so consider this one a twofer. Guildflow Wrote up pitch to...

Lots of times it’s easy to feel bad about missing deadlines but when you add it all up, it turns out a lot of things happened last week. Guildflow Updated the site with new Add to Calendar feature. Updated the SSL certs for the...

Lots of times it’s easy to feel bad about missing deadlines but when you add it all up, it turns out a lot of things happened last week. Guildflow Launched multi-episode sponsorship of the Release Notes podcast. Updated marketing...

Lots of times it’s easy to feel bad about missing deadlines but when you add it all up, it turns out a lot of things happened last week. Guildflow Worked on some limited podcast marketing experiments. Started work on website...

Teaching has always been a big part of my self identity. Be it teaching at university, Big Nerd Ranch workshops or even my work with local tech meetups. With my increasing enjoyment of Elixir and Phoenix I’ve been anxious to find a...

Lots of times it’s easy to feel bad about missing deadlines but when you add it all up, it turns out a lot of things happened last week. Guildflow Got my pull request that adds Postmark broadcast email support to the Elixir swoosh...

In advance of adding some new broadcast email features to Guildflow I’ve built some additions to the Swoosh Elixir email library that allow one to use the new broadcast message stream feature of Postmark. Brief video tour and links...

Lots of times it’s easy to feel bad about missing deadlines but when you add it all up, it turns out a lot of things happened last week. Guildflow Launched the big marketing landing page update with lots of new screenshots to...

The Apple AirPods Pro earbuds I ordered in February are broken. The left pod has this really bad vibration that just never seems to never go away. It’s particularly noticeable during my walks. I had some connection issues before and...

A short video where I catch you all up on my various project: Guildflow, Android Book Club, consulting work search, ideas in my head.

Lots of times it’s easy to feel bad about missing deadlines but when you add it all up, it turns out a lot of things happened last week. Guildflow Finally finished the new page and editable navigation feature. Deployed version...

Lots of times it’s easy to feel bad about missing deadlines but when you add it all up, it turns out a lot of things happened last week. Guildflow Posted a draft of the terms of service for feedback. Made and shared progress on...

Lots of times it’s easy to feel bad about missing deadlines but when you add it all up, it turns out a lot of things happened last week. Guildflow Pushed out a new build (see the CHANGELOG). Mostly bug fixes and security updates....

I would like to once again remind people I am looking for work. You can see more details about my freelance and consulting offerings on my For Hire page but to summarize, the following types of projects are usually a good match for...

I love the enthusiasm and energy of this video. A few thoughts on cutting to the chase in videos for an online audience.

I tried to run some Google Ads but can’t reconcile the numbers. I’ve been duped! Video Notes I work as a consultant. I do a lot of iOS development, some Elixir, some teaching, etc. Trying out a new productized...

I’m a big fan of screencasts. I generalize the term screencast here as any video where you see primarily a computer or user interface, with a voice and optional video feed of a person doing some kind of demonstration. You’ve...

In today’s video I’ll demonstrate how you can use the concept of fixtures in your Swift unit tests to quickly build business objects and validate scenarios. I’ll also show how you can add assets to a test target and then...

As part of my side project bartering, I’ve build a simple open source Xcode project that demonstrate how you could save your Swift app’s storage as a simple JSON file and then migrate the file schema changes over time. This is...

A short video talking about bartering your time with other developers to help add perspective to each other’s side projects. Video: Accountability via Masterminds (4m) VersionedFilesDemo

A short talk about how recent user interviews have challenged some of my assumptions about how Guildflow accounts should work. Guildflow Help Me with an Introduction to Your Meetup Organizer Book: The Mom Test Why use Discord for...