Career Identity Crisis

Career Transition At the beginning of August this year, I made the transition to officially become a Product Owner at my current company. This led me to think about the software developer skills that I had gained and used for the previous 3-4 years. Just because I’m not performing software developer related tasks on a daily basis, and just because this isn’t my full-time role at this point in time, does that mean I’m not a software developer any longer?

November 9, 2020 Read
What Video Games Taught Me About Not Reinventing the Wheel

With all of the heavy topics being posted about lately, I wanted to write about something a bit fun this week. I enjoy playing video games. I mostly play first player fantasy RPGs (i.e. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy, etc.). I’m not sure if others also do this, but I tend to use online guides when I play video games. I enjoy a good story and exploring the worlds, but a lot of the games I play usually require many hours of level and skill grinding, extra missions, and such that are available outside of the main story.

June 16, 2020 Read
Are You More Focused on Quality Results, or Seeing Your Employees' Butts in Their Seats?

There have been many folks posting recently around companies being compelled to let their employees work remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic and how many of these employees self-report an increase in productivity and overall job satisfaction. This has got me thinking about a topic that really bugs me as it relates to the mindsets of many companies and leaders, specifically in America, today. One reason that many companies have been reluctant in the past to adopt a remote work policy and allow their employees to work from home (or from anywhere), comes down to the fact that leadership doesn’t trust their employees to be as productive at home as they are perceived to be when in the office - that they won’t get distracted by the TV, doing laundry, talking with neighbors, or any number of distractions that exist while working from home.

May 26, 2020 Read
How I Converted My Existing Website to Use Hugo

I wanted to write this post as a guide on how I converted my website to use Hugo, a static site generator, in order to host blog posts without using a CMS like WordPress. When I was looking for resources and guides on how to build a Hugo site, nearly every resource I ran across was a guide on how to build a Hugo site from scratch. Which is great because that’s where most people start from.

May 14, 2020 Read
Time for a New Adventure!

This blog post has been a long time coming! I have been meaning to revamp my website by giving it a new design and ability to host blog posts for over a year now. After Dave and I stopped producing the Junior Developer Toolbox podcast, I knew I still had more to say and wanted to continue to help others along their journey. But there are also other topics I have thoughts and ideas to get out into the world - general career, travel, and dating being just a few examples.

May 5, 2020 Read
To Bootcamp or Not to Bootcamp

There won’t be a new episode of Junior Developer Toolbox this week. But fret not! Dave and I are taking a break to recharge and plan upcoming show content. Dave is soaking up some rays on a cruise with his family (I’m jealous), but we wanted to make sure our listeners still received some great content this week. So I wrote this blog post to accompany the series on software bootcamps we’ve been working on recently.

March 12, 2019 Read
This One Time at Barcamp Nashville 2017

Hello All! We’re working hard to get our third episode (Episode 2) edited and finalized to release. In the meantime, we’d like to share our experience from BarCamp Nashville 2017 this past weekend. Erin, Dave, and Jason finally got together in person for the first time at the BarCamp Nashville 2017 Conference, which was hosted at Nashville Software School this year. BarCamp Nashville is a free, annual “unconference” that brings together the local tech community to explore, share and connect.

October 4, 2017 Read