Tag: work
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The greatest productivity hack of all time
The greatest productivity hack of all time is working less. Slack recently published new research into desk worker productivity. It is a worthy read – however, it sheds light on something that most desk workers already inherently know: longer hours do not mean greater productivity. I have put a lot of personal focus on trying…
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How long does it take to transfer a Stripe account?
I updated Stripe Transfer’s website with new testimonials and a downloadable PDF that provides a rough timeline for transferring accounts on Stripe. When customers are in a time crunch, they generally ask you two questions; how long will this take? how much does it cost? We offer free estimates for Stripe Transfer since we cannot…
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Using Docker to build a WordPress theme
If you have no idea what Docker is or how it works, this blog post won’t help you too much. For that, I recommend Julia Evans’ Zine How Containers Work! I recently wanted to build a premium WordPress theme to offer here via my website. I started, finished, and released the theme in record time…
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Photography isn’t my job
Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life. That’s the saying, right? What can also happen, though, is that by doing your hobby as work you can suck all of the joy out of that hobby for yourself. I make some money doing photography. But, by and large, my photography…
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React is an ecosystem
Jonathan Snook, on his learning curve when joining a new organization that uses React: When people talk about learning React, I think that React, in and of itself, is relatively easy to understand. At least, I felt it was. I have components. I have JSX. I hit some hiccups with required keys or making sure…
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Mandy Pennington teaches SEO at the May 2018 NEPA Tech meet up
This last month’s NEPA Tech meet up was very well attended, produced, and an all-around great time – as per usual. I’ve seen Mandy do several presentations over the last few years and so I knew going into this we were in for an informative and fun session. SEO could be a boring, drab topic…
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Corporate typefaces are all the rage
This isn’t a recent phenomena. Corporations have been creating their own typefaces since the beginning of type. But, lately, I’ve noticed more and more that they are using it in their marketing efforts or because the scale of these corporations make it cost prohibitive not to make their own typeface. Let me pull these two…
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A new brand identity for Jujama
This project was not part of my Design Challenge. However, I thought I’d catalog this project here as I was the primary designer working on it, with help from Jujama’s designer Lindsey Jamieson. Jujama is a nearly 10-year-old business (and my current employer) with global clients and a sophisticated product that services top-tier customers. The…
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A new brand identity for The Watercolor Gallery
I’m excited to start a brand-new series here on my site — The Grand Brand Design Challenge. I’m equally excited to be starting this series with a personal project I’ve been working on since 2010, The Watercolor Gallery. Read more about The Grand Brand Design Challenge on its own page. I’ve only taken the time…
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You should attend events, meetups, and conferences
I published the following article on LinkedIn in March. However, their publishing tool removed all of the photos from the post when I published it and I was so frustrated that I did not bother to go in and fix it. I’m republishing the post here with photos. For over a decade now I’ve put…
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Creating Summit: The current summit view
This post is the first in a series of posts about my experience building and designing Summit. This post focuses on just one view within the application; the current summit view. The idea for Summit came nearly 4 years ago as far as I can tell. I’ve hunted around for scraps of paper, digital notes,…
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Developers, Let me tell you about Microsoft (audio)
I’ve been writing about Microsoft’s moves for the last three years. This week everything has come together and I’ve been writing my first multi-platform application using C# and Visual Studio. In this long rant I go on and on about how Microsoft needs to spread the word about what they are up to. Links for…
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What’s new in WSL in Windows 10
Tara Raj for Microsoft: We’ve been documenting many of these new features and improvements on this blog over the last few months, but we’ve often been asked for a single document listing all the new improvements, and with FCU (version 1709, build 16299.15) shipping on October 17th 2017, we thought it was time to publish a…
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A unique color for every address in the world
A recent, yet-to-be-announced client project had me designing a mobile app interface that dealt a lot with showing locations and events that are happening at certain locations (how is that for vague? sorry). While I utilized the brand’s colors to represent certain sections of the app I wanted the app to have tons of colors…
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I can work on anything I want
One of the most enjoyable aspects of working on your own project is that there is so much to do. That may seem strange, why would I want to have so much to do? But if you look at it a different way it becomes a much more enjoyable experience. Whenever I sit down to…
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Presenting at the July NEPA.js Meetup
Earlier this week my Condron Media cohort Tucker Hottes and I presented at the July NEPA.js Meetup. Our presentation was about automation and all of the things we can automate in our lives personally and professionally. And also how we employ automation in our workflows for creating applications and web sites using our own task…
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Observations on building my first iOS app in Swift
In early June I decided I wanted to learn iOS app development using Swift. I’ve made a lot of progress over the last month, building two apps that I can use on my own phone, and one app that I’m now in beta testing via TestFlight with a few friends. Over the last month I’ve…
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How do you get work?
Aspiring freelancers always ask this question. Lara Schenck answers: I tell people I’m looking for work. Then, while I wait for referrals, I do a bunch of stuff for free. That includes talking at meetups, doing free workshops, and writing blog posts. Finally, I cross my fingers and have faith that it will come when…
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Hacking rather than waiting
Yesterday afternoon Sarah Pressler retweeted Jono Young’s request for a plugin that would add a submenu to the WordPress’ Admin with the current pages for the site under the Pages menu. This would reduce the number of clicks to get to the page editor. I was waiting for an upload to finish and I thought, given the code…
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How can I get into programming?
Linus Torvalds in 2004 on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML): To me, the biggest thing with small patches is not necessarily the patch itself. I think that much more important than the patch is the fact that people get used to the notion that they can change the kernel – not just on an…
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On rebranding
Over on our company blog we published our recipe for rebranding a company. Here’s a snippet on how our outsider view is an advantage: Our suggestions and feedback come with no internal bias, no politics, no fear of losing our jobs, and certainly no fear of sounding stupid. We’re experts at dumb ideas. Out of…
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Migrating Subscriptions from one Stripe account to another
Update June 2021: I’ve had enough interest in this service that I’ve created StripeTransfer.com — Please visit this site to schedule your consultation. Learn More at StripeTransfer.com One of my recent client programming projects (hire me here) was to help a company migrate all customers, cards, plans, and subscriptions from one Stripe account to another…
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Observations on using a standing desk
I’ve used a standing desk on-and-off for a few years. In 2011 I stood for a week before giving up. At the time I claimed that I wasn’t able to focus on my work as well while standing as I was while sitting. Reading that now confuses me as I believe standing is far more…