Identity is your distinguishing character or personality. If you want to be known as a cat person, talk about cats. Want to be known as someone to avoid, only talk about the negatives. Want to be known as a jerk, be a jerk. Want to inspire, encourage others.
Your identity is how others see you, but through your words and actions, you can control the narrative. Now the hard part is stepping outside yourself and figuring out how the world sees you.
Every Sunday I send out a newsletter and right now it’s at about 35,000 subscribers. It just so happens I made an embarrassing mistake in today’s issue:
When someone first brought it to my attention I tweeted about it thinking it was a funny mistake, and since then I’ve had hundreds of emails about it.
Now I could feel bad about myself and think about what an idiot I am, but instead I choose to look at it as a positive. I’m thankful I have this many people that read what I write each week. A lot of weeks I think I’m emailing into the void, but this proves how mistaken I am with that outlook.
What is also funny is Monday is another big day for people reading the newsletter so I’m going to bed tonight expecting many more emails.
To keep your keyboard clean and free from grim use chopsticks when you are eating chips and other snacks.
Products shown in the picture:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
This is a passage from Theodore Roosevelt speech The Man in the Arena, and I feel like it’s a great ode to all the creators. It’s so easy to get down from the peanut gallery of the world, and it’s nice finding great quotes like this to lift your spirits.
Sebastian Schlein on why you should stick to the default Laravel architecture:
Projects which are built by teams of developers and that take months to build, need to be easily maintainable. They should be easy to understand and follow as much default conventions as possible. Why? Teams change.
How do you prepare a project for changing teams? Stick to the most common standards and use boring technologies. So if you use Laravel, do not introduce an additional architecture on top of it. It takes more time to build this architecture, and every time a new developer joins the team, you need to teach your way of doing things. It takes time until they become productive, and if a deadline is near, you miss the opportunity of outsourcing a feature to a freelancer to get everything done in time. The custom architecture requires time to learn, and this is exactly the resource you don’t have at this moment. Goal failed.
I am of the same mind as Sebastian.  When I started with PHP, no frameworks existed, and as soon as I tried one, I was immediately hooked because of the advantage that any developer anywhere in the world, with knowledge of the framework, could jump in on day one and know what is going on. As soon as you start changing the defaults it adds even more overhead to the whole codebase.
It’s like going to your regular grocery store. It’s comfortable, you know where things are and can be in and out without much fuss. Then compare that with being on vacation where you have to visit a new grocery store. You can’t find anything, what typically takes ten minutes now takes thirty, and it’s super frustrating.
Sticking to the defaults also pays dividends on projects that are not long-lived. I have apps that are many years old that still work and only require the occasional bug fix. Because I stuck to the defaults I can quickly jump in, make the fix, and go on with my day. In apps where I’ve changed them, it feels like it takes half the day to relearn how it works and why it works.
I prefer simplicity, and the defaults are simple.
Early voting is in full swing in my area and I had the ability to go over my lunch break yesterday and cast mine. This year was short and sweet with only the mayor and three city council races.
I know we all focus on the presidential elections but these local ones probably affect you directly more than national races ever will, and these typically have small turnouts. So your one vote could potentially carry more weight. It’s definitely worth your time to research the local candidates and make your voice heard.
I send a lot of emails through my various web properties. I’d say at least 200 to 300 thousand emails each month. With this many emails, the likelihood of me offending someone is pretty high, and when someone gets triggered, they sure let me know.
I’ve found that if they are from a different culture, they may not even be upset. I am just using the wrong words and phrases. To them, what they are saying is perfectly fine, but to me, it comes across as tactless and offensive.
Other times it’s just a misunderstanding, and very rarely is someone just straight up being a jerk. That does happen, though, and I always just hit “unsubscribe” in the email they are replying to and go on with my day.
Outside of those people, the way I handle these situations is to respond in good faith, thinking they meant well and are not intending to come across rude. Â So far giving the benefit of the doubt hasn’t let me down.
As part of my normal routine, I check Twitter throughout the day and I like to see what my friends are sharing. Â For the most part, it’s pretty mundane, lots of programmery topics, people sharing personal things, the usual.
But some days I’m just in a weird mood and will see a few tweets that just trigger me. Before I respond and write something I’ll regret I just quit the app and get back to work. Then when I come back later whatever annoyance I had is usually lost in the shuffle. Unless I’m using the official Twitter app which keeps wanting to show “top tweets”, then I remember to open Tweetbot.
I know stepping away is nothing new, but based on the replies I get, many of us struggle with just not replying. We love to tell people how wrong they are, and how they should feel bad for being so wrong.
My kids want a dog, it’s all they’ve been talking about for a few weeks now. As a kid, they can’t understand what all is involved in having a pet. I told them to make a pros and cons list on having a new pet, and the only con they came up with is a puppy will chew on things. Their perspective was so skewed to what they wanted they had tunnel vision.Â
If we are not careful we can get this same tunnel vision when we really want something. It could be anything from starting a new side project to releasing something open source, or a new car, or even just spending money on stuff when we shouldn’t be. Â
Too often instead of thinking through everything, we jump in feet first and then quite literally pay for it later. Where if we would just slow down, think through the unfavorable factors we’d save ourselves lots of heartaches.Â
It’s been all over my Twitter feed today about Meetup announcing big changes to their pricing. The way they currently charge is the user group owner pays a monthly/yearly fee for using the Meetup service. For me, this was a reasonable way to do it, but today they announced some pretty big changes to this.
Your new subscription cost is only $2 per month, or $24 per year. That means you’ll be saving at least 80% annually on subscription fees. This will also distribute costs more evenly between organizers and members. Members will pay a $2 fee when they reserve a spot at your event.
Members having to pay just to reserve a spot for your event is the part that many people are having problems with, and for good reason. Oh, you can wave that fee, but then you are responsible for covering the $2 per reservation. Now I don’t know all the stats on user groups, but from all the people I’ve heard from that run them, it’s hard to get consistent members attending. Now, this adds another hurdle to getting them.
It’s about time for all the user groups to find another service and my friend, Dries Vints, just announced a new app he is launching called Eventy.
Some of the things that you’ll be able to do with Eventy: manage user group members, RSVP to events, prepare your conference talks, submit to CFPs. And much more.
I’m super excited to hear about this new app today and if you are running a user group, join the newsletter and find out when it officially launches. I have a feeling there is going to be a lot of people wanting to move from Meetup to Eventy.
I’ve always been a fan of developer swag. Everything from shirts, to hats, and everything else. Secretly I’ve had a dream to start a site to sell shirts with nerdy puns and geeky sayings, but the time never felt right.
That was until a few months ago when Phil Sturgeon announced he’d like to sell Made in Production, and Matt Stauffer and I jumped on the chance to get it, and we are now partners in this business.
All the old existing designs are still up on the site and we plan to leave those up for the foreseeable future but will eventually phase some of those out. If you see one you like, you should go ahead and get it now, and if you are a fan of Laravel News we have one for it available now.
Our next plans with the site are to get new designs created, work with some open-source brands, and to have even more inventory. If you have any ideas for unique shirts, be sure and let us know.
My second Hacktinkerfest logo design is now complete, and I just sent off the pull request to Buggerino, which is a native app for Android/IOS that allows you to interact with your Bugsnag account. Here are some of the designs I came up with:
Here is the larger version of the final colored options:
As you can see, I went with the bug theme, and Jordy, the creator of Buggerino, said he liked the green and/or blue moth ones the best because of the combination of code and the bug. I’m partial to the blue one too if I’m honest.
These where a lot of fun to create and I hope Jordy gets a lot of use out of it. Â I went ahead and exported all of them and sent them to his project so he could use them any way he wants.
I had a single tweet sort of go viral, well, not super viral, just 4,500 retweets and 10,800 likes. But I would still assume that would bring in a lot of new followers but according to Twitter analytics I gained a total of 19 new follows.
Being a viral hit is overrated and brings superficial traction. The real fans are those that find you through the mundane stuff you post or share everyday. Those are the ones you want to interact with and invest your time into.
One of the best new settings that come with iOS 13 is the ability to silence calls from unknown numbers.  This can be found in settings -> phone just like the screenshot below:
Granted this is not much use if you expect calls from numbers not in your contacts, or if you are worried about people trying to reach you in an emergency. But for those like me who rarely get calls and is sick and tired from the constant robocalls, this is an awesome solution.
I’ve had it enabled for a few days now and it’s silencing close to 5 calls a day. I consider that a win.
Food for thought…Â
With the United States having a two-party political system, everything feels like a competition, and it almost turns into a civil war. Family against family, neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend all because people have different views on the best way forward.
I’m in a nostalgic mood and missing the web of the old days. I’m thinking about how we all used to have personal blogs, read through RSS, and we’d discover others through blogrolls.
In order to help showcase personal bloggers that I follow I’ve created an old school blogroll page with a list of some of the people that post regularly.  Some are friends that write occasionally, others are people I’ve never but I like what they write about.
If you’ve been wanting to add more sites to your RSS reader checkout some of the ones in mine. I also plan to add others throughout the year.
Caneco had a cool idea for a spin on the Hacktoberfest to make logos for open source projects and submit the designs as PR’s.
Being a fan of making illustrations I asked if I could help him and he agreed, so I’m going to make some logos this month and here is my first for the Laravel sweet alert package:
I’m not actually super happy with this so I’m going to keep working on it but I wanted to make a post and offer an open invitation. If you have an MIT licensed open source project that needs a logo let me know in the comments and I’ll make you one. Free of charge, but you get what you get so to speak.
Yesterday was the annual Build Your Own Boat competition at USNWC in Charlotte NC. The goal is that any team can enter and build their own boat and run it down the rapids. The winner is chosen based off a combination of crowd reaction, creativity, and the seaworthy-ness of the vessel. It’s always a blast and I love taking the kids.
This year didn’t disappoint and here is a short video with some of the boats going down the rapids. I tried to speed it up so it’s more enjoyable and to be a quicker video
The creativity of the boats this year was also fantastic. Here are a few photos from some of the boats
A lot of fun was had, and if you live in the area, come check it out next year.
There are two trains of thought on the question of should you deploy on a Friday. One believes you should deploy on Friday’s because if you have a sound system in place, you can always roll back, the other thinks it is not worth the risk.
Both of these people are correct, and if you have a complete automated deployment process complete with rollbacks, and the rollbacks are continuously tested, then sure go for it.  But in every other case, I don’t think the risk is worth it.
If it’s an emergency sure, but I’ve rarely found a deploy to be so important, it’s worth disappointing my wife and kids if it goes wrong. The risk/reward is just not close to being worth it for me. Work can wait.
Eric L. Barnes 