The Five-Minute Geek Show

Mister Rogers' mom said, when things are going poorly, "Look for the Helpers." I love Mister Rogers, but I have another idea.

I've been creating a lot of content in other places. Here's a quick update on what I've been doing.

Your online presence matters in job applications.

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Introducing three new not-ready-for-real-time web sites I'm working on: https://onramp.dev/ https://omgphp.com/ https://whyphp.dev/

Figure out the values, then make the choice according to your values

Just break that overwhelming project up

Knowing, and getting, what you want Recent newsletter Sign up for newsletters

I think we have a bit of entrepreneurial survivorship bias Survivorship bias definition

How we picked our insurance provider, and my guiding principle

You can't make everyone happy

How Tighten sets our prices

Per special request, Christmas 2017 with the kiddos

A few simple tricks for editing your blog posts

What's at the top of your brain? And what's the benefit you get from having to wait on something, letting you brain roll over it? Paul Graham - The Top Idea in Your Mind Transcript: Hi, I'm your host Matt Stauffer, and this episode 101 of The Five Minute Geek Show, a weekly show about development and everything around it. It's one topic per episode about front-end, back-end, mobile, project management, design, entrepreneurship, whatever. If it's geeky, it fits. Today, we're going to be talking about your top idea. I've talked about it a little bit in the past, but essentially, at any given moment, there's usually one primary thing that your brain returns to you when it gives a moment to rest. I often have about seven of these, which drives my wife nuts. We've talked often about the fact that I need to have less commitments. Not just because I need to be spending less time doing things, but because I need spaces for my brain to not only rest and have moments where I think about things family life related, not just all these kind of entrepreneurial and work ideas that I'm doing. So, essentially, when you have nothing else to do. When you're stuck in traffic, or when you are using the restroom, or showering, or taking a walk or something like that, your brain kind of rolls on to things. The things that your brain roll onto, often those are kind of like ... People frequently know this, are the things that ... We get some really great thinking done then, right? You've got stuck on something at work, and you go home and you sleep on it, and you come back and you have an answer. Or you go, you take a 15 minute walk. Sometimes you take a 15 minute walk, your brain just needs to re-orient itself. But sometimes ... For example, I'll often have an idea for an application or for a software of service, or for a project or a book or a blog post or a video. I'll have the idea long before I create the thing. I had an idea for a new product ... Not a product but that open-source thing that I want to do, like 11 months ago or something. Every once a while, it pops into my brain. It hasn't been the top of my mind, but it pops into my brain for a little bit. I think about it, and I think about one aspect of it, one nuance. Well, how would I get these people to carry the content here? Or, what would motivate somebody to want to carry the content here versus somewhere else? Or, how would I handle the fact that there's this type of data coming in there, but that type of data coming in there? So, it pops up every once in a while, and I kind of think about it for a little bit, and the thinking that I do there kind of moves into the storehouse of answers that I've come up with for those things. So, every single time I've ever created something of significance size, there's been years or at least many months of thinking about the thing prior to the point where I actually get started. So this thing, I bought a domain name for it three weeks ago, and I told everybody at Titan about it three weeks ago, but I've been thinking about the thing for months. I've been thinking about it even more frequently since then. It's nearly at the top idea of my mind kind of thing where most of my free time, I think, "Well, okay, here's another thing I need to think about it." Then I think through it for a while, while I'm putting my daughter to sleep, or something like that. So it's interesting that there's not just this idea of the top idea in your mind. I've talked often with people about this top idea in your mind thing, Paul Graham's somebody who wrote something about it recently. It's not just the fact that you have one, which of course is an important conversation, because if you've never thought through these things, some of these important things about that are ... Like, if you're trying to split your job responsibility between multiple roles, there may be certain roles that never get to be the top idea in your brain, which means they never get that kind of free time thinking or that free moment thinking or that extra brain power that allows you to power through some things that might not happen during your normal, actual application of the job. Often I've told people who've wanted to do three things, I'm like, none of those three things are going to be done ... Or at least probably two of those three things are actually going to be done to a one-third attention level, because two of them are not going to be the forefront idea. So it's not even the time to spend on the thing, it's the time to spend thinking on the thing. So there's definitely things worth thinking about, just with regard to what is at the forefront of your mind. But what I want to talk about is giving space for yourself to process through the thing over time. It's almost as if ... So, okay, we did a developer battle. I think I'm going to get to my point eventually here. We did developer battle just recently between two of our senior developers. It's their first time d

TRANSCRIPT: Hi, I'm your host Matt Stauffer and this is Episode 100. One, zero, zero. We've made it! I have not, I was going to say tweeted. I've not podcasted, I've hardly blogged, I thought I was back a couple months ago and then it turns out that babies don't like sleeping. Turns out, who knew? So finally back-ish, it's going to be a slow roll back--I'm not going to promise that I'm 100 percent, but I'm back enough to record Episode 100. Hurray, huzzah, there was much rejoicing. If I wasn't so lazy I'd put sound effects in here. People clapping and cheering. The Five Minute Geek Show! it's a purportedly weekly show about development and everything around it. It's purportedly five minutes long. It's really whenever the heck I can get to it and turns out it's sometimes between five and ten minutes. It's one topic per episode, that's true. About front end, back end, mobile, project management, design, entrepreneurship, whatever. If it's geeky, it fits. I'm glad to be semi back. My son is out of school, and all of a sudden my schedule is rearranged and I'm able to find pockets of time for podcasts and blogs now, so my goal is to get a podcast and a blog out this week. That's what I'm going to try and do. So this week we're going to be talking about community. Capital C community. If you are not a PHP developer this will be a little bit less relevant. If you're not a developer, it will be even less relevant, but it'll touch on some things. There is often a line that is repeated by various people within the PHP community that Laravel, the people in Laravel, the Laravel community, are elitist and that they encourage silos and that what they really needed to do (if they weren't pigeon holing themselves into just being Laravel developers) is be involved in the greater PHP community. People, hoity toity, are proud of the fact that they are just a PHP developer, and they would not be so base as to identify with a particular framework. They say, well, I hope you don't put "Laravel developer" on your whatever. "Why wouldn't you just say PHP developer?" They'll point to the wonderful efforts of people like Cal Evans, and other wonderful human beings whom I love, who do great things to encourage the PHP community to have an identity. Every single time they say these things, I respond in the same ways, and they stop responding when they realize their argument is awful and then somebody else spouts the same crap a month later. So! I'm going to say it out loud here. If you have the temptation to go ham on somebody because they consider themselves a WordPress developer, or a Symfony developer, or a Laravel developer, or whatever else developer because they should be just thinking of themselves as PHP developers... Next time you identify yourself as a PHP developer, I'm going to walk up and I'm going to say, "why are you identifying yourself as a PHP developer? Why aren't you just a web developer?" Then when you go to a web development thing, "why are you are identifying as a web developer, why aren't you just a technologist?" When you go to technologist thing I say, "why are you a technologist, why aren't you just a person?" Why aren't you just a human? Where is the line? You have made up an arbitrary line that you think is the acceptable place for someone to identify, below which is not possible. And we haven't even started talking about geographical location or anything like that. Is it acceptable for someone to identify that they're in the London PHP group? Is that unacceptable because that's a delineation? No, none of this stuff matters. All these groupings are helpful. Now remember, if you've listened to this podcast for any time you understand that a lot of the things I'm talking about come out of faith and religious background. So let me tell you about denominations. In denominations, you have the differences between people of the same faith, similar to sects and stuff like that. Where you have multiple people who ascribe to the same general thing, but are different in certain ways. There's all sorts of horrible things where people have mistreated each other, they've killed each other and all that kind of stuff, with the difference between religions. So, in general, we tend to think of unity as good and division as bad, right? So we often have this naïve concept that if we could just rid ourselves of denominations, and everyone would just be the same faith, the same religion, then all of our problems would be gone. The problem is there are perfectly acceptable, and perfectly normal and often very healthy, differences in opinion, and denominations give you space to find the other people who follow along that line in a different way, and celebrate together with them without having to separate yourselves entirely from the community that you're a part of. Or without fighting all the time. Let's say you have a particular interpretation of how something says whether its Sa

Take care of your people

Take care of yourself

There's a big difference between conversation and snarky quips. Hire More Women In Tech

A chat about indirect vs. direct conflict, what passive aggression is and isn't, and some tips for responding to folks who manipulate others indirectly.

Give credit where credit is due

The tip: Be a grownup. -- Transcript -- Matt Stauffer: Hi. I'm your host Matt Stauffer, and this is episode 94 of the Five-Minute Geek Show, a weekly show about development and everything around it. It's one topic per episode—about frontend, backend, mobile, project management, design, entrepreneurship, whatever. If it's geeky, it fits. Today we're going to be talking about being a freelance web developer, freelance contractor, and what it is that I expect from you as a business owner when you're doing that. I'm also going to turn off the fan so you don't hear the noise in the background. At Tighten we often hit spots where we have too much work, too much stuff on our plate. Sometimes we'll just say no to clients, but sometimes we'll say yes to a project or we'll just need a little bit more, and we'll turn to freelance contractors to help round it out a little bit, because what we don't want to do is, at that point, hire someone then realize that it was just a temporary kind of boost in the amount of work we're getting. Instead, we bring on freelance contractors to help us do work. These are varying from random freelance contractors we found on the internet somewhere to completely famous freelance contractors who are big names in the PHP or frontend space or whatever else it ends up being. The weird thing is, we have had far more negative experiences than we have had positive. Far more people where I say, "What is going on? How do you not know how to manage your business? How do you not know how to be a grown-up? How do you not know how to communicate to me?" Well, what I've discovered is that the number one problem that we have had working with contractors is that they expect to come into our organization as an employee. In some ways that's my fault, because I often say, "Hey, we kind of think of you as an employee while you're here." Because we usually only have them contract basically full time, so I want to know when you're in the office, I want to know when you're out of the office. I want you to do check-ins with me. I want you to feel like you can communicate to me. I want you on our Slack channels, all that kind of stuff. The problem is, they often think that they're employees, in that I'm the one responsible for checking in with them, or I'm the one responsible for setting the list of tasks, or I'm the one responsible for something else. The thing is, the vast majority of contractors we work with are charging anywhere between $100 and $150 bucks an hour (edit: this is not true. A more correct number would be $75 and $125). If I'm paying you far more per hour than I make, then I'm expecting you to do a whole bunch of work for me, right? I'm not expecting to pay you a whole bunch of money for you then to just sit there and wait for me to tell you what to do, or wait for me to check in on you, or babysit what you're doing. That's not acceptable. I think that ... This is not acceptable for me. Maybe that's how it works with other companies. I think that there's a misconception for a lot of folks who are freelance contractors that the process of choosing to be a freelance contractor and charging much higher rates than you would, whatever else, is really just you ... Like we're paying for the value of having somebody to flesh out our team when we didn't have the resources to do it, and that's why the cost is extra or whatever. That's definitely true. You know, if I didn't have somebody to do that, then I would have to do the work, or I'd have to turn down work, or whatever it ends up being, so there's definitely value there. I also think that it is the value of paying someone who's supposed to be a self-sufficient work-doing resource. Self-sufficient in that they handle their own finances, and they handle their own accounting, and they handle their own timeline. The whole concept of ... At least in the US, the difference between a W-2 employee, which is like a full time employee, and a 1099 employee is that you can't really tell the 1099 employee, like legally, ethically, or technically or whatever, you can't tell them exactly when to do it or where to work from or what stuff to do. You really could just tell them, "Here are the things I need done, and here's the timeline in which I need them done. Here are some conditions around it." Some of the conditions are, you can be like, "Well, you need to check in with me every week to show me what you're doing." Or, "I need to know that you're going to use this particular programming technique versus that, because it will affect the final outcome." That's cool, but you can't tell them, "You know, you need to work these hours at this place using this laptop," or something like that. You can't do that. For me, I embrace that. I say, "Look, I'm not telling you that you need to do it a certain way, but I am telling you that I need a certain level of communication. I need a certain output. I need it do

Understanding the end goals--the motivation--of your clients, or yourself, allow you to make the small decisions in ways that serve the goal, rather than potentially fighting it.

Spoiling yourself to avoid burnout

Small, measurable, manageable commitments help people like me move toward their goals. Transcript: Hi, I'm your host, Matt Stauffer, and this is Episode 91 of The Five Minute Geek Show, a weekly show about development and everything around it. It's one topic per episode about front end, back end, mobile project management, design, entrepreneurship, whatever. If it's geeky it fits. Today we're going to be talking about goals and commitments. I know a lot of people who really value the idea of setting goals and measuring your, long goals. I have a lot of friends who really care about analyzing others. The word that they use for it I forget but basically having metrics about everything you do, how often I eat that, how often I do that. I do some of those things. I've been tracking my food and calories through either ... I think the old one was called Calorie Counter and the new one's called My Fitness Pal for years. It really helps me have a good understanding of what my health is like and everything so I'm very thankful for those things. One of the things that I've noticed is a lot of those folks who think deeply about journaling and planning, executing, all that kind of stuff, they all talk about setting goals. If you haven't had some teacher or parent or someone at some point in your life tell you you need to set goals I'd be extremely surprised. Why is it that people like me have so much ... Okay. I have a lot of trouble setting and focusing on goals. I set them and they're really great and a nice idea but some of the things I run into are first, it's really hard to predict what my goals should be. It's like how much should I increase sales by? Well, I guess 10%. Is that realistic? Is that good? Is that bad? How do I really know, I've just kind of made up things. It's good to focus on those made up things but often it's just hard for me to really use them as motivation. Additionally, the hardest part for me is that they're not present. Unless you do a really good job of keeping them at the forefront of your mind or checking in on them regularly or whatever else which I don't do you set the goal and then you feel guilty when you had forgot about it for three months. That's not to say that goals are bad but if you're like me you might find that there's something a little bit better which is small, measurable commitments. Instead of saying, "I'm going to set a goal to lose a certain amount of weight." Instead make a commitment, "I'm going to make a commitment that I'm going to cap my food at 1800 calories a day." "The source of my calories is going to be 40% protein." "I'm going to make a commitment that I'm going to make 10,000 steps everyday." What that ends up meaning is when I have that doughnut in the morning that means in the end of the day I'm scrambling a little bit to figure out how am I going to get my protein in or the next day when I feel really bad about that it's going to motivate me to be less likely to have that doughnut. When it's the end of the day and I've only hit 7,000 steps and I want to go to sleep I say, "Hey, I made a commitment." My wife knows that I made that commitment and so she's okay when I, like a crazy person, go walk around in circles in my neighborhood for 45 minutes to get my steps. Those commitments are easy to make because I say, "I committed to do this thing, therefore I'm going to do it." It's easy to justify the decisions in response to it because it's very hard both to myself and to other people to say, "Well, I need to lose weight. Therefore, I'm going to go walk." That's definitely, it's a true thing but it's vague, it's very distant, and it's very easy to justify away. "Well, I can just skip walking this time, I can just whatever. How much is it really going to matter? I'm already making progress, blah, blah, blah"... but... "I committed to walking 10,000 steps everyday." You don't justify that away. If you don't make 10,000 steps that day it's because you're breaking your commitment. That's not like you should feel guilty or whatever but it's much closer to the wire thing to fulfill. "I committed to 10,000 steps today, I'm going to do 10,000 steps today, that's it." My hope is that I make commitments that are in line with my values. My value isn't actually losing weight, it's just being healthy. I just want to give examples of things that are maybe small, measurable, and very clear when you broke them in the moment, in the immediate space. Commitments might be a good way to reach goals. By doing that I now have to worry less about being able to predict what my goals should be in the future. I have to more just say what are healthy decisions to make that are in the same direction as that goal. With my physical health it's very easy because I know what things are healthy. With things that are a little more abstract sometimes it's a little bit tougher. What are the thi

It turns out, it's perfectly OK to specialize in a certain tech. Who knew! Tighten

Whether it's getting a new job, launching a product, or finding new business, the things you'll need in the future require you to plan now.

Notes: Equality vs Equity Graphic The New Jim Crow Carlos Doesn't Remember - The Revisionist History Podcast Transcription: Hi. I'm your host Matt Stauffer, and this is episode 88 of The Five Minute Geek Show, a weekly show about development and everything around it. It's one topic per episode about front end, back end, mobile, project management, design, entrepreneurship, whatever. If it's geeky, it fits. Today, we're going to be talking about diversity in hiring. So what I mean by that is: I own a business, I co-own a web development business, and I also care deeply about equality, equity, diversity, and opportunities being given to people who don't have so many opportunities. I'm highly aware of the fact that as a white American male--Christian, straight--I have basically the best gig there is. It's very difficult for someone to have it better than me. By this I don't mean, like, "My life is great, and your life is bad." I mean: I have privilege, and I have power, and I have all sorts of things going for me. I've talked a lot about this before a lot. I was on a call with some friends the other day who are also business owners, and in our conversation I found words for something for the first time, and wanted to share it. It's really helpful for me to think it through. We were talking about diversity in hiring, talking about this question: "How do you hire either employees or contractors in a way that works towards bringing about a more equitable world?" I think the first step we tend to take is saying, "How do we do more diverse hiring? How do I make my company not just a whole bunch of white dudes?" This is okay. This is a good start. Diversity for the sake of diversity is a good thing, but I think it's a too-basic understanding of it; "I have all white dudes. That's not the way it's supposed to be, therefore I will change it." Let's talk about moving past just that. One of the more important things to do next is to ask yourselves questions along the lines of, "What is the reason that I want diversity, and what is the reason I don't have diversity right now the people I work with?" You'll start getting into interesting questions--talking about how common it is to hire people we already know, seeing what people's pre-existing friend networks do for them. One thing you'll often notice is that people who have a lot of power, and privilege, and networks, tend to get internships or first jobs based on relationships with friends. Maybe your dad's college buddy has an agency, so you intern with him, and that's an opportunity that other people don't have. You get to go to college, and your parents pay for your college, and so you can go to college for 4 years without having to work, and so you get opportunities while you're there. Whatever it ends up being. Heck, just the entire concept of the unpaid internship is very limited to people with a lot of money or ability in the first place. There's all these things that come into that kind of conversation. Let's also notice that we have primarily white male business owners. People in general, not just White people, have networks that generally reflect their ethnicity. White people in the US are more guilty of having networks that only reflect their ethnicity than anybody else, but everybody's guilty of it. And maybe it's not even "guilty." It's just life. And with that being the case, if you're hiring the people you know, or you're hiring the people you run into more often, or a little more subconsciously, nefariously, if you're hiring the people who are more like you and make you more comfortable, then that's going to have a lot of influence on who you have working with you. We've got to have the conversation about this. I hope we will choose to say, first, "I want my company to be more diverse"... but hopefully also, second, "That is the case not just because I feel some external pressure, but because I recognize that having people that are different than me on my company is good for my company, and I recognize that there's people in my country who have less opportunities, and I want to be a part of bringing about equity. I want to bring about justice." This is good. If you've never heard of the term "equity", and you wonder why I'm using it instead of "equality", I'll link a graphic in the show notes that explains it really well. Basically, the difference between equity and equality is, equality means treating everybody the same. A lot of people come out of, let's say, 500 years of racist United States history, and say, "Okay, that was bad. Now everybody should be treated the same." That's equality. The problem with equality is it's assuming that everybody has an equal playing field. All you have to do to be equal, to treat people well, is to give everybody the same thing. Equity says, "Whoa. 500 years of difference makes 500 years of difference. We

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