Tech Pick
I’ve been making slow glacial progress (due to everything else in my life) in learning Laravel while working on a side project. As part of this, I’ve been listening to lots of PHP and Laravel podcasts. Twenty Percent Time is a new-ish podcast where two developers from Tighten (Caleb Porzio and Daniel Coulbourne) discuss various programming topics that typically revolve around Laravel. On the latest episode, Caleb verbalized something that I’ve fundamentally believed in for a long time though I didn’t have the words for it. Here is what he said:
“You can be an unbelievable super successful super smart great Laravel developer and know nothing but the Laravel docs and use nothing but the built-in Laravel things. You don’t have to learn design patterns…you don’t have to learn the internals of how everything works…it’s kind of crazy, but that is the path to mastery. The path to mastery is knowing how to use the tools really well, just using the tools that are in the docs.”
Beyond learning Laravel, I think that Caleb’s quote is significant for those of us that get super-involved in learning about the latest ‘shiny’ thing, rather than learn a few tools well to create something.
Media Pick
I can’t recall a time in my life when political polarization was greater than it is now. I’ve recently come across a constructive podcast (“What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law”) covering our president in the context of constitutional law. It fits my ‘learn by example’ style, and it is a fantastic study of our country’s constitution.
Random
- I bought a Drobo 5N last November during a black Friday sale. I didn’t get to unbox it until a month ago (lesson learned – test hardware as soon as possible; I knew this, but life has been busy). Within a few days, I found that my Drobo was a dud. Fortunately, Drobo’s diagnostics in combination with Drobo support has been excellent so far, and I have a replacement coming. Hopefully, I’ll experience the Drobo difference soon :-).
- I’ve had lots of emails with OmniFocus support about the last corruption. This infrequent/intermittent bug got even escalated to an OmniFocus engineer. Their support has continued to be stellar.
Thoughts? Feedback? Let me know: @eli4d on Twitter
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