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How To Series: Standard Work Week

How many hours should employees expect to work per week? According to Jason Fried of Basecamp, 40 hours per week is more than enough . There are countless studies that have found that employees working more than 40 hours per week on a sustained basis see their productivity dwindle. I would expect that it is also a leading cause of burnout of employees. Who wants a workforce of overworked, burnt out, and tired employees that keep seeing their performance dwindle over time?

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How Not To: Normal Working Hours

I was working at a company that was extremely strict about ensuring that their employees were working between 8am and 5pm during the week, and I had taken a Friday and a Monday off to enjoy some much needed relaxation away from work. I returned on Tuesday morning to discover that there were multiple customer emergencies that had to be taken care of, and would require working extra hours to be able to coordinate addressing the issue with outside consultants with minimal impact to the customer’s business.

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New How Not To Series

Welcome to the newest series on The Geek Speaks, How Not To. The focus of this series will be to highlight some of the things that should be avoided when running development teams. It is from a developer’s perspective that has spent time working extensively in support, product management, and team leadership, and will cover some of the things that I have seen companies do poorly. In addition, I will also highlight some of the things that you can do that undermine the things you can do well as seen in the How To Series.

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New How To Series

Welcome to the newest series on The Geek Speaks, How To. The focus of this series will be to highlight some of the best practices for how to run development teams. It is from a developer’s perspective that has spent time working extensively in support, product management, and team leadership, and will cover some of the things that I have seen companies do well. In addition, I will also highlight some of the things that you can do to counteract those things you shouldn’t be doing, as seen in the How Not To series.

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A Look Back at 2020

What a year it was. 2020 was a year that we will all look back on as being completely unique. As far as memorable years, it’s right up there with the events of September 11, 2001, though these events have persisted for the majority of the year instead of a more focused impact. Professional When I look back at everything that happened professionally, it truly is a lot. After starting the year working through the final days of removing a member of my team, which had all its own challenges related to interpersonal relationships and stressors that the process wasn’t happening as fast as I and other members of the team would have preferred.

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Why Netlify?

When it comes to hosting for static sites like this one, that uses Hugo, there are a few options out there now. It used to be that the default answer was to use GitHub Pages and Jekyll to host your site. There weren’t many well publicized alternatives out there that allowed you to host it all for free. Add in CloudFlare in front of GitHub Pages, and you had a well protected site that would be able to weather most issues, and be performant for most users.

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Goodbye Jekyll, Hello Hugo

If you’ve been paying attention to this site, you would have noticed that the blog has been going through some updates for a while. Hopefully those are taken care of for the moment, but the biggest thing thats changed is the platform running the site. This started out as a self-hosted Ghost site, then a GhostPro site, and then a site running on GitHub Pages via Jekyll. However, due to the requirements of site previews and building Jekyll locally, it’s caused updates to be more difficult than they should be.

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When Should I Use Magento 2 Helpers?

When Should I Use Magento 2 Helpers?

One of the objects that developers familiar with Magento 1 will instantly recognize are helpers. When working with Magento 1, helpers proved to be a special type of object that looked similar in invocation to a singleton, but in reality it was more of a lazy way to share functionality between multiple locations. The main benefit to using a helper in Magento 1 is that it made it easier to access the __ function for translations and it was directly accessible from the template files .

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The Magento 2 Learning Curve

The learning curve for various products and platforms tends to vary greatly depending on the complexity of the system you are learning. For example, people that understand how to use the internet and communicate online via email or Facebook are generally able to figure out how to work with Twitter without much of an issue. On the other hand, when you are looking at the learning curve for designing airplanes that are able to carry people, it should be much more difficult to understand how to start as compared to starting to use Twitter.

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The Best Way to Learn Magento 2

The very best way that I have found to figure out how to develop with Magento 2 is to write unit tests for a module. It not only requires you to figure out how to work with phpunit, but to also look at the existing codebase for examples of how the Magento 2 team works with the same objects and handles the same kinds of tasks. Once I wrote a full set of unit tests for my first Magento 2 module, I felt that I had a much better grasp of the workings of Magento 2 than I did before I started writing the unit tests.

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