Up, Up & Away

Remote conferences are not conferences

If burned out on legacy Magento codebase consider working with more modern codebase with better tooling.

Review Pomodus - death by 1000 notifications

Making connections before a conference

Approaching people at conferences https://twitter.com/thescottsb/status/1196228004625686531

Prepay. Shouldn’t be in business of financing.

How to socialize at conferences - ask questions, follow a system

Most devs aren't working async. Especially remote. Follow up to yesterday’s thing on notifications

Magezine swag

Conditioning and boundaries for async work / flow state

"For all-remote companies, leaders should not expect informal communication to happen naturally" https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/informal-communication/

When it comes to determining salaries when hiring remote workers, one thing that people struggle with is romanticizing the past. Gary Vaynerchuk brings up this idea in a different context—advertising costs on social media. People romanticize the past when ad costs were lower. I think there’s a similar dynamic when it comes to hiring remotely. Five years ago a company could find a great developer in Latin America or Eastern Europe for $25-$30,000. Now, you’ll need to pay more in the $50-$70,000 range to secure the best talent. It’s easy to think of that salary as insane, especially if you found someone in that lower range just a few years ago. But you have to keep in mind that everything changes; salaries increase over time, and what was true five years ago isn’t true today. If you’re you’re struggling with the quality of work in your remote team, it might be that your salaries are too low to attract and keep the highest quality developers. The best talent has leveled up, partially because there has

As your company grows, it’s important to have one on ones with your team. Growth is a great thing, but you need to work to keep open lines of communication. Checking in with your team members to see how they are doing and to make sure that they are growing the way they want to be growing helps keep employees engaged and invested. A traditional annual review is probably not frequent enough. In this industry, you see people leaving jobs quickly, often after only about two years. A lot can happen in a year and you don’t want to miss out on chances to interact and guide your employees. I recently saw an app tweeted out by the CEO of Shopify called fellow.app that they use to organize one on ones. It helps you organize and schedule one on ones, suggest topics for discussion during meetings, let your team request feedback, and easily follow up on action items. If you are looking for a tool to make the process more seamless, it might be worth trying. As your company grows, you want to make sure you are growi

A common question I see related to Magento 1 reaching End of Life is whether a store that stays on M1 will automatically fail PCI compliance. I’m not a PCI expert, and don't take any of this as official guidance, but generally the answer is, it depends. Security issues within the Magento world are unacceptably high. The credit agencies that officially look at PCI compliance are undoubtedly aware of that problem. At the end of the day, though, with hundreds of thousands of stores on M1, if it’s passed EOL but the rate of hacks is acceptable, I believe they will continue to accept that business. One of the simplest ways to approach this is to keep the software out of scope for PCI compliance by handling payment processing through a third party. (Honestly you should probably be doing that anyway in most cases, even if you are on an officially supported version of Magento.) Even in-scope software that’s past EOL can be supported. Other parties such as Nexcess can provide official support for M1. To st

Autonomous developers are happy developers by Kalen Jordan

For agencies in the Magento space, getting in front of the Magento sales team is important. I often hear Solutions Partners say that just being in the program isn’t enough to get the leads you want. You really want to get in front of the sales team so that you are top on their minds when leads are coming through, and so they know what your specialties are, and when a referral to you makes sense. A marketing tip I heard from Gary Vaynerchuk lead me to a strategy that can help agencies get in front of the sales team. He suggests running ads targeting employees of a specific company. If you are trying to get a client at a specific company you can use Facebook or LinkedIn to target ads at employees of that company. If you are a Solutions Partner wanting to get in front of the Magento sales team, you can apply this strategy. Run ads targeting the Magento sales team. This gives them the chance to see you and understand what makes you unique so that you come to mind when leads come in. This is a potentially

Firing is BRUTAL...but it's critical by Kalen Jordan

Commuting BLOWS! by Kalen Jordan

How to connect with people on LinkedIn effectively (without spamming!) by Kalen Jordan

One of the hardest things about undertaking a new challenge is not seeing improvement as fast as you want to. This applies to everything — from losing weight to creating an app to starting a business. We’re all naturally gifted in different areas. A personal goal for me right now is losing weight.. But I’m not naturally gifted in fitness the way I am with software, where I can power through and succeed quickly. Even when I’m working hard, I don’t see fast results on the scale. When you start to start to stall out in any challenge, you might have to adjust your expectations to be more realistic and change your mindset about progress. In my early days of starting a business, I had only two customers for a year. Seeing the growth was hard in that situation. When we can’t see progress in a broad scale, we get frustrated. But if you could zoom in and see the minute amount of progress you make you could stay more positive. For example, if you create a new app, you might want thousands of new users in a week.