Category: work

Tips for Addressing a Virtual Audience
08 August 2013

As a conference speaker, I've read the books on how to be a good conference speaker, and coached quite a few people to raise their skills in this area too. However recently I've been meeting more virtual audiences, both delivering virtual training and doing virtual events such as DayCamp4Developers, and I thought I'd share my take on what works well in a setting where people can see your slides, and hear your voice ... and nothing more.

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The Mathematics of Recruitment and Training
22 April 2013

The PHP jobs market is hot, very many people find it hard to recruit the skilled staff that they need to achieve the goals of their organisation. I meet a wide variety of organisations in this technology space, and they all tell me the same story: it's really difficult to get good, qualified people. And I believe that this is true, I know plenty of developers too and although I'll usually try to put people in touch where it makes sense to do so, it's not as if there is a great reservoir of hidden PHP talent somewhere.

This isn't a rant about salaries, the skills of new graduates, or the trials of dealing with recruiters, although each of those is worth a post in itself. It's about the mathematics of providing your organisation with the talent it needs at the time that it needs it.

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How To Write 800 Blog Posts
25 February 2013

This is the 800th published post on lornajane.net. It's my personal blog and I started it in early 2006, when I moved to a new city with no job. I think I got the blogging bug just because I had nobody else to talk to at the time! Over the years the blog has recorded recipes, craft projects, the story of buying and refurbishing the house (a decision that a previous employer described as "brave") - and of course the vast swathes of technical snippets that are the regular content you see here.

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Study Days: Keeping on Top of the New Shiny
14 February 2013

One of the biggest dangers in this industry is getting left behind as the tools evolve very quickly. For me, working alone or as the most senior person on a project in most cases, this becomes doubly hard as there's nobody in my office to show me a new trick or share an idea that he or she learned in a previous job. So how do I deal with this?

I take "study days".

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Learning to Speak
11 February 2013

I don't mean learning to talk, I mean learning to address an audience, coherently and without dying of fright (actually I think I have clinically proven that it isn't possible to actually stop living as a result of fright). There are a couple of things that I'm involved with that may help you, if you're looking to improve your successes in this area.

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Teaching Those Beginning The Journey
09 November 2012

Becoming a master developer is like becoming a master craftsman; you just can't rush the process. You learn the basics, apply those skills, and over time master them and adapt them to be your own. As time goes on, you take on bigger and more complicated tasks, and apply appropriate skills to those, and so on. Our journey as developers is really much the same and yet sometimes I feel that we don't help those at the very start of the journey as much as we could.

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Which Basket Should A Developer Put Their Eggs In?
10 January 2012

The situation goes like this. Lots of excellent, capable people have great ideas for new software products. They are bootstrapping their venture, so they look for a developer who wants to give some time up front and receive a fair (let's assume fair) share of the rewards once the product …
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Is This Marketing?
07 December 2011

Last year, someone asked me what I'd chosen for the company Christmas cards (I was relatively newly self-employed at the time). The idea of company Christmas cards had not even crossed my mind, but that conversation stayed with me and this winter, I picked a photo I took last winter, and uploaded it to moo.com, producing this:

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Celebrating One Year in Business
25 July 2011

A year ago, I left my job at Ibuildings and went freelance. At the time, I didn't really know what I wanted to do next, and I was excited about the opportunity to try out a few different things. I blogged about my new (ad)venture when I launched it, but I haven't written much since and people keep asking me for updates - the anniversary seems like a good time to reflect.

Well, I still don't know what I want to do next, but that seems like less of a problem these days. I'm busy but in a planned-in-advance, only wearing myself down because there was something so exciting I couldn't say no, kind of a way. I am not a great fan of travel, and have always tried to avoid it, but in fact so many interesting things came up this year that I ended up on the road more than ever. It turns out that there is a world of difference between being sent somewhere on short notice, and planning a series of interesting professional engagements that just happen to involve being away from home a lot all at once. And if I don't want to go: I don't go. It's amazing how many people will wait til next month if you ask them!

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A Book Burndown Chart
21 July 2011

You might have noticed that things have been a bit quiet around here lately ... that's because I'm writing a book and doing a lot of editing at the moment. I love doing both of these as part of my work, but it turns out that when you're already writing/editing …
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Time Tracking with Harvest
20 January 2011

Since I started working for myself almost 6 months ago, I've had to get to grips with running a company myself, and I must admit that the paperwork was one thing that stopped me from making this move sooner! I've kept everything in order and I'd like to mention one tool which has helped me hugely with that: Harvest.

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360 Degree Feedback
17 November 2010

I mentioned the 360 Degree Feedback Technique during my keynote at PHPNW10 and had many comments and questions about it since, so I thought I'd post about it in more detail

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