Speaking in Frederick, MD on March 3, 2015

February 16, 2015

I’m going to be speaking to the Frederick Web Tech group, in Frederick, Maryland, on Tuesday, March 3, 2015. The event is free, and if you’re in the greater Maryland-Washington, D.C.-Virginia-Pennsylvania-West Virginia-Delaware (why not?) area, I encourage you to come out. It’s going to be a cozy affair, with pizza and beer!

The specific presentation I’m doing is “How To Get There”, first given at the Northeast PHP 2013 conference, and revised as a keynote for php[tech] 2014 in Chicago. This is a motivational-type speech, in which I lay out the attitudes and behaviors you need in order to achieve your personal and professional goals. The official talk description is below.

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What is Larry Thinking? #75 => Freelancing, Part 2

January 19, 2015

This is the second of a three-part series on freelancing. In the first, I wrote about getting started freelancing. In this one, I’m focusing on working with clients. In the third, I look at the actual day-to-day of freelancing.

As always, questions, comments, and all feedback are much appreciated. If you have any specific thoughts, resources, or stories about freelancing, please let me know so I can include them in Part 3.

And thanks for your interest in what I have to say and do!

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“The Yii Book” Now at larry.pub!

January 13, 2015

About a week later than I would have liked, I’m happy to say that “The Yii Book” now has a new home at larry.pub. If you’re an existing customer, your existing account information should work there. If you have any problems at all, please let me know.

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“The Yii Book”, complete version 1, done! (Finally!)

December 22, 2014

Why…Hello! I am very pleased, and elated, and relieved (mostly relieved) to say that the first edition (i.e., for Yii 1) of “The Yii Book” is finally, finally, finally! done. I posted it earlier today. I’m going to skip the obligatory–and deserved–“OMG I’m sorry it took so long” and get onto the “What’s next?”.

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Git for Technical Writers

December 1, 2014

I was fairly slow to adopt Git (having been raised on other version control tools), but, needless to say and like most of us, it’s now a daily component of my work flow. And certainly using Git myself is a much different beast than using Git in a massive organization with hundreds of engineers all working from the same code base. Which is to say: there’s still plenty of room for my Git skills to grow.

Recently, though, I’ve come to appreciate another value of Git, which hadn’t previously crossed my mind or been written about elsewhere (such that I’ve seen):

Git is a valuable tool for technical writers.
One interpretation of that sentence is that you can use Git to manage revisions to a document. Sure. That’s completely logical and not surprising. But I’ve found something more nuanced in my Git usage as a technical writer.

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