It's hard to believe, but the last Q&A episode was published over two years ago. Let's fix that with a new 2022 edition. I'll answer a wide variety of questions, such as: how to initially plan a business, are lifetime accounts are worth offering, why aren't there dedicated Laracasts apps, how to avoid content creator burnout, and more. 

I often hear about flat organizational structures and how they lead to more autonomy and better collaboration. That could be true! It sounds appealing. But my worry is: don't you lose the zoomed out perspective in the process? From my experiences, that multi-focus hierarchy is essential.

For a number of years now, I've found myself quietly mumbling the words, "Don't participate," every time I feel the need to insert myself into events or conversations that have nothing to do with me. It works wonders. Nearly every time, I delete the draft and get back to work.

In this episode, I take some time to ponder over which programming bullet points I wish had been drilled into me more in the early days of my learning. We'll discuss the psychology of learning, design patterns, SOLID, and, of course, the never-ending river of programming opinions.

It's far too easy for developers to fall into a trap of never shipping new code to production. "It's not ready," we tell ourselves. "Just one more month to clean things up, and then we'll push it up." But if you're not careful, there will always be a reason why it's still not ready. In this episode, we discuss habit building and why it's necessary to not be a perfectionist. 

If you've worked in programming spaces for any period of time, you will surely have heard the advice, "It's better to go slow than fast." We all instinctively knows this, and, yet, we're simultaneously obsessed with optimizing every facet of our workflow. 

Whenever I ask a slightly controversial programming question, the responses often take one of three shapes. Let's talk about each of them in this episode, before taking a few moments to discuss why it's so important to play gracefully with ideas.

Every time I learn something new, I have to re-remind to trust the process. I'm not sure why. That feeling of "I can't" never goes away. You would think we'd eventually make the connection that if you work on something a little bit today, and a little more tomorrow, you'll eventually become quite skilled. And, yet, why do I always begin the learning phase with a hesitation that says, "You'll never be able to do this."

In this episode, we discuss the three-month process of converting Laracasts to a single-page application with Inertia.js.

It has occurred to me that I might have made some teaching mistakes in the past. Learning sticks when it can immediately be applied to a particular task or need you have. If you don't have an immediate use case, it might as well go in one ear, and out the other. It's not going to stick.