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I often get asked questions like:

What should I learn next to level up in my career?

What backend skills am I missing that I need to be a senior engineer?

How do I break into my first tech role?

Ever wish you had a clear roadmap for learning backend development?

Yeah, me too.

If so, this guide is for you!

Software engineering often changes quickly.

There have been many times in my career that I felt like I was falling behind. I needed to quickly learn a new technology at a job I just landed, or I was working on a new project that required a new library I hadn’t used yet.

I’m going to share how I’ve overcome these issues and learned many things very quickly either on the job, or even for a new job I just landed.

The article details how to learn something quickly, step by step.

That’s the question I asked myself and my manager last year. It ended up taking me about 6 months of hard work to grow into the tech lead role. Now, a year into being a tech lead, its become more clear to me the skills needed to be successful. I want to share them with you...

Has anyone else ran across this before?

WordPress is the most popular Content Management System to date. But is it really up to the task of managing your website? Over the last several articles we have looked at several main problems of WordPress including WYSIWYG Editors, Not enough control over document structure, and a somewhat confusing admin panel.

In this article we are going to look at some ways we can improve WordPress to make it way more user-friendly for content editors and business owners.

So let’s jump right in and look at 6 ways that we can improve the editing experience of this awesome Content Management System known as WordPress... http://www.webinsation.com/wordpress-reimagined-in-a-more-us...

Last week, we talked about several specific problems with WordPress. I know I said this week we were going to look at some solutions. But in thinking about the problems mentioned, I realized that it was more important to first go over some key user experience (UX) principles before discussing specific solutions.

So this week we will look at what an optimal CMS user experience should look like. We’ll outline the groundwork needed to create a really good editing experience in WordPress, and any other CMS.

Keep reading... http://www.webinsation.com/what-does-an-optimal-cms-user-exp...

Thanks for your thoughts. I agree that WordPress is very powerful from a sysadmin point of view. I also mention in my article that I'm not necessarily suggesting that things need to be fixed on the back end. However, from a Client front end editing perspective some things need to be made a lot simpler and easier.

Also, there need's to be a way for us as developers to create more complex layouts like 3-Column responsive designs, parallax scrolling sites etc.

I'll be sharing more of my ideas for WordPress and what we as designers/developers can do to help WordPress be a better solution for our Clients over the next several weeks.

I'm interested to hear what some of the code bugs are that need to be worked out.

That's great to hear that Concrete5 is working so well for you! I'd be interested to hear more about the "inline" editing feature.

According to Forbes, WordPress powers one of every 6 websites on the Internet, nearly 60 million in all, with 100,000 more popping up each day. But have you ever taken time to think about how WordPress manages content. Not only from an editing perspective but also from a design perspective.

This article has come about from years of experience with WordPress, talking and working with multiple Clients, and even being inspired from other innovative products – like Square. One of the things that really strikes me about Square is that they are so focused on their users. They are focused on completely rethinking how payments are done in order to make them beautiful and easy to use.

Let’s think about the WordPress Admin – is it focused on its users; is it easy to use; is it breathtaking? I think we’ll all agree that it could use some work in these areas.

Today WordPress powers one of every 6 websites on the Internet, nearly 60 million in all, with 100,000 more popping up each day.

But have you ever taken time to think about how it manages content from a design and a Client perspective?

Let’s think about the WordPress Admin – is it focused on its users; is it easy to use; is it breathtaking? I think we’ll all agree that it could use some work in these areas.

Some of these issues are related to the Client experience, and some are related to our design process. All these problems are related in one way or another to user experience. Before we dive into the problems of WordPress, please understand that I’m not suggesting that we need to throw WordPress away and develop a radically different CMS. Nor am I necessarily suggesting that these problems should be fixed and embedded into the next core version of WordPress.

What I am suggesting is that we as developers, designers, programmers, (really) “Solutions Managers” need to look at these problems and develop a creative solution for them. So read on, and put your creative hat on – you’ll need it!

Is Design Just a Veneer? The question often comes up in different conversations between designers, developers and clients of "What is Design"?

Is it just a Veneer - something that is "slapped" on after the website or app has been built? Is it simply copying other beautiful designs and pasting your own logo and colors into it?

I've written an article on this topic that I hope you'll take some time to read and think about. And then I really want to hear your thoughts on this topic. What does design mean to you? What does it encompass? http://www.webinsation.com/design-is-not-just-a-veneer/

Looking forward to hearing from you! -Caleb