Sarah Savage - A fusion of development and business

Microservices may be dangerous for your team

Last week, Zend by Perforce wrote a blog post about when and how to migrate from a monolithic application to a microservices architecture. For those that haven’t read the post, the TL;DR is that as your application grows, it makes sense to migrate to microservices in order to streamline development. I find this advice to be dangerous, for a number of reasons. Microservices as architecture Microservices were never meant as a purely architectural pattern; rather,… continue reading.

Posted on November 25, 2025 in Best Practices, Community, Development Practices, team management, team organization, teams, Zend Leave a comment

Coding tests as an interview smell

Recently I had an opportunity to interview with a company that I really respected. Normally I wouldn’t consider taking any kind of role or gig (as I run a small business), but the problem space was particularly interesting and the company seemed progressive and unique. But then came the coding test. And I bombed. Hard. It might surprise people that an engineer of my caliber would “fail” a coding test. After all, I have extensive… continue reading.

Posted on November 17, 2025 in Best Practices, Development Practices, coding tests, efficiency, hiring, interview questions, interviews, open source, php Leave a comment

Reset

Sometimes in life it’s important to perform a “reset” and just take a minute to examine where you are and where you want to go. I’m about to embark on a month-long retreat to bolster my mental health and consider what my next steps are as a business owner and person. This retreat will empower me to make better choices, and have direction in my life. It’s important to know where you want to go,… continue reading.

Posted on February 17, 2025 in Personal Leave a comment

Heartbroken

These remarks reflect my personal position alone. They do not reflect the position of AspirePress or anyone else. Today, I am heartbroken. I feel many different emotions. Anger. Fear. Sadness. But most of all, its a feeling of profound loss that breaks my heart. Matt reached out to me on Monday night. I was surprised to hear from him. While I will leave what he said private, I will share the gist of what I… continue reading.

Posted on October 31, 2024 in Personal View all 5 comments

Examples of open source community in action

With as much as has been written about turmoil in the WordPress community, I wanted to take a minute to highlight a contributor in the open source space that truly embodies the open source ethos and a community-driven spirit. Many people who know me know that I have problems with the design of Laravel and I object to things like Active Record and the heavy use of statics and globals. And I know I am… continue reading.

Posted on October 25, 2024 in Community Leave a comment

Who owns WordPress, really?

There is a lot of upheaval in the WordPress community right now. There is talk of forks, and community repositories for packages, and lots of different ways that the community can establish independence from the status quo. But who really owns WordPress? I’m not talking about the licensing here – I’m talking about ownership in the sense of who owns the copyright? Who has authority over the code? For every open source project there are… continue reading.

Posted on October 22, 2024 in Community Leave a comment

Productivity tools I use to stay on track

As a busy business owner and software consultant who has numerous projects on tap at any given time, I’m always working hard to stay on task and focus on what needs doing, at the time it needs to be done. Over the years I have developed a routine that I use to map out exactly what my days will look like, complete with checklists, to-do items, calendars and time blocks. I wanted to share some… continue reading.

Posted on August 13, 2024 in Best Practices, checklist, efficiency, productivity, systems, to-do list Leave a comment

Is there a place for manual testing in software development?

Anyone who has read my work knows that I’m a huge fan of automated testing. I’ve preached automated testing ever since Chris Hartjes (Grumpy Programmer) wrote about it years ago. He converted me, and I have been a dutiful, loyal apostle of the “test everything” movement for years. Similarly, I’ve long been a faithful proponent of code review to catch bugs and improve development processes. But what happens when automated testing and code review fall… continue reading.

Posted on August 5, 2024 in Best Practices, cicd, code review, consistency, error, failure, mistake, production, staging, testing Leave a comment

Makefiles make life easier

Web developers have long sought ways to make their projects easier to run, maintain and work with. From console apps like Composer and Artisan to custom implementations using things like Symfony Console, there’s a myriad of development tools aimed at running commonly needed commands like resetting a database or seeding information. All of these tools, however, depend on a common set of things: the presence of PHP on the system OR access to a system… continue reading.

Posted on July 30, 2024 in Best Practices, gnu make, make, makefile, shell Leave a comment

Mental health in tech

I’m not ashamed to admit the fact that I struggle with my mental health. Mental health issues are common among technology professionals. Perhaps this is even more common than in the general population, though I do not have any statistics to back this up. What I can say for certain, though, is that the technology world is not conducive to great mental health: we put incredible pressure on developers to deliver the impossible in unrealistic… continue reading.

Posted on July 16, 2024 in Community Leave a comment