LearnBoost

If you’ve been wondering what I’ve been up to these days, I have some compelling news to share about my company, LearnBoost

I’m excited to announce that my company has raised a seed round of $975K from several leading angels and venture capital firms. Our VC’s are Bessemer Venture Partners, Charles River Ventures, RRE Ventures, and Atlas Ventures. Our angels include Naval Ravikant, Bill Lee, James Hong, Othman Laraki, Karl Jacob, and several other fantastic angels. We’re thrilled this entire group of investors share LearnBoost’s vision for developing free and amazing software for schools.

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Posted in General about 1 month ago

It’s time to vote!

Devthought has made it to the finalists of the WPWebHost competition.

You’ll find it listed under the “Modern and Elegant” category, where Devthought has some strong competition. You might want to check out the other categories, and visit the other contestants’ beautiful websites.

Please vote and spread the love!

This post has 6 responses

Posted in General about 1 year ago

Best Wordpress Design awards

I’m signing up for this Wordpress design competetion, organized by the guys over at WPWebHost team. Only Wordpress-powered sites are elegible, and there are 5 categories with 10 featured sites and 1 winner each.

The winners will be decided by the public, so it’ll be nice if you cast your vote for your all-time favorite Devthought! As for the prizes, winners will get a badge, $200 cash via Paypal, and excellent life-time hosting (which I’d love).

I’m signing up for the Best Modern and Elegant category, which probably also means some strong competition :)

This post has 5 responses

Posted in General about 1 year ago

The four stages of programming competence

One of the basic pillars of the study of human psychology is the analysis of the subconscious and conscious mind. Sigmund Freud was one of the first to clearly identify and characterize the ‘areas’ where our psychic energy flows. During the first part of his notable life he stated that these were the ’subconscious’, ‘preconscious’ and ‘conscious’ mind.

If we wanted to get an idea of how each of them is involved in our ideas, feelings, thoughts, decisions and motivation (which are key in our daily and professional lives), we should picture ourselves as an iceberg. The tip of the iceberg, the only part we see from the surface, is the conscious mind. It’s logical, organized, and we can control it, but still small. The vast and voluminous underlying mass is the unconscious mind. It’s disorganized, illogical, irrational, but defining in how we act.

Modern psychology has attempted to classify how good we are at a certain skill by observing how deep it perforates that iceberg. It thus describes four stages of competence an individual can achieve. In this article I’ll try to apply this simple scheme to the skill we practice everyday: programming.

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Posted in General about 1 year ago

Devthought redesigned

The feeling of upgrading and redesigning your blog is comparable to that of celebrating your son’s first birthday. Although I have to admit I haven’t experienced the latter yet.

For those longtime readers of Devthought, or at least for those who can notice the change, I offer a walkthrough of this long awaited modification.

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This post has 18 responses

Posted in General about 1 year ago

Devthought DNS Poisoned

If you got redirected to a random site during the last couple of hours, please do your best to erase that event from your memory.

This post has 11 responses

Posted in General about 1 year ago

Downtime

I finally migrated from MediaTemple to Joyent, a change I’ve been trying to make for a few months now. I wonder how it’ll work out.

Speaking of change, I’m glad to announce the future availability of WP-o-Matic 1.0 with its new website (which has been in the oven for longer than a year!). You’ll see many new features, bugfixes, and the birth of a great little community.

I’ll be releasing two other small Wordpress plugins that developers will find specially useful. One of them is Base-Plugin, a template plugin architecture aimed to make your own plugins preparation easier. It features a very small template management system, it sets variables and functions that you might find yourself writing over time after time, and more.

And for those who wish to include details about their plugins hosted at Wordpress Extend in their websites, Extendfetch will be nothing short of amazing. It fetches and lets you display the number of downloads, links and it’s dead easy to integrate.

This post has 11 responses

Posted in General about 1 year ago

My birthday

Today, December the 10th, I turn 17. Lots of exciting stuff has happened this year… including being dugg twice, releasing a popular Wordpress plugin and meeting new really cool people.

We’re close to Devthought’s first anniversary too, which will mean an upgrade, a new design, and lots of new stuff. Stay tuned

This post has 20 responses

Posted in General over 2 years ago

Updates coming!

As you see, I haven’t updated in a while – have been quite busy.

I’m glad to announce that I’m working on the following updates, which will be here on Devthought in the next few weeks:

  • WP-o-Matic Stable, with more than 15 bugfixes, and many of the promised features and some that readers suggested.
  • SlideList 2.0 (aka Fancy Menu), more optimised than ever and now with free menu examples. Both vertical and horizontal, text or image based!
  • More cool articles and tutorials!

Stay tuned

This post has 53 responses

Posted in General over 3 years ago