Author: Joel Gross

Joel Gross is the CEO of Coalition Technologies.

Weekend

I spent 14 hours this weekend debugging an application built by someone else. I couldn’t even get it properly installed! Super frustrating, but I did learn a decent amount of system administration related stuff. Hopefully my pain will help me in the future.

Tools vs Teams

I have spent quite a bit of time and effort lately developing tools for Coalition. The trade off for this is that I have not been able to spend as much time directly with my teams and clients. I need to make an effort to spend more time there as I feel I may be getting diminishing returns on my tool suite and a lot of good would come from more face time with my team.

Work

Most people complain about their job, but it seems like having a job is pretty important to giving people meaning and purpose in their lives.

Going on vacation for a few days is a great feeling, but not having work on a daily basis longer than that is depressing. People who are long term unemployed or retired have much higher rates of depression than those who work.… read more “Work”

Laravel

I am in love with the Laravel framework! It greatly simplifies PHP development and deployment. I have built two custom web applications on it so far, one for training and one for recruiting.

Training Web Application

While on vacation, I built a training web application for my team at Coalition in Php / MySQL using the Laravel framework. I am pretty proud of it! It allows for the creation of lesson material of any type (videos, links, html, text content, etc) and the creation of multiple choice questions that are automatically graded, text questions, and feedback on the lesson.… read more “Training Web Application”