Guess I’m guilty of not “dogfooding” enough and I should spend more time actually reading articles on the site here.

I was shocked when I saw this load time for www.jeffsteinke.com tonight:

not the best screenshot but we were seeing 30-60+ second page load times. gross.

So I got to work and did a bit of tuning. I’m not an expert though so wanted to share what I did, what I learned, and leave room for additional ideas.

  1. First, I learned what TTFB is (hint: time to first byte).
  2. Looks like I can improve TTFB by using a WordPress caching plugin. Here are some options.
  3. Ended up choosing WP Super Cache…because turns out I already had the plugin installed, but deactivated. Who knows why?!?
  4. Decided to look up my hosting details on DreamHost and compare to other options like WPEngine and Kinsta.
  5. In the process noticed that I didn’t have SSL on. Whoops! Should be fixed shortly.
  6. Deactivated and deleted plugins I wasn’t using.
  7. Turned off the Jetpack Admin Bar, which was throwing a nasty, page-load-time wasting error of its own

The result?

3-4 seconds…much better. Sure there’s plenty of room for improvement still but this is still just a lowly old blog.

The wp-admin portal is still slow (this is where you can write posts, etc) but I can at least put up with that for the time being as it only impacts me.

If you’re still seeing anything slow on your end let me know. Always open to other ideas and recommendations…

Recently our team gave a round of customer feedback demos to some customers, showing off a completely redesigned eVestment Input portal.

On the surface everything went perfect. After all, the users had consistently praised the new look. All our hard work had paid off.

If you looked closer though, we didn’t actually learn that much. Responses were generic & unactionable. And while positive, there wasn’t any hard evidence to back it the good things we hear. Instead, this became a good opportunity share some best practices on how to capture great customer feedback.

feedback

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Employment at Will and Right to Work are often mixed up and confused.

Here’s a quick overview of both and how to distinguish them from each other.

Employment at Will

Think of it as: You can be fired without cause

Employment at will means that an employer can terminate an employee for any reason they want, as long as it’s not an illegal cause. Good cause, bad cause, or no cause at all, you can get laid off.
report
If you crushed your recent TPS report, you can still get fired. If you mailed it in and did a poor job, you can get fired. The other way to look at it is that you, as the employee, can also leave the employment relationship without cause.

Exceptions

The only cases you can’t get fired for are illegal ones, such as for race, sex, religion, age, etc. Another common exception to at-will employment is if the written contract of employment is for a defined duration.

Similarly, the practice of giving two-weeks’ notice is not required by law (as long as your employment contract doesn’t have a specified duration). Then again, remember the impacts and consequences of not doing so, such as asking for a future reference from your previous employer.

Here in Georgia we are an at-will employment state.

Right to Work

Think of it as: You can’t be forced to join a Union

Georgia is also a Right to Work state. Right to Work is often confused with At-Will Employment but is much different.

In essence Right to Work means that you can’t be forced to join a union to work at your company.

right to work picketing union

Why Right to Work Laws Exist

Proponents of Right to Work laws argue they are pro-business. By not allowing union mandated membership, companies can be more competitive. In theory unions hurt economic growth so in turn the economy as a whole gains from a freer business environment with things like more competition, more jobs, etc.

On the other hand, opponents of Right to Work laws argue that without unions, employees see decreased wages and benefits. In addition, in theory companies maintain too much control, as compared to the employee, in a Right to Work state.

Many cities have been actively campaigning against Uber for various reasons in favor of the existing Taxi Cab networks. At times it’s resulted in Uber being blocked in some parts of the city, or some services (such as UberX), or being kicked out altogether.

Yet I recently saw an article, Show Me the Way to Go Home: An Empirical Investigation of Ride Sharing and Alcohol Related Motor Vehicle Homicide, which confirmed what myself and likely you have also suspected. In short, it found:

A significant drop in the rate of homicides [arises] after the introduction of Uber.

The article also confirmed that educational institutions have yet to adopt click bait headlines.

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I see more and more SaaS companies adopting use of the Net Promoter Score (NPS) metric.

If you don’t know yet what I’m talking about, you’ll surely recognize this survey question:

Net Promoter Score_orig

How likely are you to recommend XYZ product/service/etc to a friend?

Followed by a simple 0 to 10 point scale ranging from Not Likely to Very Likely. NPS is considered one of the best ways to measure customer loyalty and the growth potential of your product.
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Sometimes you can just drop an image right in to your site.

For example, if your image’s background and the site’s background are the same (or even better, the image’s background is transparent) then you’re probably just good-to-go, like this:

Iphone-1

However when you have an image with a different background color,

Various_iPods    Various_iPods

Or especially a changing border background color that’s inconsistent around the four sides,

after
after

A proper border can help create a smooth transition between your image and the rest of the page. It’ll make your post look a lot better without much work at all.

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Let’s try something different here.

On average the posts here are around 1,000 words and come in once a week or so. But what if the posts weren’t quite as involved?

John Carmack explores this idea when he talks about blogging about the little things.

It doesn’t need to be big, significant, detailed, mind-blowing to come out but just of a little value. It is helpful to think just of one person who had the exact same problem as yours and was helped by your post. Maybe the post won’t get thousands of shares as we see in our reading list but hey, it saved someone’s time :).

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