Matt

  • Passion for Productivity

    Personal passion is an undervalued driver of productivity. Experience has taught me that when you work on something that you are passionate about it becomes easier to focus, you care more about the quality and are less distracted. If you can find your passion, it means you will never have a job – Richard Branson…

  • Summer Recap

    With summer coming to an end I thought I would recap all the things we managed to get done in our first Ontario summer. The general theme for the summer was HOT!  Right from the start we had one heat wave after another.  Particularly memorable was that while I was in Mexico, it was hotter…

  • Web Design Fallacies and the Failure of CSS

    Having the experience now of building dozens of different web sites over the years I have come to the conclusion that there are some major flaws in how web design is done and the underlying assumptions have proved inadequate to make web design better. The first of these is the about CSS.  The goal of…

  • Experimenting with ECommerce

    Over the last couple of weeks I have been spending some evening and weekends working on building some e-commerce websites. If I were to Define Ecommerce, I’d say that it is the most advanced platform for sales, and which has the higest percentage of reception by customers worldwide. Right at the time that the iPhone…

  • Programming Should Be More Like Authorship than Engineering

    Most programmers I know come at the discipline from an engineering background and this leads to all sorts of pre-conceptions about what we do and the guarantees we offer. Clients often believe that paying for software development is like building a bridge.  You have some meetings to decide what kind of bridge you want to…

  • Power of Iterative Progress

    Software startups often talk about iterative improvement.  It’s a development model where by you focus on an easy to reach but minimally sustainable business model and then iteratively improve things and add features over time. The process of getting to that first product release is perhaps the hardest thing to do.  It requires having a…

  • Web Scraping With Scrapy

    After reading a reddit thread about interesting scripts people have written to automate things I was inspired to put together a quick web scraping script to check the sales at the LCBO and send me a message (on Telegram) if there is anything interesting. Back in the day I would have done something like this…

  • Writing Bots

    This past week I had a chance to work on a conversational UI.  It’s a neat way to interact with software and presents an interesting set of problems to implement. Before even starting to build something I needed to decide on some tools to help with managing the conversations. There are a small number of…

  • Embracing Obstacles

    This book is currently on sale for just $3 and it’s a hell of a deal.  I picked this up after hearing it referenced from several different groups of people in the span of a week, enough to make me curious. “The obstacle is the way” presents an argument that much of what prevents us from…

  • Agile Methodoligy For Achieving Goals

    At the beginning of the year I, like many other people, set some goals for the year.  I also took the step of putting a reminder in my calendar to revisit my goals list every month to assess my progress. After a couple of cycles of that I recognized the pattern, I had inadvertently applied a…