Matt

  • Focus is Critical

    At this point we all know that being a good multitasker is a myth.  The time it takes to context switch between projects can vastly wipe-out any perceived productivity. This has become more apparent to me recently as I have been asked to take on more work, or have taken on more for myself.  As…

  • Flâneuring

    A term made popular by the French Poet Beaudelaire has been on my mind for the last month. Flâneuring is when you take an idle stroll. It’s a practice that that I learned about from reading vagabonding by Rolf Potts. In the world of travel, flâneuring is a way to break out of the tourist traps and find…

  • Learning How to Learn

    My recent experience with daily freecoding taught me a lot about learning programming and about how you learn new skills. There were several types of freecoding sessions that I did and each of them proved useful for different reasons. I had a handful of memorized programs one of which was to program a deck of…

  • Github Streak is Over

    Vacation broke my Github streak of consecutive days for coding and contributing code openly. It started out as a way to get me back into programming Python code and trying to test a theory I had about how to become a top 1% software developer by doing “Freecoding”  – a method based on what authors use…

  • Lessons From 253 Days of Consecutive Freecoding

    My recent camping vacation is what broke an epic 253 day streak of github commits.  Overwhelmingly this activity was a daily practice of freecoding to see first hand just how effective it could be at getting better at programming. Freecoding is based on a writing technique called free-writing which is supposed to get the juices…

  • More Swift

    Since Apple announced Swift was going open source and coming to Linux by the end of the year, my interest was peeked again to dive in and start learning it. With Swift running on Linux servers the race is on to create a compelling web framework so that it will be possible to write iOS…

  • House work

    This past weekend started with the goal of painting the fence with a fresh coat of paint.  To make it a bit less manual I got a pressure washer to help with scraping off the old paint. Things went sideways when we realized that one of the fence posts was rotted and cracked and would…

  • Why You Should Find Time to Play

    Play is one of the more undervalued activities we can undertake as an adult, yet it is one that differentiates many of the worlds top performers from the rest of us.  Playtime could be considered to be the pinnacle of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.  When you are intrinsically motivated and enjoy what you’re doing  you…

  • Investing More

    Amazingly we’ve been living in Calgary for 5 years now.  The time came to renew our mortgage and while I was doing that I started the process of opening a HELOC so that we can use some of the equity in our house to invest. With today’s low interest rates it has become pretty attractive…

  • Have a Lab Instead of an Office

    The space to create new innovation is dearly missing from today’s work environments.  Creating a space to really encourage great leaps in innovation requires a few things: Space and time to think. Freedom to implement or test an idea quickly Collaboration to help get over hurdles Recently I had the opportunity to work in a…