Matt

  • Making Longterm Plays

    In an age where we expect everything quickly it seems that it can be harder to have the patience to endure long term investments. People are career hopping between companies and entire job types more today than at any time in history.  Employees who want to progress up the ranks find that a quicker route is…

  • Overbuilding From the Start

    A project I have been working on for the past couple of months has suffered from a critical planning error that early on has resulted in time and budget overruns as well as a product that has performance and stability issues.  It’s all because the decision makers at the top decided to take on risky…

  • Success and Confidence: The Trump Effect

    With election activity heating up in the USA, and the prominent Donald Trump attracting a lot of media attention as well as leading positions in the polls it is interesting to think about what a crazy world we live in that someone like him has accumulated so much wealth and power.  It begs the question,…

  • 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…