Matt

  • Re-invigorating Old Products

    Sometimes you need to go back and look at the things you’ve done in the past to see if anything is due for an update or refresh.  Leaving old products to go stale is a sure way to let your customers know that you don’t care and don’t provide good customer service. With that in…

  • New Bike and Fractured Rib

    This weekend I picked up a balance bike for Ada to start playing with. These Strider bikes seem like a good way to get a child used to biking and gaining balance skills.  It sort of takes the place of ever needing to go with a tricycle or a bike with training wheels.  Once they…

  • Finishing

    There are plenty of hurdles that you have to make in order to be successful.  Perhaps the most critical is taking something all the way to completion.  When you are not working with a team this is a deceptively difficult thing to do. It takes determination, momentum and accountability to start a project and see…

  • Interstellar

    I love to support movies that I think support positive visions of the future with a constructive, based in reality perspective.  We just purchased Interstellar. which is probably one of the most intriguing movies I’ve watched in a while. Based in a post-war future where the climate of Earth is devolving into a dust bowl…

  • Pycon 2015

    For those of us who can’t take the trip to Montreal this year for Pycon all the talks are on the Pycon 2015 youtube channel. To become the best of the best you have to learn from the best and all the most active and knowledgeable Python developers are at Pycon giving amazing talks that…

  • Organizing Priorities

    One of the books I read recently suggested a best practice for a businesses to have a top 5 list and a top 1 of 5 item that is the most important of that list.  Limiting it to 5 makes things seem attainable and having one singled out as the top priority adds just enough…

  • Eyesight Improving

    Yes, it really is working.  There was a plateau, but with the new lower prescription glasses, When I started this process of trying to improve my eyesight I measured my far point at 17cm. Today I measured 24cm. That’s a pretty significant improvement. I’ve been wearing my new lower prescription glasses for everything except driving.…

  • One Great Developer is better than Three Good Ones

    I saw this said in a book I recently finished reading about company planning and strategy.  For sure when I read it first it caused me to pause.  Could there really be that much difference between good and great? The more I thought about it, the more I came to agree that it is a…

  • Productivity of Decision Making

    Decisions can be paralyzing when you have to make them.  Even more so when you don’t have the information you need to make an informed decision. In the day-to-day work of programming we make decisions all the time.  However the decisions we either don’t have answers for of don’t have the power to make ourselves…

  • Quantity over Quality

    Why would anyone ever suggest that it’s better to focus on quantity over quality?  Clearly pushing out a pile of sub-par work is not a good idea when you could take your time to think though things and produce a master piece the first time. The fact is that you can’t easily produce top quality work…