Matt

  • The Most Often Overlooked Programmer Skill

    Programmers often take something for granted that would make them significantly better at their job.  No it’s not communication skills, or management.  The biggest differentiator between the best and average programmer is how often they have to refer to google to solve a problem. Any programmer who knows the basics of programming in a C…

  • Don’t Write Code Unless You Use These 11 Tools

    Do you want to write code faster, with fewer bugs, and feel confident that what you write is good? Over the years, programming has evolved, and many new platforms and tools have been created. Most of the tools aren’t very useful, but a few are. Here are the 11 tools that have helped make my programming a bit easier…

  • Practice, Homeostasis, Resolutions and the Path to Mastery

    It’s that time of year again when everyone is making ambitious new years resolutions. I started by re-reading one of my favourite books: Mastery is about the journey – an endless one. Taking comfort in the practice, ritual and repetition of the fundamentals while endlessly pushing the edge of your skills and knowledge. Something that’s…

  • Asset Allocations

    Late last week my RRSP transfer from mutual funds into Questrade completed.  It feels as if I lucked out in that the 5 worst days of the year on the market happened while the cheque was in the mail to move money. Trying to devise a strategy for investing that is both safe, has the…

  • Why You Should Build Your Own Tools

    Something has happened in the manufacturing world that is nearly irreparable.  As America moved production to China and downsized factories to realize the profit gains from low wage Chinese workers it also decimated an entire skill set from the national tool belt. When a factory tools up a new line to produce a new iPhone, sneakers…

  • Strength Training Required

    These last few weeks have been stressful.  Trying to hit deadlines at work and hunched over a computer again at home have left me more sore than I can ever remember being.  My back is shot, and I haven’t been able to sleep comfortably for at least a week.  It’s been brutal.  Once you get past…

  • How to Get Things Done When You Have no Time

    This last month or so has been a hell of a busy time for me.  Working long hours, with a 1 year old at home who needs attention while trying to squeeze in social events, exercise, sleep, reading and personal projects is a lot to juggle. How have I managed to rock a streak of…

  • Too Many Ideas

    I have a long, long list of software projects that I’d like to create.  Scattered across notebooks, Google docs and text files and collected over years. It’s unfortunate that even good ideas are worthless if you don’t have the time or capital to implement them.

  • The Tragedy of Magic Code

    There are many software platforms that offer ‘magic’ like ways to accomplish things. Ruby on Rails has a lot magic going on – pass in a string argument and it gets automatically pluralized, converted from snake case to elephant case, inferred as a class name in the global namespace, instantiated and connected to set of…

  • Exploratory Programming

    One of the unexpected benefits of free coding daily is the chance to explore solutions to problems you have to work on that day. When you write code freely without considering the use of it there is less pressure to keep a poor implementation. It’s practice that is a way to boost your understanding of the problem before writing it…