Matt

  • Why is it so Cold

    This week has been a difficult one for biking to work.  On Friday it hit – 35 with snow. Biking required the full snow suit including ski goggles.  Despite the slow slog home it still was probably more pleasant than being stuck in a car, gridlocked and worried about all the cars around that still…

  • Study Open Source Applications

    I came across an excellent resource last week that more people should know about. The Architecture for Open Source Applications is a series of books that examines how some of the best software ever written is designed. Programmers rarely get the chance to study the work of others in detail.  You learn the fundamentals in school…

  • How to Provide a Great Estimate

    Estimating the cost of developing software is difficult.  Very difficult. That’s because with each new project there are always unknowns, mis-interpretations and assumptions that are not communicated.  If the client knew exactly what they wanted then it would just be a matter of typing it up.  They hire you because they don’t know how to do it…

  • Free Coding Caused an Avalanche

    It’s about a month since I started doing some free coding everyday as part of an evening ritual. The idea was to spend a minimum of 10 minutes writing any bit of silly code I could think of. It could be completely meaningless random bits of syntax or it could be a useful script. And…

  • How to Create a Billion $ Company in 8 Months

    If you want to get a sense of just how crazy the world of technology is for businesses that want to make money you need look no further than Slack. For those of you unfamiliar with Slack.  They launched a product in February 2014 which is a private communication tool for business inspired by IRC.…

  • Learning about Artificial Intelligence

    There has been a real break through in AI technology over the past year with the work that Google is doing on the Google Brain project. Details are scarce at the moment but it seems like they’ve taken neural network concepts and dramatically improved their performance.  From what I can glean, Google is using this internally,…

  • Three Ways to Become a Better Programmer

    Programming is a great mix of both the creative and technical skills. Problem solving on a daily basis makes it one of the best jobs imaginable. Staying ahead of the technology curve and continuing to get better at your core skill is what differentiates an average programmer from the superb. The three most effective ways…

  • Contributing to More Open Source

    This week I expanded my daily Free Coding time to include some contributions to open source projects.  It just scratches an itch to continue my learning and reach out to find other skilled developers to help drive some additional expertise. One of my free coding scripts was to develop an interactive file template engine, that…

  • Move Fast, Break Things and Collect Data

    With the help of unit tests, BDD, Coverage reports, Continuous Integration, and Source code control it has become easier than ever to build code that is robust against regressions while letting you branch and play with ideas quickly and without risk.  However there are times when the scale of code use in production requires a…

  • Finding Opportunities to Open Source

    There are so many good reasons to open source code. Gain contributions from the wider community Contribute back for all the awesome you’ve gotten from Open Source To build the status of yourself or your company Attract the best programmers Get public feedback on the quality of your software More people will use your software open…