Matt
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Free Coding
Getting into the flow or zone as a coder is when you are your most productive and code spews from your fingers into your favourite text editor as fast as you can type. When in the zone you can seemingly pour out 100’s of lines of code in no time. But how do you get…
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Think Weeks
One of the things Bill Gates did was to take a semi-annual ‘Think Week’ retreat. During this week he would extract himself from all obligations and hole up in a hotel somewhere with a stack of books to read. To Bill Gates these retreats were critical to his ability to stay ahead of big picture…
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Tele 10 Finished
One more thing to knock off the bucket list. Yesterday Heather and I finished the Tele 10 race in St. John’s. My time was good considering zero training runs over the last few months. I was counting on the adaptation to Calgary altitude to help me power through the race. That seemed to work. At…
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Manager Who Codes vs Developer Team Lead
Personal branding is deceptively effective in many cases. The difference is skills between a manager who codes and a developer team lead is negligible. In many cases you could say they are job titles that describe the same role in a company and yet from a HR and status point of view they are very…
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Reading Fewer Blogs
For years I have had an extensive reading list of blogs that I read through everyday. Scanning through 200+ blog posts per day was a way for me to keep up with the latest things happening. However, the time it takes to read through everything was significant. I’ve decided to greatly reduce my subscribed blogs…
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Ada Walking
On Tuesday, Ada took her first un-assisted steps. It’ll be a while until she develops the confidence to really get around the house on her own, but clearly that time is coming. I was convinced that she would be walking much earlier than this. She was putting weight on her legs since she was 1…
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Microservices
The term Service Oriented Architecture has been twisted by so many people now that it has lost some of it’s meaning. Microservices is a software architecture for web apps that aims to define a more specific way of doing SOA that isn’t so fuzzy and hand wavy. Web applications have long been developed in a…
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Rhinoceros
In a recent meeting with my boss he asked everyone to be more like a rhinoceros. You can’t stop a rhino when it’s moving forward and you definitely can’t push it backwards. It’s a situation that many of us find ourselves in. A project or task runs into a small obstacle so we stop to…
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Time Audit Surprise
When you measure things you can manage them – Words of wisdom from Peter Drucker. Every time I have made the effort to measure something whether it be calories, carbs, miles run, heart rate, cash flow, net worth or weight there is always a surprise in what the numbers reveal. Recently I did a one…
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Time Audit
It can be eye opening to measure things for real whether it is calories or carbohydrates, or reps and weight, or cash flow and net worth. Perception is a tricky thing and the spread between reality and perception can be wide. With that in mind last week I did an audit of every hour of…
