Matt

  • Best Days Of My Life

    Back in the summer of ’69 I was still not born yet, but this year is going to be the beginning of a major shift in how we think about and plan our vacations. Hopefully will be the foundation for many epic summers in the next several years. A couple of months ago we took…

  • Finding Winners

    There are lots of stats out there about how many businesses fail. It is astounding that something close to 9 out of every 10 businesses fold in just a few years. With each of those businesses there are smart ambitious people with the best of intentions, plans, and money to get things off the ground.…

  • Training Your Mind

    The human mind is fascinating in so many ways. I often like to invision the brain as an input/output machine with some internal loops to self-reflect and generate its own internal inputs. Inputs to the brain come from our senses – what we see, hear, smell, touch. Those inputs will physically modify your brain as…

  • The Future of Work

    When looking at how automation, robotics and AI will change the future of how people work and what jobs they will have there seems to be two main camps of thought: Capitalistic/Free Market view that looking back at the history of economic transitions have shown that each time we faced productivity improvements there were always…

  • Canadian Manufacturing

    Over the last couple of months I’ve been giving some thought to how the manufacturing business works, specifically in Canada. It’s been driven partly from things that I’ve been trying to buy, partly from wanting to try my hand at small scale production of something in the garage and also because it’s such an important…

  • Pace of Innovation

    Our ability to be productive is the most critical metric that determines quality of life. It’s a fundamental measurement of how the economy is doing, identifys where we are stagnating, and shows where the biggest gains are. There are many factors that go into improving productivity – capital investment in tooling, factories and better software,…

  • Value of Vision

    In business, when talking about writing a business plan, or when a consultant evaluates a business, sometimes a vision or mission statement are things that get discussed. For a long time I have looked at these kind of things as fluff. It’s a bunch of people wordsmithing a document that will never be read outside…

  • Ideas, big and small

    I have 3 big ideas. The kind of legacy making change the world ideas that are big and bold. These ideas are things I would pursue if I had the means to execute on them but it requires vastly more capital than I have access to, or that others would put me in charge of.…

  • The Last and Biggest Industry Primed for Tech Disruption

    The wave of tech disruption has been picking off industries one after the other since the early 70’s. Until today when it’s hard to think of any remaining sector of the economy that hasn’t gone through, or is in the process of being converted into a software driven market. The current biggest industry that is…

  • Current Thoughts on Software Testing

    When I was a younger developer I didn’t see the value in writing tests for the projects I worked on. I was focused on being as productive as possible during the day to turn out new features and fix bugs. Tests doubled or more the amount of code that needed to be written, it added…