Software Engineering

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Grabbing the best ideas from other industries and applying it to your own is a fantastic way to learn and discover new ways to do things. I was listening to the Tim Ferriss podcast yesterday in an interview with Neil Strauss.  Two best selling authors discussing their creative process for writing a book.  It got me thinking…

There are quite a few computers in the house. Heather has a MacBook Pro for herself I have a Macbook Air that I use most of the time and leave around the house In my office there is an old 2009 Mac Mini which is showing it’s age but mostly acts as a machine to host my…

Finding time to write code after work, when you have an eight month old and a full time job is nearly impossible.  I’m not sure how others manage to do this. It’s time to do an audit of my time management.  To figure out just where all my free time is going so that I…

I consider myself a fairly well rounded developer. So when it comes time to choose a technology to accomplish a task I will happily choose the one that is the best fit whether it requires Ruby, Python, Java, Objective-C, PHP, CSS, or Bash or anything else. Recently I was given a project to take on.…

A few years ago I was working at a finance company doing quantitative stock algorithms and I remember hearing an interesting story. Back in the early 2000’s there was some buzz around neural networks and their ability to be used to pick stocks.  The company at the time had invested some R&D into creating their…