Software Engineering

Coding, Python, web development, architecture, and deployment

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Applying The Creative Writing Process to Software

    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…

  • too many computers?

    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 code

    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…

  • Polyglot vs Specialization

    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.…

  • What happens when computers are smarter than you

    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…

  • Investing in your Productivity

    This week in discussion with the rest of my team it became apparent that there was a lack of investment in creating tools to help with the productivity of the team. There are four distinct areas you can focus on to improve your productivity as a software developer. Focus Software development requires a lot of time to…

  • Getting Back to Node.js

    Javascript is the most popular language on GitHub.  There is roughly 5 times more Javascript than Ruby code! Node.js has been moving very fast since it was first released 5 years ago.  It has been pushing the development of Javascript to expand into numerous other areas including commandline tools and servers.  Coming back to it…