Software Engineering

Coding, Python, web development, architecture, and deployment

  • The Bots Are Coming

    Slack is the fastest growing startup in history, and it is starting to drive a new kind of interface for users to make things happen within their businesses. If you remember way back the only way you could interact with a computer was through a command line.  With this interface you form very specific commands…

  • Being A World Class Programmer

    A year ago I started on a goal to write and publish code every day to my github account.  That streak lasted for 250 days.  It was a learning experience that gave me time to broaden and deepen my knowledge of Python.  Though the actionable goal was to maintain a streak of activity, the underlying…

  • Going Mobile

    Over the last couple weeks I’ve had a growing concern that my office is just not functional any more.  A standing desk in a room pulling double duty as a spare bedroom. So over the last week I have pulled out all the office equipment and turned the room back into just a bedroom.  The…

  • Overbuilding From the Start

    A project I have been working on for the past couple of months has suffered from a critical planning error that early on has resulted in time and budget overruns as well as a product that has performance and stability issues.  It’s all because the decision makers at the top decided to take on risky…

  • Success and Confidence: The Trump Effect

    With election activity heating up in the USA, and the prominent Donald Trump attracting a lot of media attention as well as leading positions in the polls it is interesting to think about what a crazy world we live in that someone like him has accumulated so much wealth and power.  It begs the question,…

  • Github Streak is Over

    Vacation broke my Github streak of consecutive days for coding and contributing code openly. It started out as a way to get me back into programming Python code and trying to test a theory I had about how to become a top 1% software developer by doing “Freecoding”  – a method based on what authors use…

  • Lessons From 253 Days of Consecutive Freecoding

    My recent camping vacation is what broke an epic 253 day streak of github commits.  Overwhelmingly this activity was a daily practice of freecoding to see first hand just how effective it could be at getting better at programming. Freecoding is based on a writing technique called free-writing which is supposed to get the juices…

  • More Swift

    Since Apple announced Swift was going open source and coming to Linux by the end of the year, my interest was peeked again to dive in and start learning it. With Swift running on Linux servers the race is on to create a compelling web framework so that it will be possible to write iOS…

  • House work

    This past weekend started with the goal of painting the fence with a fresh coat of paint.  To make it a bit less manual I got a pressure washer to help with scraping off the old paint. Things went sideways when we realized that one of the fence posts was rotted and cracked and would…

  • Have a Lab Instead of an Office

    The space to create new innovation is dearly missing from today’s work environments.  Creating a space to really encourage great leaps in innovation requires a few things: Space and time to think. Freedom to implement or test an idea quickly Collaboration to help get over hurdles Recently I had the opportunity to work in a…