Software Engineering

Coding, Python, web development, architecture, and deployment

  • 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…

  • Fill your mind with good things

    As the father of a 18 month old, it’s been fascinating to try and understand how her little mind works.  Currently she is getting quite good at classification: car, cheese, door, dog. Everything she sees is echoed back. At this early stage in development it’s easy to see that what you say and do have…

  • Personal Key Performance Indicator Dashboard

    There are many things that make corporations work well (in well run businesses) that can be applied to a personal level. KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are something that I’ve been fascinated by for quite a few years now. Building dashboards full of statistics has been a part of every one of my personal projects.  The…

  • Re-invigorating Old Products

    Sometimes you need to go back and look at the things you’ve done in the past to see if anything is due for an update or refresh.  Leaving old products to go stale is a sure way to let your customers know that you don’t care and don’t provide good customer service. With that in…

  • New Bike and Fractured Rib

    This weekend I picked up a balance bike for Ada to start playing with. These Strider bikes seem like a good way to get a child used to biking and gaining balance skills.  It sort of takes the place of ever needing to go with a tricycle or a bike with training wheels.  Once they…

  • Finishing

    There are plenty of hurdles that you have to make in order to be successful.  Perhaps the most critical is taking something all the way to completion.  When you are not working with a team this is a deceptively difficult thing to do. It takes determination, momentum and accountability to start a project and see…

  • Pycon 2015

    For those of us who can’t take the trip to Montreal this year for Pycon all the talks are on the Pycon 2015 youtube channel. To become the best of the best you have to learn from the best and all the most active and knowledgeable Python developers are at Pycon giving amazing talks that…

  • One Great Developer is better than Three Good Ones

    I saw this said in a book I recently finished reading about company planning and strategy.  For sure when I read it first it caused me to pause.  Could there really be that much difference between good and great? The more I thought about it, the more I came to agree that it is a…

  • Quantity over Quality

    Why would anyone ever suggest that it’s better to focus on quantity over quality?  Clearly pushing out a pile of sub-par work is not a good idea when you could take your time to think though things and produce a master piece the first time. The fact is that you can’t easily produce top quality work…