Archive for 2014

It is that time of the year again when a young man’s fancy turns to a Macbook Pro upgrade. It is an expensive time of year.  

Every software engineer should wire up a piece of electronics at least once in their life so they learn the valuable lesson of what you don’t know can cost you a lot of money if you aren’t paying attention.

Do not insert the micro-controller CPU in backwards – they tend not to like that.

Entrepreneurs that tell me they are in stealth mode are really telling me that don’t have a damn clue how to run a business.

Recruiter: “Because you got ur (sic) degree from a non-American scool (sic), my client will require you to take an English language profeciency (sic) test.” *facepalm* Seriously, why are you wasting my time?

I have walked the road to success many times, facing each of my failures along the way, the road is long and never straight, but it is consistent and holds its own internal logic. Understand the logic behind the road, and it will lead you right to success, but try and work against the road,…

When you’re trying to decide who to respond to, deal with the guy who is paying you money rather than the guy who is trying to spend your time.

Ruby why u no let me use advanced regular expressions like Perl? Ruby is such a versatile and flexible programming language that some times it catches you unawares when you want to do something and suddenly realise, it can’t do that!

Android Studio! *falls to knees* Why do you not want to talk to the hardware!! And then a booming voice from the other office called out “Because your development phone is sat on my desk, you dolt!”

When you have just connected on LinkedIn (or any other social network or via a simple “reaching out” email), don’t try and make the recipient of your connection feel bad about themselves because they didn’t do the thing you told them you wanted them to do, even though they didn’t agree to do it. It’s…

Aaand… we snapped the Panavise. *massages temples* Not a good start to the day. At least I didn’t severe anything with the laser cutter this time.

The secret to getting early customer traction for your SaaS project is to stop diddling your keyboard and get out and meet people.

“Businesses with 31 to 40 landing pages got 7 times more leads than those with only 1 to 5 landing pages.” A strategy to live by. Have you tried searching for “Justin Lloyd” recently? Notice a trend? I’m just following that principle to the letter. And I’m a nobody. What could that strategy do for…

Don’t write scary code that makes other engineers question either your sanity or your ability. You know who you are…

Oh dear! I have just come to learn a new code-phrase in job descriptions. When the title of the job description reads “Self-motivated mobile app developer” it actually translates to “We don’t have any money to develop this mobile app. We were hoping you’d do it for free. And we might be able to pay…

Cooking pizza and testing my new pizza peals: Fresh mozzarella. Homemade, hand tossed dough. A little home-grown, chopped basil. Some homemade marinara. A couple of garden grown tomatoes. A little homemade, cold-pressed olive oil. Some garlic sea salt and a twist of pepper. I just said a sentence that 90% of the population in North…

I am humbled by the amount of structural engineering knowledge possessed by the woman designing my wife’s custom bra.

If your initial conversation with me when networking begins with a sales message, or an immediate ask, then I don’t have any interest in listening to whatever else you have to say.

You know the code you just wrote stinks when your cat refuses to sit around and listen to you explain it.

Cynical givers – those that give only to get. You get because you give. Getting is not an automatic right just because you have given. Give because you will probably get. Give, expecting to get, you’re doing it wrong.