Archive for 2015

When I am hired by companies to fix their broken project I look for a single pillar of support. That pillar of support can be in the engineering team, that pillar of support can be at the executive level, that pillar of support can be in the project management, but there has to be at…

Attention can be consumed, and some entrepreneurs want to gorge themselves before they realize that attention is an expensive resource to replenish.

If you are asking me to work on your idea for free for a year while you get your start-up launched, then you’re asking me to make a half-million dollar investment in your company. Don’t get offended when I ask to see your business plan, projections and want to know more about you.

There have been far too many people on LinkedIn this week looking for free work.

It takes 30 days to decide if you like it. It takes 90 days to build a habit out of it. It takes 300 days to get good at it. It takes 1,000 days to be amazing at it. Don’t expect miracles in five minutes. Anybody that is trying to sell you a solution to…

When I teach at Microsoft it’s funny because I make sure to use Keynote on a Macbook Pro. When I teach at Apple I make sure to use Powerpoint on a Surface Pro 3. Wrapping our personality in a brand ideology is the 21st century replacement for wrapping our personality in a religious ideology. Ideologies…

We have to engage more of our brain when we interpret a visual image. It’s why pithy quotes as “words on an image” are remarkable in their effectiveness. There’s a logical evolution to that content marketing type. One of the interestingly new content types we are going to see major uplift with in the near…

“Do I really need to explain how to write a console log message? Jesus Christ!” In our rush to learn something new, we very often overlook the most basic skills. Many of those basic skills are never code-ified in any reasonable way. When they are, we think “I already know how to do that, I…

Show up. One of the five keys, and certainly one of the top three keys, to success. When you show up, magical things happen. You find yourself in the right place, at the right time. You’ll also see that you are the only one among your peers that did show up. Because showing up takes…

Death by a thousand cuts. Oddly enough it is also how to build an awesome sales channel. Life by a thousand cuts. Oddly enough it is how anything that is worth doing is created. One thousand cuts. Cut! Cut! Cut! Cut! Cut! Consistently. Repeatedly. Never stop cutting.

Our legacy is measured by the lives we touch. I’m a software engineer. It is a cold discipline not known for its humanity. But it is never about the actual technology I create. No matter how technical accomplished the technology is, it is rarely talked about except by other engineers. But how that technology is…

“Can you make the ball more round?” Atari 2600 developer joke. 🙂

Did I mention I adore my Jura J9? Some of the best engineering I have ever encountered in a consumer product. But I am thinking of upgrading to the next model with the dual grinders. It is interesting because I did not realise I needed dual grinders until after I had lived with just a…

I have fingerprints all over my Macbook Pro screen. I don’t think my wife realises it is not a touchscreen. When the affordance of a user interface becomes so pervasive that we start expecting other objects to give us that affordance too. Now why won’t this URL in this paper magazine open for me? And…

I do not understand recruiters who seem to think it is their job to convince me I am overpaid and should work for less money.

There are three people in this world that can convince me to work for them for free: Me. My wife. My Mother-in-law. Everyone else can talk to my agent.

Whoop! New version of ConEmu! Oh wait, new version of ConEmu every time I start the damn application. When software updates become more of a nuisance that outweighs the benefit or desire of a new feature or bug fix. Yes, you can turn them off, or move to a different update schedule. But it’s that…

UPS man hates me. Six 34lb bags of World’s Best Cat Litter delivered from Amazon.com I have outsourced an inconvenience in my life.

Beans on toast and six tangerines. Weirdest lunch ever.

I am the most mature person I know amongst all of my imaginary friends.