In two weeks I get on the road to begin my primary 2013 project: Coding Across America. This is a large undertaking. I travel for five months from March until August to thirty cities across the United States.
I am going to be developing software for my... read more
Getting to Plan B by John Mullins and Randy Komisar is a book about transitioning from an initial idea, your "Plan A", to a... read more
Ever since I was a little kid I knew that I wanted to develop software. From what I hear that clarity of purpose is rare. It wasn't until college that I really felt I "got serious" about constantly improving on what I know. That learning has accelerated in the past few years since I finished my second Master's. 2012 has been a very... read more
The Startup Owner's Manual Strategy Guide by Steve Blank and Bob Dorf describes the Customer Development methodology that can be used... read more
I recently finished reading The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. This blog post contains some brief notes on the book. I'll have more to... read more
My New Year's resolution for 2013 is to read code from awesome open source projects each day. I don't like waiting for New Year's... read more
I am often asked by friends and colleagues that are not currently developers how they should go about learning Python. It's not an easy question - the answer is often highly dependent upon the individual's immediate technical aptitude. I do however believe anyone can learn how to program just as anyone can learn about history or business.... read more
Wise words from Elon Musk. While process can sometimes allow for a repeatable way to perform an action, it is also often a substitute for thinking creatively. That type of situation leads to an innovation vacuum where workers do a task in the same way "it's always been done" without determining whether the task actually adds value... read more
I received the following email from my colleague this morning:
Hey buddy, finally taking the plunge to learn VIM because it will make me a lot more productive when working with Puppet manifests. Any helpful tips you've come across? I already set up my client with pathogen to allow me to easily use new plugins and I... read more
There are several areas in which I need to improve to be a truly self-reliant full-stack software engineer. My full-stack focus is on web development, both traditional desktop and tablet browsers as well as constrained smartphone mobile browsers. This post describes those areas and what I'm doing through the next year to improve those... read more