maintaining focus
Posted on General

Maintaining Focus At The Year End

The Holidays bring their own set of challenges to our business lives.  One of the most significant is the impact to maintaining focus.  We have days off, co-workers on vacation, customers at parties, and vendors taking time off (or a mix of those situations) to contend with.  We also tend to have tasks that need to get done before year end.  All of this can make the final weeks of our year a stressful period. The Way Forward Every time I run into an obstacle like this I find it best to step back and simplify things.  We usually need to start this season by acknowledging our limits.  It is almost impossible for us to get everything done that we want... Read more

develpreneur podcast
Posted on A Summary Of Amazon Services

AWS Media Services

The AWS media services are among their more recent offerings.  Nevertheless, these are applications you may find critical to your cloud strategy.  These may not be very familiar to you if media processing is not your thing.  On the other hand, they are what you hope for if it is your focus.   Amazon Elastic Transcoder: Easy-to-use Scalable Media Transcoding The first service we look at is the transcoder.  It has a simple function of translating video media from one format to another.  Fortunately, it has a free tier of twenty minutes of transcoding each month.  Thus, you can “play around” with it and avoid fees.  Once you get beyond the free threshold, it is priced based on the resolution and length... Read more

develpreneur podcast
Posted on Podcast

Technology Toys for the Holidays

It is a great time for us to talk about technology toys you can give or put on your list.  As we wrap up our Holiday week episodes we have some fun and provide a few suggestions. Alternatives to Amazon Alexa devices: https://beebom.com/amazon-echo-alternatives-2018/ USB Toys: https://www.babble.com/tech/20-usb-desk-toys-to-keep-you-and-your-co-workers-entertained/ Popular USB Items: https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Computers-Accessories-USB-Gadgets/zgbs/pc/11548961011 Nintendo Switch: https://www.nintendo.com/switch/ Read more

evaluate performance
Posted on Become a Better Developer

Creating Velocity In Your Team

There are many traits of a team that can be fostered or part of their make-up.  The speed of completing tasks accurately is one such trait.  A team can focus on creating velocity by defining a proper level of risk and assessing the cost of mistakes. The Weakest Link We look at some analogies to build a case for pushing your entire team to accept some level of risk.  This can be instrumental in avoiding analysis paralysis and generally getting decisions made sooner.  Thus, we see that creating velocity is a direct result of shortening the decision process. Individual team members can contribute to creating velocity.  However, there is a lot of the team dynamics and the general environment that... Read more

thankfulness
Posted on General

A Week Full of Thanks and Thankfulness

It is that time of year again. We talk about appreciation and thankfulness related to the year we are wrapping up.  In the busy schedule of our modern lives, this seems to be more critical than in the past.  We fill our daily planners with tasks from the moment we awake until we crash into sleep.  This hectic approach is excellent for productivity.  However, it can suck the life out of us.  When we take a step back and appreciate what we have, it can be cathartic or even energizing.  Of course, this being developer-focused, we will look at reasons for developers to be thankful. Windows Related Thankfulness I have to start with an almost religious statement.  We can be... Read more