Posted on Podcast

Technical Improvement Through Baby Steps

Our focus on technology can make improvement appear to be impossible.  The industry is moving at an incredible pace so keeping up is hard enough.  Thus, getting head is too much to ask.  We have found that technical improvement while staying current is not impossible.  It just requires us to keep a steady pace of improvement. Technical Improvement Requires Steady Use The challenge in growing our skills is to stay current in our existing skills while still learning new things.  When we are intentional about our growth, these two factors can be addressed as one.  Although incremental steps are the focus of this episode we also will need to take a big picture view.  We will look at setting up annual... Read more

Posted on Podcast

Living Better – An Overview of the Life Hacking Series

Our efforts to become a better developer and entrepreneur are only valuable if they lead to living better.  Therefore, we cannot limit our discussions to just those two topics.  In this series, we will look at how to work better.  Also, we will explore how to accomplish that without sacrificing a fulfilling life. Living Better is Our Ultimate goal The worst thing I can imagine is if someone follows our blog and podcast, is successful, but has an empty life.  The goals of skills and success are pointless when our health and relationships are ignored.  Nevertheless, our time is limited so we will also look at ways to make the most of this valuable resource.  Our ultimate goal is to squeeze all we can... Read more

Posted on Podcast

An Introduction to the Business-Focused Episodes

Becoming a better developer requires us to understand the business side of our solutions.  Therefore, this series of topics is highly valuable.  They also help our goal of becoming a better entrepreneur.  This first episode provides an overview of what to expect from the business-focused category. Why Business-Focused? One of the big complaints about developers is a lack of building solutions for the “real world.”  Thus, we want to spend time looking at how to tie our latest technical advances back to well-grounded business needs.  In the long run, this will help us avoid building solutions in an ivory tower.  This approach also helps us build solutions that sell.  Therefore, adding to our bottom line rather than purely an academic exercise.... Read more

developer tools
Posted on General

Great Developer Tools To Be Thankful For

As I write this, it is a season of being thankful.  In this spirit, it is worth looking at developer tools for which we should be grateful.  The young amongst us may not know how much more productive development has become over the last fifty years.  Time to appreciate what we have. Integrated Development Environments Depending on your age, you may have heard about or even coded with card decks.  These decks are not an old version of Pokemon.  It was a process where holes were punched in cards to write code.  I don’t want to revisit that.  However, now we have systems and tools that write your code.  Code completion, easily save and test your code?  That never happened until... Read more