New Year Planning
Posted on General

Strategies for Your New Year Planning

As we end a year, it is an excellent time to look back and ahead.  This retrospective time should translate into New Year Planning and setting goals.  The challenge in this activity is setting goals that are meaningful and aggressive enough to grow on where we are today.  Although this is sort of art based on experience, there are also guidelines we can follow to help us in our planning. New Year Planning for Growth First and foremost we should look ahead.  The plan should grow on what we accomplished this year.  Coasting into the New Year is not acceptable.  Thus, our challenge is not whether growth will occur but instead in how much we will grow over the next... Read more

Posted on Podcast

Focus is the Key To Success (and Maybe Happiness)

We live in a world full of distractions.  That fact does not go away just because we have a goal or focus.  In fact, those little distractions can be harder to identify when they are in line with our primary goal.  These are the small time wasters and productivity thieves that hide as helpers. Focus Must Be Guarded Any entrepreneur lives with a steady stream of new ideas.  However, too many of us underestimate our natural creative state.  In fact, we all are creatives to some extent and have to deal with a steady of temptations to drift from our primary goal.  Our struggle can be with big and common time-wasters like Facebook or the latest Netflix series, but these... Read more

Posted on Podcast

Build Your Customer Base

Whether you are just getting started or your business is decades old, customers are critical to success.  In fact, without your customer base, there is no business.  So let’s look at some ways to build loyalty and grow your core of customers. A Strong Customer Base When we look at a customer base, we look beyond the numbers.  A core of 100 purchasers of your product is better when they are loyal customers and not one-time buyers.  Thus, we have to provide an experience and build a relationship, not just provide a product or service.  This challenge can seem to be a huge hill to climb when we start.  However, there are some tools and channels to start and grow our... Read more

cloud formation
Posted on AWS Tour

Cloud Formation – Script Your AWS Solution

Our tour of Amazon Web services has taken us through some offerings.  When you consider maintaining and reproducing these for your environment, it can seem overwhelming.  However, the wizards at AWS have already thought of this and created Cloud Formation Cloud Formation: Wizards and Scripting This free service allows you to use JSON or YAML to script out your resources and environment.  It may seem daunting and over-technical at first, but it is easy to use.  There is support for a graphical approach to building your scripts, or you can edit them directly.  Honestly, I can see a high value in both methods.  In particular, the templates and quick start tools are perfect to get your scripts 80% or more done. ... Read more

Posted on Podcast

An Introduction to AWS and the Free Tier

Any good developer has to start with an environment for their work.  These requirements can be an expensive obstacle to overcome.  However, Amazon has made their extensive network and resources available to all of us.  There is a cost, of course, but it is easy to scale.  They even have a free tier of services. Your Personal Data Center The suite of services provided by Amazon called Amazon Web Services is often called AWS.  These offerings cover dozens of needs of modern developers.  Better yet, these tools are easy to use and secure by default.  This topic is a great place to start your development roadmap.  It is also where any company should turn as they are being launched.  This... Read more

Posted on Podcast

Determine Your Why For A Life of Contentment

There are many measures of success.  Fame and fortune often top this list.  However, when you think about it, a life of contentment is the real measure of success.  Once we reach this conclusion we need to dig into what makes us content.  This is our personal key to happiness. Contentment Comes From Your “Why” The are many ways to achieve contentment.  However, anyone that is truly content has found and addressed the “why” in their life.  This goal may be a happy family, financial security, the ability to give to or support others, or many other achievements.  So our first step needs to be figuring out the “why” that drives us.  This is the reward we achieve for a job... Read more