Executing on Passion I read Steven's post the other day, and I felt jealous, impressed and if I had a hat, I would have taken it off. Down the ergonomic keyboard rabbit holeOver the past few months I’ve had an ergonomic keyboard obsession. It started out
Automating Voice/SMS It's a pretty great time to be operating a business (Covid aside) in terms of tools and technology available. Imagine it was 10 years ago, and you were receiving a significant volume of incoming support calls, more than you could have one person field
Build tools around workflows, not workflows around tools I read this article (I borrowed the title, thanks Linus) and it really resonated with me. I've been doing software for a long time and for businesses (and people) its a constant fight between conforming to whats possible with the tools, and changing the
The cost of repeating data entry TL;DR - people repeating the same data entry in multiple systems costs a lot of time. Pick one thing this month and find a way to automate it and make it better. A big part of running any business is pushing information around
Software Development Avoiding Dependencies in Software Development? I read an interesting article Tripping over the potholes in too many libraries. The simple rule suggest is Never use a dependency that you could replace with an afternoon of programmingThe reasons given were pretty sound - searching online takes time, reading docs to
The simplest project tracking TL;DR Every week estimate how much work is left on the project. If the amount of work remaining flat-lines instead of going down, stop what you're doing and keep asking why until the root problem is uncovered and resolved. There are many many
How to know when a Software Company is ripping you off We've almost all been there - we have got the greatest ideas in the history of great ideas, and we'e assembled our team, partnered with Reputable Software Company™ to build your vision and everything is going great. Right up until it isn't. At the
Failing inexpensively is a good idea I was listening to a Business of Software podcast, and a phrase got to me, it was something like this: If 70% of new ventures/startups fail, and of those 30% that succeed they each likely had to pivot one or more times, then
Waynes World of IT - PowerShell For you sys-admin and DevOps people out there, here is a random but amazing collection of powershell to help with some pretty specific tasks. WWoIT - Wayne’s World of ITInformation regarding Windows Infrastructure, centred mostly around commandline automation and other useful bits of
Software Development Software Development Continues to be Hard As each year goes by I think to myself "everything is going to get easier this time, surely." And at the end of said year I realise that software is just as hard as it has always been, and probably getting harder. I was
Software Development Teaching is really fun I had a really enjoyable day today. I was privileged to work with my team directly and explore Web Workers and how it interacts with TypeScript and webpack. It was just an hour long internal training session touching on the fundamentals and some of
The Importance of Listening Words matter, and the words people choose really matter. The reasons and habits that underpin our language choices are complicated, can span decades right back to childhood, and I don’t pretend to understand much of what shapes or decides these things. Looking at
