Resume Writing

Most of us don’t really take a look at our resumes until it’s time to apply for jobs. I’m certainly one of those people. I’ve updated my resume only occasionally in between looking for new jobs. I’ve done a lot of experimenting with my resume over the years. This article summarizes what I started with, […]

Photo Organizing!

I’m sure you have about 10,000 pictures all in one big folder with no organization, multiple copies, and a wishful intent of organizing it. When you finally find the time to sit down and do your organizing, the task seems so insurmountable, you suddenly realize you forgot to scrub your kitchen floor, do the laundry, […]

The Importance of Data Backups

If it hasn’t happened to you yet, you will eventually suffer a data loss event. The most common event is your hard drive, with all your family pictures on it, suddenly and unexpectedly dies. If you haven’t planned for this, you may have to spend a bunch of money on data recovery to recover all […]

Security

Hacked accounts, identity theft, security breaches. Security compromise is no longer a question of “if” but a question of “when.” With companies hoarding personal information for marketing, the payload of a successful data breach becomes increasingly more valuable to follow up attacks of individuals. Identity theft leveraging stolen information is typical after a large data […]

HATEOAS

Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State. Sounds fancy. It pretty much is. HATEOAS is a REST constraint where the state of the entity is transferred as well as what a consumer can do with that entity. It’s REST on steroids as it enables truly stateless distributed services that can scale without worrying about consumers. […]

The Value of Design

In the projects I’ve worked on, about half of them skipped any sort of design phase. This typically lead to unmanageable code a few months into the project with no discernible way to backtrack or quickly change architecture. While each project could benefit from their own postmortem on their design phase (or lack thereof), I’m […]

Hiring Good Developers

Hiring Good Developers Hiring software engineers is easy, hiring good software engineers is hard. Due to the nature of software engineering, there is no clear or objective way to measure the skills of an engineer. Companies try to determine skill based on questions and online skills assessments. The problem with this approach is that it […]

Building a Product Vision

Building a Product Vision Developing software under deadlines is hard. When I start projects I often have a problem to solve in mind and that’s it. It takes some effort and genuine thinking to come up with a solution to that problem. Part of that solution is having a vision. Without that, how do you […]

Hiring a Software Consultant?

Hiring a Software Consultant? Hiring a consultant for your business can be a little uncomfortable. You have a contract that protects your business, but what if the consultant is just… bad? There are a few tips and tricks for identifying a less than stellar software consultant and this article will cover those. Low Balling Whether […]

Eisenhower Matrix

Eisenhower Matrix I’ve had my share of projects in the past. With each project comes a bit of unknown terrain, deadlines, known tasks, known risks, unknown tasks, unknown risks… the list goes on. It’s hard prioritizing everything as it comes in for a project and backlogging this prioritization becomes a huge burden. I’m sure your […]