What Large Amounts of Caffeine Can Do
Since leaving RewardSnap in the summer of 2011, I took about a month off, and then got back to business. This post is an update of what I’ve been working on and interested in since then: Current projects and interests: RailsThemes.com (new project!) consulting/contracting Awesome Controller Desperately Seeking Validation office hours Hamming Lunches RailsThemes.com A [...]
RR for Test Doubles Presentation
Here is a presentation that I gave to the Indy.rb Ruby user group in Indianapolis. It covers the advantages of using RR (double Ruby) for concise mocking and stubbing and gives some real-life use cases to inspire thinking about testing using test doubles. (Having trouble seeing the slides? Try here.)
Signs You Aren’t Really Building a Minimum Viable Product
With the popularization of lean startups, minimum viable products (MVPs) have recently entered into business and software lexicon. Who can argue with building more than you actually need? Many people seem to interpret MVP as the first iteration of their product. Once they build that version, they can add more features, and users of the [...]
Making Recommendations with Apache Mahout Presentation
Last month I gave a presentation about making recommendations with Apache Mahout. Since the presentation, Manning books has released the final version of their book, Mahout in Action, which should be an even better resource than the book that I was using for my slides and presentation. Here are the slides: (Having trouble seeing the [...]
How to Write Without Reservations
Here’s a pep talk that I give to myself when thinking about not writing about something The talk You have a reasonably well founded position, you almost certainly have enough to write about. You have arguments and counterarguments for the major things people are going to say. You have experiences that no one else has. [...]
Formal Skill Modeling
I think people should create a formal model of their knowledge portfolio and use this model to actively manage their knowledge and skill acquisition. This applies both to organizations and individuals. I could see this looking similar to the Thoughtworks technology radar. The skill model would have a list of skills and interests and how [...]
How to Look Like You Can Accurately Predict the Future of Technology
It seems like the most devastating career risk people face is getting stuck doing one thing for too long without branching out. As a result, they become unemployed or underemployed, doing work that is not challenging, poorly paid, or nearing obsolescence. To this end, I have a framework that I currently use to think about [...]
