Author: Matt

  • Applying Machine Learning Lessons to Humans

    The more that I learn about Deep Learning and other Machine Learning concepts the more intrigued by the idea that we could apply some of things we learn about how these ML models behave back onto human psychology.  This is not something I have heard discussed yet. They were, after all, roughly modelled on how…

  • Finding Appropriate Side Projects

    Time is our one major limited resource and so it’s important how we decide to use it.  One of the biggest questions we ask ourselves as developers is often what kind of cool stuff could we do on evenings and weekends. Here are my considerations for any side projects that I feel are worth saying…

  • Goals and Processes

    A goal without a process to back it up is just an idea.  It is the process which actually will help you reach that goal and it’s more important to focus on developing on an actionable process than to have the best idea or goal. A business idea is worthless unless you do something with…

  • Passion for Productivity

    Personal passion is an undervalued driver of productivity. Experience has taught me that when you work on something that you are passionate about it becomes easier to focus, you care more about the quality and are less distracted. If you can find your passion, it means you will never have a job – Richard Branson…

  • Summer Recap

    With summer coming to an end I thought I would recap all the things we managed to get done in our first Ontario summer. The general theme for the summer was HOT!  Right from the start we had one heat wave after another.  Particularly memorable was that while I was in Mexico, it was hotter…

  • Web Design Fallacies and the Failure of CSS

    Having the experience now of building dozens of different web sites over the years I have come to the conclusion that there are some major flaws in how web design is done and the underlying assumptions have proved inadequate to make web design better. The first of these is the about CSS.  The goal of…

  • Experimenting with ECommerce

    Over the last couple of weeks I have been spending some evening and weekends working on building some e-commerce websites. If I were to Define Ecommerce, I’d say that it is the most advanced platform for sales, and which has the higest percentage of reception by customers worldwide. Right at the time that the iPhone…

  • Programming Should Be More Like Authorship than Engineering

    Most programmers I know come at the discipline from an engineering background and this leads to all sorts of pre-conceptions about what we do and the guarantees we offer. Clients often believe that paying for software development is like building a bridge.  You have some meetings to decide what kind of bridge you want to…

  • Power of Iterative Progress

    Software startups often talk about iterative improvement.  It’s a development model where by you focus on an easy to reach but minimally sustainable business model and then iteratively improve things and add features over time. The process of getting to that first product release is perhaps the hardest thing to do.  It requires having a…

  • Web Scraping With Scrapy

    After reading a reddit thread about interesting scripts people have written to automate things I was inspired to put together a quick web scraping script to check the sales at the LCBO and send me a message (on Telegram) if there is anything interesting. Back in the day I would have done something like this…