Author: Matt

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…

This past week I had a chance to work on a conversational UI.  It’s a neat way to interact with software and presents an interesting set of problems to implement. Before even starting to build something I needed to decide on some tools to help with managing the conversations. There are a small number of…

This book is currently on sale for just $3 and it’s a hell of a deal.  I picked this up after hearing it referenced from several different groups of people in the span of a week, enough to make me curious. “The obstacle is the way” presents an argument that much of what prevents us from…

At the beginning of the year I, like many other people, set some goals for the year.  I also took the step of putting a reminder in my calendar to revisit my goals list every month to assess my progress. After a couple of cycles of that I recognized the pattern, I had inadvertently applied a…

Chat is becoming the next platform. Interacting with computers through channels that you already use to talk to people (Facebook Messenger, SMS, Slack etc) in a way that feels natural is a powerful way to accomplish many things for which web pages, mobile apps, desktop applications, or commandline scripts are cumbersome. Chat is not a…

A number of things have come up in the last few weeks for a project I’m involved in that has shaken my beliefs and shifted my perspective. The team I work with have all developed a deep level of experience within their domain of expertise.  This is part of the competitive advantage we use to…

Ah algorithms, that fundamental part of computer science education (and job interviews) which seem to very rarely come up in real world, day to day software development. Sometimes I have a  real yearning to tackle a technical problem that involves writing an implementation of a red-black tree or a bucket sort, or hell, just write…

They say that the market for Mobile Apps is now mature. The stores are topped by the big companies – Facebook, Google, Microsoft and the design languages are now more or less stable for mobile platforms. The next hype’d interface is chat. For a generation of kids txting is the most comfortable way to communicate…

We all only have so much time and attention, and with constantly being pulled by work, friends, family in various directions we are only able to give our own causes and ambitions a percentage of ourselves. Opportunity cost is what we lose out on for taking one path over another.  In a way opportunity cost…