Matt Warren

Author: Matt

  • Another side project

    One of the most influential pieces of code I’ve written (that I use myself every day) is something I’ve talked about before.  It sends me an email alert when I haven’t blogged or written code as often as I want to, and keeps sending alerts until I do the action. When I broadened the software…

  • Getting Started With Ansible

    Everyone who does web development will probably find themselves doing devOps tasks at some point.  I keep an eye on servers hosting several different projects at different cloud providers and some private servers.  Until recently management of those servers wasn’t difficult enough to warrant using tools to deal with things. Ansible is a commandline tool…

  • The Quantified Programmer

    Expanding on the thoughts in my last blog post about measuring opposing indicators I wanted to explore things from a different perspective. There is a growing community of people that measure and record as much as they possibly can about themselves.  This quantified Self movement is predominantly focused on health related aspects exemplified by the growing…

  • Taking a Machine Learning Course

    I started a Stanford course yesterday on Machine Learning.  It’ll be interesting to update my knowledge since things have changed a great deal in that area since I did an AI class at Waterloo 10 years ago. Machine Learning has really taken off in the last couple years as the number of problems and the…

  • Measure Opposing Indicators

    All software developers know that measuring a developer’s productivity by counting lines of code written is not an effective way to measure their output.  The correlation between the technical difficulty of a problem and the number of lines of code is not always 1:1.  Which means that one developer can write 10 lines in a…

  • Make Reading Inevitable

    One of my big goals this year is to read one book every 10 days.  That’s 36 books to read before Christmas. Inevitable thinking is about asking one question: “What can I do to make the outcome I want INEVITABLE?”  The phrasing of that question prompts you to think about things differently.  Instead of just…

  • The Most Often Overlooked Programmer Skill

    Programmers often take something for granted that would make them significantly better at their job.  No it’s not communication skills, or management.  The biggest differentiator between the best and average programmer is how often they have to refer to google to solve a problem. Any programmer who knows the basics of programming in a C…

  • Don’t Write Code Unless You Use These 11 Tools

    Do you want to write code faster, with fewer bugs, and feel confident that what you write is good? Over the years, programming has evolved, and many new platforms and tools have been created. Most of the tools aren’t very useful, but a few are. Here are the 11 tools that have helped make my programming a bit easier…

  • Practice, Homeostasis, Resolutions and the Path to Mastery

    It’s that time of year again when everyone is making ambitious new years resolutions. I started by re-reading one of my favourite books: Mastery is about the journey – an endless one. Taking comfort in the practice, ritual and repetition of the fundamentals while endlessly pushing the edge of your skills and knowledge. Something that’s…

  • Asset Allocations

    Late last week my RRSP transfer from mutual funds into Questrade completed.  It feels as if I lucked out in that the 5 worst days of the year on the market happened while the cheque was in the mail to move money. Trying to devise a strategy for investing that is both safe, has the…