Matt Warren

Author: Matt

  • Why You Should Build Your Own Tools

    Something has happened in the manufacturing world that is nearly irreparable.  As America moved production to China and downsized factories to realize the profit gains from low wage Chinese workers it also decimated an entire skill set from the national tool belt. When a factory tools up a new line to produce a new iPhone, sneakers…

  • Strength Training Required

    These last few weeks have been stressful.  Trying to hit deadlines at work and hunched over a computer again at home have left me more sore than I can ever remember being.  My back is shot, and I haven’t been able to sleep comfortably for at least a week.  It’s been brutal.  Once you get past…

  • How to Get Things Done When You Have no Time

    This last month or so has been a hell of a busy time for me.  Working long hours, with a 1 year old at home who needs attention while trying to squeeze in social events, exercise, sleep, reading and personal projects is a lot to juggle. How have I managed to rock a streak of…

  • Too Many Ideas

    I have a long, long list of software projects that I’d like to create.  Scattered across notebooks, Google docs and text files and collected over years. It’s unfortunate that even good ideas are worthless if you don’t have the time or capital to implement them.

  • The Tragedy of Magic Code

    There are many software platforms that offer ‘magic’ like ways to accomplish things. Ruby on Rails has a lot magic going on – pass in a string argument and it gets automatically pluralized, converted from snake case to elephant case, inferred as a class name in the global namespace, instantiated and connected to set of…

  • Exploratory Programming

    One of the unexpected benefits of free coding daily is the chance to explore solutions to problems you have to work on that day. When you write code freely without considering the use of it there is less pressure to keep a poor implementation. It’s practice that is a way to boost your understanding of the problem before writing it…

  • Why is it so Cold

    This week has been a difficult one for biking to work.  On Friday it hit – 35 with snow. Biking required the full snow suit including ski goggles.  Despite the slow slog home it still was probably more pleasant than being stuck in a car, gridlocked and worried about all the cars around that still…

  • Study Open Source Applications

    I came across an excellent resource last week that more people should know about. The Architecture for Open Source Applications is a series of books that examines how some of the best software ever written is designed. Programmers rarely get the chance to study the work of others in detail.  You learn the fundamentals in school…

  • How to Provide a Great Estimate

    Estimating the cost of developing software is difficult.  Very difficult. That’s because with each new project there are always unknowns, mis-interpretations and assumptions that are not communicated.  If the client knew exactly what they wanted then it would just be a matter of typing it up.  They hire you because they don’t know how to do it…

  • Free Coding Caused an Avalanche

    It’s about a month since I started doing some free coding everyday as part of an evening ritual. The idea was to spend a minimum of 10 minutes writing any bit of silly code I could think of. It could be completely meaningless random bits of syntax or it could be a useful script. And…