Matt

  • Transition From Text Editor to IDE

    For a decade I have pushed back on switching to an IDE for coding Python.  My preference has always been to use the minimal editor possible to help force a level of consciousness in my code and avoid the complacency that can come from having tools that are just too powerful.  Auto-complete is awesome, but…

  • Morning Routines for Success

    The morning is probably the best time of day to get things done for yourself before work and stress start to derail your day.  When you’re trying to accomplish something big finding a way to take advantage of these early morning hours can really ramp up your productivity. The quiet morning hours can be your…

  • Creating More

    One of my new years resolutions was to give my side business a chance to start making real money.  To get actionable on that goal I started building a software tool (which is currently undergoing private beta testing).  The next part of the strategy is to produce several informational products and grow an email marketing…

  • Productivity Research

    As part of a project to release a tool for productivity I am reading, researching and testing various concepts and tools.  The goal is to compile all this information into a couple of reports and launch a newsletter, website and write some software based on mashing together some of these concepts. Colum, Heather and I…

  • Finding Your Motivation

    The theory for motivation has been best described by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Peak motivation can be achieved when you become self-actualized – internally self motivated, however to get there you need to fulfil your lower level needs first. At each level of this pyramid you will find factors that might be motivating you.  Working…

  • Deploying Flask With Ansible

    Over the last couple weeks I have been getting acquainted with using Ansible to provision and deploy servers. One nice thing with using Ansible over a tool like fabric for deployment is that everything from provisioning, initializing, updating, management, and application deployment can be done with a minimal amount of code. There are tips I…

  • 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…