Matt Warren

Author: Matt

  • 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…

  • How to Create a Billion $ Company in 8 Months

    If you want to get a sense of just how crazy the world of technology is for businesses that want to make money you need look no further than Slack. For those of you unfamiliar with Slack.  They launched a product in February 2014 which is a private communication tool for business inspired by IRC.…

  • Learning about Artificial Intelligence

    There has been a real break through in AI technology over the past year with the work that Google is doing on the Google Brain project. Details are scarce at the moment but it seems like they’ve taken neural network concepts and dramatically improved their performance.  From what I can glean, Google is using this internally,…

  • Three Ways to Become a Better Programmer

    Programming is a great mix of both the creative and technical skills. Problem solving on a daily basis makes it one of the best jobs imaginable. Staying ahead of the technology curve and continuing to get better at your core skill is what differentiates an average programmer from the superb. The three most effective ways…

  • Contributing to More Open Source

    This week I expanded my daily Free Coding time to include some contributions to open source projects.  It just scratches an itch to continue my learning and reach out to find other skilled developers to help drive some additional expertise. One of my free coding scripts was to develop an interactive file template engine, that…

  • Move Fast, Break Things and Collect Data

    With the help of unit tests, BDD, Coverage reports, Continuous Integration, and Source code control it has become easier than ever to build code that is robust against regressions while letting you branch and play with ideas quickly and without risk.  However there are times when the scale of code use in production requires a…

  • Finding Opportunities to Open Source

    There are so many good reasons to open source code. Gain contributions from the wider community Contribute back for all the awesome you’ve gotten from Open Source To build the status of yourself or your company Attract the best programmers Get public feedback on the quality of your software More people will use your software open…

  • Getting my Git On

    For the past week I have been trying to be more active on GitHub.  I’m writing code every single day in an effort to boost my presence and learn a few new things. GitHub has created a social network around writing software which serves as a productive (and necessary) tool and also as a portfolio…

  • 5 Reasons You Should be Free Coding

    Free coding is the practice of writing code quickly off the top of your head.  It should be done as part of a daily ritual for at least 10 uninterrupted minutes.  The goal isn’t necessarily to produce something useful or even complete.  You should strive to open the taps of originating thoughts in your head…

  • Building Things Quickly

    Developer productivity is a  perpetual area of improvement. Finding better tools, new abstractions, learning shortcut keys and using modern project planning is a way to continually get better at your job.  The goal of doing all that is to produce better software faster. Choosing the right tool for the job plays a big part. Lets…