Matt Warren

Author: Matt

  • Building Social Services

    Technology is getting more and more personal. As it does such it becomes easier to make things social in a real way. Bringing a social experience to your application is more than just slapping a like button somewhere. Social is about making people aware that when they use your application they are entering a social…

  • 1 Thing Programmers Should Do More Often

    This past week I found myself with a task of creating pages on this site for all the Mobile Apps that have been developed by Halotis Inc. At the same time I wanted to get the marketing material organized for all of those apps in a consistent directory structure. Which lead me to something I…

  • Life to Old Projects

    Maintenance.  UGH! We live in a world where software is part of an every evolving ecosystem of other software.  Everything is constantly changing and everything you do needs to keep up or risk falling into disrepair and creating technical debt. The maintenance window is a chance to breath fresh life into an otherwise languishing project.…

  • White Shoe Syndrome

    You know what you need to do to launch your business, you have the skills, you have the idea, and yet progress is slow. Maybe you have White Shoe Syndrome. The problem with white shoes is that they are always dirty and need to be cleaned. When it is time to sit down at your…

  • Adjusting to Fewer Blogs

    A couple weeks ago I drastically downsized my list of subscribed blogs.  Going from skimming 200+ blog posts down to fewer than 10 per day.  It has actually made quite a difference.  The time saved was used to read more books, which I’m happy to say has worked out. Being disconnected from the news has…

  • Long Vacation

    For the last 2 1/2 weeks I have been on a long vacation back home to Newfoundland.  This time we seriously lucked out on the weather, getting in two weeks of 25+ degree sunny days. We bookended the trip starting with the Tele 10 at the start and the Regatta to finish things off with…

  • Free Coding

    Getting into the flow or zone as a coder is when you are your most productive and code spews from your fingers into your favourite text editor as fast as you can type. When in the zone you can seemingly pour out 100’s of lines of code in no time. But how do you get…

  • Think Weeks

    One of the things Bill Gates did was to take a semi-annual ‘Think Week’ retreat. During this week he would extract himself from all obligations and hole up in a hotel somewhere with a stack of books to read. To Bill Gates these retreats were critical to his ability to stay ahead of big picture…

  • Tele 10 Finished

    One more thing to knock off the bucket list.  Yesterday Heather and I finished the Tele 10 race in St. John’s.  My time was good considering zero training runs over the last few months.  I was counting on the adaptation to Calgary altitude to help me power through the race.  That seemed to work.  At…

  • Manager Who Codes vs Developer Team Lead

    Personal branding is deceptively effective in many cases. The difference is skills between a manager who codes and a developer team lead is negligible.  In many cases you could say they are job titles that describe the same role in a company and yet from a HR and status point of view they are very…