Author: Matt

Over the last couple of months I’ve been giving some thought to how the manufacturing business works, specifically in Canada. It’s been driven partly from things that I’ve been trying to buy, partly from wanting to try my hand at small scale production of something in the garage and also because it’s such an important…

Our ability to be productive is the most critical metric that determines quality of life. It’s a fundamental measurement of how the economy is doing, identifys where we are stagnating, and shows where the biggest gains are. There are many factors that go into improving productivity – capital investment in tooling, factories and better software,…

In business, when talking about writing a business plan, or when a consultant evaluates a business, sometimes a vision or mission statement are things that get discussed. For a long time I have looked at these kind of things as fluff. It’s a bunch of people wordsmithing a document that will never be read outside…

I have 3 big ideas. The kind of legacy making change the world ideas that are big and bold. These ideas are things I would pursue if I had the means to execute on them but it requires vastly more capital than I have access to, or that others would put me in charge of.…

The wave of tech disruption has been picking off industries one after the other since the early 70’s. Until today when it’s hard to think of any remaining sector of the economy that hasn’t gone through, or is in the process of being converted into a software driven market. The current biggest industry that is…

When I was a younger developer I didn’t see the value in writing tests for the projects I worked on. I was focused on being as productive as possible during the day to turn out new features and fix bugs. Tests doubled or more the amount of code that needed to be written, it added…

The utopian future portrayed in Star Trek takes place is a post scarcity society where money has lost it’s importance and people more or less have the access to food, energy and housing they need to live as well as the freedom to acheive their personal life ambitions without worrying about where the next paycheque…

Making the most of things when stuck at home for the last couple of weeks, and plans for the next while. I’ve been chipping away at various small projects. I’m looking for things that I can get done with the things I have at hand and not going to the store. One of the recent…

In the midst of the current global crisis for COVID-19, I was reminded just how often we have found ourselves in Bug-in situations over the last decade. We have been personally impacted by 4 significant events in the last 12 years. In 2018 a tornado ripped through a power distribution station in Ottawa knocked out…

There’s a limit to the things a single developer can accomplish as part of a project. I get a great deal from checking things off my todo list. You can write great code and propose great ideas, but there’s a limit to what a single person can accomplish without a team. A team can accomplish…