Matt Warren

Author: Matt

  • Focused Effort vs Shotgun Approach

    There are proponents of both cases for building a business.  Should you identify the vision and strategy for one amazing product and chip away at it until it becomes a success, or should you try 10 small experiments, see what sticks then focus on the winners? David Heinemeier Hansson of BaseCamp started his venture with…

  • Bot Trading Final Thoughts

    My software project for February was a stock trading bot that made trades based on twitter feeds. It was an interesting project that gave me a chance to learn a few new things. I had the chance to apply a couple of machine learning techniques.  In particular using natural language processing to perform sentiment analysis and…

  • Revisiting Adsense

    I have been writing for my blogs for over 15 years now.  A lot has changed with the internet in that time, and over the years I have investigated many ways to let my websites pay for themselves. When Adsense was first announced I jumped on it only to find that it paid almost nothing…

  • Programming for Impact

    One of my ambitious goals for the year is to take on 12 programming projects.  The projects I’ll undertake for this challenge have a couple of requirements: It should be something that I can complete in 1 month of calendar time it should take less than 40 hours of effort it should ideally challenge me…

  • Writing a Twitter Stock Trading Bot

    My project for the month is a stock trading bot that will ingest tweets from accounts I consider to be market influencers and do some parsing and sentiment analysis to help create and execute a trade through my broker. For years I’ve wanted to build something to do automated trading and this is something that…

  • Programming Deliberate Practice

    For software developers there is an unhealthy prevailing belief that being a great programmer is some innate skill that others have. Brilliance with developing code is difficult to train for because it either requires some gift you don’t have or years of on the job experience.  There is a large amount of impostor syndrome within…

  • Programming Momentum

    Writing code everyday has been an interesting challenge. In 2015 I started to work towards a long streak on GitHub which eventually capped out at 250 days. The questions I wanted to answer was: Can I apply ‘deliberate practice‘ to programming and get better? Can ‘free coding’ (like free writing) be effective way to push…

  • Deploying a Python Flask App on Amazon Lightsail with Dokku

    One of the welcome additions to Amazon’s AWS offerings is a simplified server provisioning service to compete directly with Digital Ocean called Lightsail.  Lightsail provides a nicer web UI for launching instances, many quick launch options for common apps like WordPress or GitLab and simplified billing (yay!).  With Lightsail you don’t need to pre-pay for Reserved…

  • Programmatic Models

    Recently I’ve been interested in finding a business investment – something like a B&B that allows me to put some of my retirement savings into a business that I have some control over its success.  The normal process for something like this would be to write a business plan or at least do some back of the…

  • Small Projects

    There’s nothing quite like the feeling of starting a new project idea and seeing it all the way through to finished and published.  It’s a feather in your cap that you can look back on and say “I built that”.  Regardless of if it is a big hit or not, it will make you a…