When you think about efficiency I’m guessing you think about savings: cost savings, time savings, overall improvements in delivery.  More and more, efficiency has come to mean environmental efficiency: less CO2, less water,

aka the metaprogramming zoo I’ve been designing and building software for years, in many different languages.  I love to explore the different abstractions and conventions as you move from language to language.  I’ve

Life is a journey, not a destination.– Ralph Waldo EmersonThis has not been a good week for fans of Canadian Triathlon. It’s the Olympics and day 8 and 11 were what I’d been

So I’ve been using the Office 2013 Preview now for a couple of weeks and I thought I’d take a few minutes to give you my thoughts.  In a word, Wow!  I know

aka Do I really need an App server If you’ve ever planned out an application I’m sure you’ve heard the term “n-tier”.  The idea is to take the logical capabilities required in a

So I sat down to write out my GTD 50k goals and work my way into the next quarter.  And its hard.  Let me rephrase that … it’s haaaaaaaaaaaaard.  The question is why?

While its not hot in the mainstream media, there’s been a great deal of talk lately in financial circles about Basel III.  There’s a great review of the what Basel III is over

You’ve all heard the derisive phrases “form over function”, “lipstick on a pig” and the like.  The gist of these epithets is to indicate that more care and attention is put into how

We take community involvement seriously.  And as one of our communities, Edmonton, is currently going through the paces of its current municipal election, I thought I would take a moment to reflect on

I’ve worked with a number of teams over the years. Built-from-scratch teams, in-place teams I’ve inherited and teams that have grown organically with me over a long period. In all cases, people have

Wire-framing is God’s gift to requirements gathering.  Its true.  I’m a recent convert to formally including a wireframe in the design/requirments process.  Why this sudden conversion?  The discovery of a tool that makes

I’ve spent the better part of a year now doing nothing but business development.  Its a rough sport and don’t ever let anyone tell you differently.  The hardest part is definitely ‘the void’.

We recently worked on a rebranding (hope you like it).  We have a fantastic designer who has produced a phenomenal brand book.  I look at the investment we put into the re-branding and

If you’ve been following our project manager or our chief technologist on twitter or our invitation to a revolution in software development, you’ve been exposed to our new religion.  We are evangelizing a

Seth Godin talks about how an entire generation of manufacturing was based on the single drive shaft layout of an industrial factory and asks the question: What if you produce a service or

Work is an interesting animal.  There are many things that I want to do, many things that I need to do, just plain many things that need doing.  But often times, I find

I left the employed world almost 2 years ago to work as a hired gun.  That quickly turned into the entreprenurial venture you see before you today.  Like most consulting gigs, it wasn’t

As is all over the blogosphere, 100000 google wave sandbox accounts were sent out this morning.  And we got one!  You can read lots here, here and here.  I particularly liked this review

I was working on a website redesign project for one of the clients of our sister educational software services company, and I was plugging away in GIMP moving bits around, trying to get

When negotiating a contract, there are many factors to consider as you wind your way to a working agreement.  Some of these factors are quantifiable, like duration or rate, but others, like trust,

I was suffering through taking my Windows 7 RC (7100) install up to the RTM edition.  Microsoft, if you can believe it, wants you to backup all your files and settings, wipe the

Seth Godin posted a brief comment about his experience with “One Flew South,” a restaurant in Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, Terminal E.  The simple post notes that the secret for the restaurant’s success

Developing applications is all about resources.  Do you have the developer tools, the frameworks, the databases, the web servers, the app servers, etc, etc, etc.  My entire career, I’ve been the kind of

So I’ve spent the last little while getting aquainted with Ruby on Rails.  My assessment so far?  What a brilliant collection of conventions.  But the number of times I’ve been missing an ‘s’

The 4-hour work week as popularized by Tim Ferriss is an interesting postulation: try to establish a lifestyle for yourself where you only work 4 hours a week and do what you want

I just read Daniel Markham’s post on how Agile is like Teenage Sex and its nice to see I’m not the only one stuggling with the reality of agile.  I’ve been flirting with

So, the lifecycle of scripted applications is, in theory, hours not days or weeks or years.  In theory, that means that you are constantly updating and adapting in a production setting: iterations of

So this week I began down the road of bringing our database scripts up to snuff with reality to ensure that we have a script that can build us a functional database from

So, I’ve been doing a lot of reading on JoelOnSoftware lately.  If you’re not familiar, I’d encourage you to do some reading because his insight are often just what you need to kickstart your