Category: Personal Learning and Growth

New Year is a Time to Have a Retrospective

New Year is a time to reflect on the passing year. If you are like me; you will have experienced many changes and challenges throughout 2019. I like to take time every January to reflect on the passing year and make goals and challenges for myself. One way to reflect is by using the retrospective idea used in agile software development processes. Continue reading New Year is a Time to Have a Retrospective

Podcasts I Follow

These are the Podcasts I follow and listen to most often. They range from business, design and general interests. They are not ranked in an particular order, but my favourite is James Altucher and Jordan Harbinger. I would challenge everyone to listen to one or both of these regularly. Continue reading Podcasts I Follow

7 Soft Skills That Senior Developers Should Have

Developers often ask what they need to do to make it to the level of a senior developer. They can gain all the programming skills in all the popular and new software frameworks, but they will not be anything more than just a developer. A Senior Developer needs to have some fundamental soft skills.

What are soft skills?
Soft skills are how you interact with people, tasks and projects where hard skills are the skills we learn at college, online tutorials or books ( “HOW TO DO” skills ). Soft skills are tough to achieve and are often part of a persons natural tendencies. Soft skills like hard skills can be learned, but not easily. Soft skills can get better through practice and time just like hard skills. An example of hard skills is carpentry. An example of soft sills is a skill that is transferable to any job like being a team player.
Continue reading 7 Soft Skills That Senior Developers Should Have

Developer Engagement

I was throwing ideas around in how to increase our developer engagement. I was also thinking of a way to give our product development a little boost. I love the developers that I work with and would like to support their passions and boost their care for their jobs.

One idea I had was to take a day or two a month and let developers work on a pet project. The only caveat was that the pet project had to be related to the company somehow. Continue reading Developer Engagement

Using FitBit as a Software Developer

Confession: I am a Software Developer and I do not move much.

My wife had gotten a FitBit and was loyally using it. She offered to let me where it for a day which I did not do, but rather I told her that I am pretty certain I walk at least 10,000 steps a day easily ( FitBit suggested target ). She had purchased one for me and boy was it an eye opener; I was very immobile. In a given day I was lucky to get between 3,000 and 4,000 steps in a day and that is while walking two blocks to the car. Continue reading Using FitBit as a Software Developer

Joined the Dark Side and Loving It

A while back now I had a friendly debate with a colleague. It began innocently in a pub on a Friday night and it was Web Forms vrs MVC in the DotNet framework. I was anti-MVC for various reasons and in some sense I could still make an argument against MVC. We escalated our debate to a more public forum where we took the topic to the masses and presented our two sides. We created the exact same projects in our chosen DotNet platforms ( me in Web Forms and he was in MVC ) and we presented the projects. We talked about what we thought were the plus sides of what we chose and why. Before the debate I posted a question on LinkedIn for feedback and the feedback seemed positive for Web Forms. At the end of the debate, we asked our audience to make a choice based on their experience and what they had seen and Web Forms won.
Continue reading Joined the Dark Side and Loving It