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Visit Calgary: You’re Very Welcome!

9 Jun 2010

When we returned from Costa Rica, our plans had been pretty simple: take off the month of December to get settled, and then head back to work in January. Plans changed shortly after arriving back home, and suddenly I found myself without a job. Bills still had to be paid, food purchased, and because we live in a city that is far too unfriendly to public transit, we also had to buy a car.

A few years ago, this probably would have put me into a panic. And a few years ago, it would have been just me to worry about. Now I have a wife and two kids (well, one at the time, and one on the way) to support. Really, that should have put me off the deep end. Having lived through a significant amount of adversity over the last couple of years, though, I found myself not even concerned about the prospect of unemployment.

I attribute that to having kept contact with just the right people.

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Mentorship is a must

17 Mar 2010

No-one is ever born knowing everything. Like all animal life, we enter the world devoid of knowledge, having only the instincts innate to our species after countless eons of evolution, adaptation, and survival of the fittest. But those instincts can only grant us so much in the act of survival — they do very little for us as higher-intelligence beings. Instincts can only assist survival, in near-epic troglodytic proportions.

We need teachers to help us move past mere instinct towards self-sufficiency, and self-learning. They teach us mathematics, communication, sciences, and art. As intelligence grows, we shift away from teachers, and look more towards peers — people who are similar, but have more experience. They are our mentors, ones who offer their abilities as examples for us to learn from, and models upon which we can hope to improve ourselves.

And anyone who thinks they can survive without a mentor has truly never had one.

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What makes a Senior Developer

11 Feb 2010

Every so often, someone asks me what I need to see in a senior developer. Why people ask me this is a mystery. I mean, besides the fact that I’m a Know-It-All, could it really be that several years of being a manager have really allowed me to delve into the core of the human psyche, separate the hard skills from the soft, and know what it really means to be “that” person?

Yeah, I’m having a good laugh at this one, too! But since I am a Know-It-All, and someone asks, it’s really hard for me to say “I don’t know”. I mean, it’s not like I don’t have an opinion on it or something…

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Goodbye, Critical Mass

7 Jan 2010

Hey Critical Mass! I’m sorry I didn’t say “goodbye” properly. You know, the traditional email that goes around to cmassother, usually followed with the “we’ll be in the Ship starting at 5 o’clock”. I never got a chance to fire one out, such as things are, so really my best avenue to say hasta la vista is here. Hopefully a few of you get to see it.

Truth be told, I had been planning my “goodbye” message for years. (As my dad used to say, if you’re going to do something, do it right.) If nothing else, it would have been fun to make: a video that would cover my time at CM, complete with a snazzy soundtrack, and some bogus story about going to teach at an all-girls school. But planning means nothing without execution, and I never got around to it. I’m sure I will come to regret that.

Some of you won’t have a clue about who the fark I am. Some of you know me all-too-well. No matter where you sit in the spectrum, do yourself a favour and look around at all the people sitting near you. They, and you, are the people who make up Critical Mass.

As many have said before me, it’s the people I will miss most.

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2009, A Year in Review

4 Jan 2010

The year past was one of the toughest ones I can remember. It’s been a year of extreme highs, some pretty darks depths; my share of awesome joys, mixed with an unhealthy dose of stress. And that’s not when you consider the economy, I might add — things are even worse when you roll all that in.

The year closed out on a more sombre note for me, in many ways. Much quieter, and I got to spend a lot of time with my family (which I cherish now, and cannot regret in anyway), but the future is a little less certain. I’m less concerned about that fact than I thought I would be, however.

On with the year that just was… (more…)

You can never go home again

14 Dec 2009

When I was a kid, I heard the phrase “you can never go home again”, but never understood it. I mean, I went home every day after school, so what was wrong with that? It wasn’t until I went to university that I started to appreciate it — I was regularly amazed at how much my hometown seemed to change whenever I was away at school.

When my father died in 2002, the term gained a whole new meaning for me. Suddenly, I couldn’t even go home. My home was where my family lived, which was now only in the past. When my mother moved away, my home became a sightseeing stop.

Then I moved home from Costa Rica, to a house we own. Man, talk about change of perspective.

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Overtime is not a solution

12 Nov 2009

Every project is defined by a schedule. That schedule determines when certain tasks start and stop, when people enter and leave a project, and ultimately how much that project will cost (because, after all, time is money). But as we all know, the schedule you start with is almost never the one you end with.

Schedules change. No-one can predict the future. No-one can see the out-of-left-field problems, the people unable to work due to sudden illness (or worse), or the sudden changes in project direction. When a project’s schedule starts to go sour, time management rapidly becomes extremely important. In a world where deadlines are fixed and resources are limited, one of the most common solutions is to work overtime.

However, overtime is not a solution. Overtime is a problem.

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A good programmer is lazy, not stupid

24 Sep 2009

I say this, in one form or another, to developers I manage. I’ve said it for years, and I’ll continue to say it until I’m proven horribly, horribly wrong. Which, until I leave this industry, is not likely to happen. My belief is simple: when you work in a time and materials-based industry, such as marketing, you’re not being paid to do everything new. You’re being paid to deliver a solid solution as quickly and effectively as possible.

The problem, however, is that programmers like to create. It’s what makes a programmer a programmer — I know, because I used to be one. (Then I turned to the Dark Side, but that’s another story.) Programmers like to do things themselves.

But good programmers — at least in this business — try to as little work as possible.

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O Canada, my home and native land

1 Sep 2009

For anyone who’s been reading this blog for a while, you know two things:

I currently live in Costa Rica.
I’m Canadian.

One of those things is about to change.

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The power of responsibility

13 May 2009

With great power comes great responsibility.
- Various sources

I’m sure you’ve heard this quote before. It’s a good one, often used to reinforce the need for people to not slough off their priorities. Don’t get me wrong, it’s all fine and dandy, but I don’t really like it. It works for superhero movies and parental figures. It fails in my mind because it puts more of a burden on responsibility, rather than the sense of freedom one gets from being responsible.

Instead, I prefer this variation: