Startups Startup Insights: Leveraging Customer Support to Improve Your Product By establishing an efficient support system early on, you can gain invaluable insights directly from your users, understand where they're struggling, and identify areas where your product needs improvement.
Work-Life Balance An Engineering Manager's Guide to Pivoting Out of Work Mode for Real One benefit of regular breaks is a chance to step back and become aware of yourself but what if you’re still wearing down? To counteract the problem of slowly grinding yourself away, you’ll need to find relief on a larger scale, beyond the confines of your job.
Business How "Right-sizing" Companies are Sacrificing Innovation We know companies tend to continue their existing trends until something changes. But what if that external force is not a sudden shock but a gradual erosion? What if the company starts losing its most valuable asset - its people - through layoffs?
Work-Life Balance Featured Work-Life Balance for the Software Engineering Manager Today’s post marks the start of a new series on work-life balance and on the healthiness of work in general. I’ll be coming at this from a somewhat different angle than most sources on the topic. Searching for a Balance I have a confession to make. I am
Work-Life Balance Avoiding Burnout, Taking Breaks As managers faced with large (or numerous) projects, we might start to believe that it’s our responsibility to “be the heroes” in our companies, ensuring that everything gets done and performance metrics are always on the rise. This can lead us to some very unhealthy places.
Startups A Engineering Manager's Guide to Managing Effectively Mastering the art of managing a team goes beyond structural efficiency. Learn the essential skills of prioritizing and delegating effectively to create an environment where everyone can shine.
Technology The data landscape: ELT, Event Streaming, and ESB Every company will deal with data, and if you're a SaaS company, the data is coming in from all sides like a strong storm front blowing in snow. You'll be buried in data, more data than you'll ever use. How you do use that data can vary. You're going to
Mastodon Using Cloudflare to Customize Your Mastodon Username Domain You can use Cloudflare to customize your Mastodon username domain without needing to host your own Mastodon.
Hiring An Engineering Manager's Guide to Hiring - Planning to Hire Hiring, growing and retaining people are going to be your most important skills as a manager. Growing your team, not just grow in size but in ability and consistency, is the most accurate reflection of your management abilities. If you're an engineer that's new to managing, it's important to shift
career planning Providing Career Planning and Advancement Welcome back to Room to be Awesome! I hope all my Canadian readers had a great Victoria Day, and all my US readers are able to enjoy Memorial Day with their families. In my previous post on building deep connections with your team, I discussed the need to provide opportunities
Employment With Times Changing, Deep Connections to Your Team Matter Even More 2 years. For most tech companies, that’s the expected median tenure for a software engineer (Forbes). If you’re an engineering leader, having that high turnover means a lot of your corporate knowledge leaves each year. Your managers are also constantly on a hiring treadmill to maintain equilibrium, even
engineering Reflecting and Flywheels Change isn't fun, but it's a part of life. I've been in a reflective mood the last few weeks. I've gotten a flood of kind messages (which I've deeply appreciated) as well as interesting offers to chat from other founders and recruiters. I've been eager to provide reference letters and
podcast My Podcast Listening for Summer 2021 It's July, and you've still got a few months of Summer left, and you're working on checking off those checkboxes. First watermelon? Check! Off bug spay? Of course. Enjoying sitting on your truck or hatch back tailgate at the beach with just enough of a breeze to make the heat
Dolby Movie Theater Sound: How does Dolby Digital work? I know many of us haven't been in a theater for a while, so I wanted to write this short missive about the underappreciated world of theater sound before my next product design post drops. If this sort of technical nerdery isn't your thing, I get it. Expect the next
HotSpot Parking Lessons Learned From My First Commercial Product: User Flow It was 2013. We were watching videos of the Harlem Shake, Daft Punk's Random Access Memories just came out (and signalled when I was okay admitting EDM was my preferred style of music), and I was in a startup incubator in Fredericton, New Brunswick. I was part of the founding
cms Physical security, MVNOs and Heat Pumps Welcome to the third one of these, I’m excited to keep sharing cool things I’m finding that help with my work and hobbies. Let’s go! * TinaCMS is a cool NodeJS-powered Markdown visual editor for websites, that also powers forestry.io. * Canada crossed 3.5% vaccinated today (Feb
fonus Revisiting Fonus 6 Months In Earlier last year I wrote an in-depth review of Fonus Mobile, after having been given early access to the new mobile service reseller. I figured it was time to check back in on how the experience has been, and what's changed since I first reviewed it last year. A New
cold war Cold War Tech, Decision Making Tools, Open Source CRM Welcome back to the second time I’m doing this (you should subscribe)! Here’s the cool stuff I encountered last week, starting with some shameless self-promotion! As you might know, I like weird tech, and one amazing source of that is Cold War-era technology. I started a new site
LTE Launching a newsletter! (Issue #1) Why? Because I can, and you should subscribe. I’ll share some technical tricks and cool things I’ve discovered from across my online travels every Sunday. * Someone on TikTok showed off how to make an automatic license plate reader for the highway beside his house and shows off how
cold war The Vanishing Line of Cold War-era History Over the past couple of weeks, I've been researching and collecting information on Cold War technology (a topic of personal interest for me). I've been gathering information on how technology advanced and infrastructure was built in the shadow of a fear of nuclear war. As I've been doing this research,
Consumer Goods and Services Fonus Mobile Review My experiences with Fonus began at the end of last year, on November 21st when I heard about a disruptive mobile provider that wanted to provide global, unlimited service for a low fixed fee (presently listed at $30 / month). I need to disclose that I was part of an initial
Comparing USB Speakerphones A guest post collaboration by my friend, Daniel Haworth. Business communications have changed drastically over the years, going from old school analogue landlines to digital PBXs and now on to VoIP phones (and not even using a “phone”, per se). The organization I work for mostly uses Yealink IP phones,
Can you believe power banks mAh ratings? A guest post collaboration by my friend, Daniel Haworth. Terms Milliamp hours (mAh) and Amp hours (Ah) You'll see many battery packs (like this Blitzwolf one) listed at 10,000 milliamp hours. What does this number mean? It means that this battery is capable of providing one amp for ten
Apple Speed Up Your Mac with an External SSD If you have an iMac with Thunderbolt or USB 3 but without an SSD, you can boot from a full-speed external SSD without opening the case. It's possible for that Mac to boot in under 30 seconds and to jump generations ahead for under $200. I have a mid-2011 iMac
Consumer Goods and Services Can You Get Good Earbuds for Under Five Dollars? Me and my good friend, danrulz98 on YouTube, wanted to find out if any of the sub-$5 in-ear headphones (earbuds) sold on Deal Extreme were actually usable. Think no set of earbuds selling for such low prices are any good? You might be surprised by our results! We’re
