Coaching as a Team Leader

This article emphasizes the crucial role of a team leader as a coach and mentor to their team. I provide clear examples of different scenarios and draw attention to the critical differences between the “coach” and “fixer” mindsets that leaders can adopt. While this guidance applies to other management and leadership positions, I specifically focus… Continue reading Coaching as a Team Leader

Reactive Programming with JavaScript, Ruby and Python

Reactive programming is a concept that is finally gaining some popularity among programmers. It makes it easier to think in data flows and to manage and work with them. Instead of imperative programming, you’re thinking about code as a series of processes that take place on streams. This is similar to the conceptual shift to… Continue reading Reactive Programming with JavaScript, Ruby and Python

GraphQL with MongoDB using Mongoose and Node.js

As part of a prototype/exploratory project in March 2016, I explored how to build a GraphQL server using Node.js and interfacing with a MongoDB database using the Mongoose library. The best reason to use GraphQL is if you have multiple frontend clients that communicate with your backend and they each have differing data needs. For… Continue reading GraphQL with MongoDB using Mongoose and Node.js

PyCon Canada 2017: “Python as a Philosophy”

I was in Montreal, Canada for the PyCon Canada 2017 conference and presented on the ideas and philosophy that are present within the Python programming language. I covered how the Python language influences your coding style and how that coding style is now in the mainstream and has made its way into other programming languages.… Continue reading PyCon Canada 2017: “Python as a Philosophy”

Cause & Effect Diagrams

Cause and effect diagrams, also known as Ishikawa diagrams, are one of 7 basic tools of quality. Cause and effect diagrams are useful because they let you list out all the causes that you and/or your team can think of. Having a team think of possible causes is similar to the concept of peer review in software development projects. Where one person thinks of a few causes, another person will think of different causes. This gives a broader range of causes to investigate.

JSON C++ Tutorial

JsonCpp is a good solid C++ library to work with. JsonCpp gives you the ability to open JSON configuration files.

Web Development with Smalltalk and Seaside Framework

While taking a part-time computer science class, I built a Smalltalk-based web app using the Seaside.st web framework. The project was a software prototype for a restaurant ordering system. The goal was to design a user interface that allowed a customer in the restaurant to use their iPhone or some other smart phone to quickly… Continue reading Web Development with Smalltalk and Seaside Framework