General Posts
21 post21 found
On Generational Thinking
Three weeks to the day my wife and I welcomed our daughter to the world and ascended to parenthood.
A Eulogy: the Tenacious Pursuit of Happiness
On Tuesday, January 5th 2021 my grandfather, James Chester Roush, passed away in his retirement community in San Diego, California, peacefully in his sleep. He was 96 years old. He was a World War ...
It's Just Not a Big Deal
In my professional life, I’ve actively conditioned myself to tolerate and accept risks when necessary. Risk tolerance is something that can be learned and taught. But risk tolerance is fundamentall...
The High Price of Comfort
Chief among the values prized by fellow millennials is comfort. It’s reflected in our more casual dress and our increasing preference for impersonal forms of communication, such as text or Slack. O...
What We Leave Behind
It was roughly a year ago this week that I fled California in pursuit of greener economic pastures. I came to Texas an economic refugee; despite running a successful business in California for a nu...
The Necessity of Systematic Thinking
I spend a lot of my professional time training other software developers on how to build next-generation applications. Distributed and concurrent systems; stream processing; stateful web applicatio...
In Response to a Letter from a Beginning Programmer
I received a heartfelt response from a new software developer in response to my “What Do You Need to Become an Elite Developer?” blog post. With his permission, I decided to post his le...
You Succeed Once You Stop Giving a Shit
This post is about how to find success in any situation and draws entirely from my own experiences. Your mileage may vary. July was a rough month for me this year – I endured simultaneous failure...
Being Right is Always the Wrong Choice
It was about four or five years ago that I had an intrinsic need to be “right” all the time.
I couldn’t let it go when someone made a mistake, or slighted me, or disputed the qua...
Brush the Dust Away
This post is about stress.
It's been nearly a year since I started MarkedUp Analytics, and we've come a long way - I've raised money, won the business of some amazing customers, built the nucleus ...
Seven Unproductive Habits of Startup Founders
Now that I’m running my own company and no longer speak on behalf of Microsoft or anyone else, I feel like I can speak a little bit more freely about some of the things I’ve observed ab...
Taking Risks Requires Practice
And patience. This is intended for people who recognize that a need to change themselves, their environment, or whatever and are having trouble getting started.
Until last month, all of the books i...
College: Four Years Later
This is intended for recent graduates who are finding themselves lost in the shuffle as they adjust to the real world, but has advice that is applicable to everyone. Your mileage may vary. I gradu...
How to Do Business with Extremely Busy People
Big Picture
The bottom line when working with busy people is to preempt as much of the mental overhead of working with you as possible; all it really takes is some brevity and thoughtfulness on yo...
Rise of the Popped Collar Programmer
I am frankly disturbed by a trend that I’ve seen both in-person and all over Hacker News / Reddit through the past year, and I am going to finally give it a name: “popped collar program...
Powered by Microsoft
I alluded to a change in my employment circumstances in my previous blog entry, and now that I'm an official Microsoft employee as of Monday I feel extremely comfortable making this information pub...
My Talk at BarCamp San Diego: How to Create Applications People Love
I showed up at BarCamp7 this morning and saw that absolutely no presentations were up on the board whatsoever, so me being me I spent most of the day putting together a presentation at the last min...
Lessons from Code Camp 2010
This time last weekend I was in the middle of the second session of Southern California Code Camp. Ever since I came to the realization that no man is an island and I’m going to ultimately ne...
Programmer's Dilemma: Baby-Proofing vs. Giving Guns to Monkeys
One of my best friends from college once described a previous job in the financial industry as something akin to "giving guns to monkeys."
He felt that the product he sold, although it w...
The State of Open Web APIs
I wanted to repost a presentation that I saw on Twitter yesterday which highlights some interesting trends in the state of open web APIs across the board:
Open APIs: State of the Market, May 2010
...
A New Year, a New Attitude
Hi,
After a couple of happy years blogging my forays into social media, Facebook application development, online marketing, and so forth on AjaxNinja / Marketing Ninja, I took a year-long bre...