[Book Review] "INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love"

Marty Cagan's book "INSPIRED" is an excellent resource for product managers who are seeking to improve their effectiveness as a manager as well as the product teams that they lead. As a software engineer, this book gave me insight into the thought processes of effective product managers, and, more importantly, showed me what actions and behaviors to look for in a strong product manager. Indirectly, the book also provided me with ideas for how I can better integrate myself with my product manager in order to further enable the success of our team.

Competencies that I am Seeking to Strengthen this Year

A short list of the technical subjects that I am going to focus on learning.

I am always working to broaden my skill-set as a developer, and I wanted to sit down in the early months of the new year to consider which technologies I should focus on either learning or improving my understanding of. Given that I have always favored back-end skills over front-end skills, I thought it was time that I focus on improving my JavaScript chops. Also, being competent with technologies such as Docker, Jenkins, Nginx, and Chef will help me stay relevant as more and more developers are broadening their skills to include DevOps-related tech.

How to Spot a Faker

...and why you should be your authentic self.

Whether in an IRC channel, a Hacker News thread, or some other forum, you are bound to run into the "faker"--a person who inflates their competence, importance, or body of work in order to drive up their self-worth and clout. These self-aggrandizing troglodytes can be found in all walks of life, but there seems to be an influx of them into the world of computer programming riding the wave of start-ups that has emerged over the past couple of years.

Quick Hack for Rails / Bootstrap Validations

A quick javascript hack to make Rails and Bootstrap work well together for form validations.

New Release: dgen v0.5.0

Reviving and revamping an old project.

After a long period of dormancy, I have made some much needed updates for the dgen project.