It’s not enough to impress the person sitting next to you, the person you report to, the people on your team or the customers you interact with. They are not the ones that go to bed at night thinking – “wow they really did impress me today”. No, it’s the other way around where you will go to bed thinking – “I might have made them happy, but I held back and could have done…

Never. If you coded for 10 years, and then stopped because you had to focus on the growth and mentoring of others and didn’t have the opportunity to sit down in front of a keyboard and punch out brackets and semi-colons in your free time are you no longer considered a coder? No. What if you simply became bored with what you were building and tried your hand at other pursuits for a period of…

Some days I write a great article that gets tons of views. Some days the post I compose is so hot my keyboard melts. Some days when I am back in the code, I’m amazed and how well it works. And some days… it’s the complete opposite… but on those days I tried to write something new… something I’m not quite sure what it fully meant and how it entered my consciousness, but it was…

In baseball, you have Starters and Closers. Starters get the game going and if their good, generate a lead big enough so that anyone can close. Closers finish up what the Starter began.  The really good ones, take a potential failure from a Starter and turn it around into a win. You can have good Starters (they get the projects going, establish the architecture, get things up and running) and you can have good closers…

How often do you get a project and start to build it against the patterns you already have in your brain?  Or you start to review against the patterns that you have in your head that always worked before and should work now as well? Too much? All the time? Never? I don’t know if there is a balance, but I do know, to this day, whenever I start to work on a project that…