Approach career decisions as an investor and client would – Two important questions to ask yourself

Business dog

For any organization you’re considering working for, make sure you can answer the following two questions with a resounding “yes”

  1. Would you invest your own money in this organization?
  2. Would you be a client of this organization if you needed a product or service they offer?

These two questions have guided me well over the years. Hopefully they will help you in your journey.

Build an ecosystem around an ethos – The bottom line is no longer the bottom line

Sliced up hundred dollar bill

photo by

Once upon a time, in an economy far far away, the measure of a company was its balance sheet alone.

While a company must be profitable in order to stay in business, focus today is shifting to a more broad collection of measures, many of which have nothing to do with the bottom line. Organizations focused on achieving long term success are adept at firmly establishing their core values, attracting and retaining talented individuals and teams who embody these values, and communicating with customers authentically and transparently.

“As individuals and companies, everything that we say and do is a symbol of who we are. And it is only when we communicate our beliefs authentically that we can attract others to our cause, and form the bonds that will empower us to achieve truly great things.”

~Simon Sinek
This principal applies to organizations of all shapes and sizes. When choosing local produce the other day, I was presented with a choice between tomatoes grown by a local organic farmer and another set of similar tomatoes with simply a PLU 4064 and a somewhat smaller price tag. While I’m a frugal person at heart, seeing the name of the farmer and her nearby community made the choice clear to me, and I went with the local option because of the value provided to both myself and my local community. Ten or twenty years ago, this choice might have been unheard of. Individuals have started caring about “where” their food comes from, and this relates directly to the “why” of the person or organization who produced the food.

In the more ephemeral software realm, it can be hard for a customer to differentiate between a software platform from Initech Corporation or a similar product from Hooli. There was a time when companies could remain competitive on simply the number of features offered and the price, but the relevance of those two factors alone is waning, especially as the sales price of millions of pieces of software and apps approaches zero.

In software, a bullet-proof strategy is to have an ecosystem built around an ethos. While there is more to it than the field of dreams mantra “If you build it, they will come,” with other things equal, a clearly communicated “why” will separate the passionate innovators from the rest.

Companies and organizations are a powerful force in the world, and are able to organize and operate based on the ecosystem around them. There are limitless opportunities out there for us humans, as stewards of this planet, to make it a better place. Sir Richard Branson sums this up well.

“…imagine all the good that can be done when all companies place emphasis on purpose. Many customers want to buy from businesses that share similar values to their own, so more and more consumers are aligning themselves to impactful companies that sell social or environmentally-conscious products and services.”

~Sir Richard Branson

I encourage each of you to get out there and build successful organizations or work to effect positive change in the organizations you are a part of.


Automating the whole process instead of fixing the printer

This morning, my wife asked me to fix the printer so that she could print some forms. Sure, I could have spent a few minutes fighting with printer drivers and what-not, but I hate printing and printers – They seriously stab at my soul.

So my solution was to automate her whole process instead.

If you remember the MadLib notepads you had as a kid, then this will be very familiar to you.

Mad libs
MadLibs – shared under Fair Use

The premise is that you have a story with words cut out by type.

For example, “_______ (person in the room) is an excellent _______ (job / profession) who once _______ (verb) a/an _____ (noun) with his/her bare hands”

There would be a separate page with the following form, and while filling it out you can’t see how the words will fit into the final narrative shown above.

Person in the room   _________
Job / Profession _________
Verb _________
Noun _________

Once completed, the form might look like this…

Person in the room   George
Job / Profession fireman
Verb impaled
Noun shark

Then you transfer the words into the narrative from earlier and you get the unusual story of George the fireman who impales sharks.

George is an excellent fireman who once impaled a shark with his bare hands”

Since I was unsure of her internet access at the location of the event, I needed to build something that was completely self-contained and did not need internet access while it was running. She has a Mac, so slapping together a WPF app wasn’t a straightforward option without installing a VM.

I’ve been learning Node.js in my spare time (since @chimon1984 thinks it might catch on one day), so this was a perfect real-world scenario for me. I had about an hour to time-box the project and set off to code it up in my pajamas on a Saturday morning.

The technologies used are all free and very simple to install and get running with. I’m assuming Linux or OS X, but it could be made to run on Windows without many additional steps.

If you want to check out the code and try it yourself, hop on over to the GitHub where I’ve posted the code. Feel free to use it any way you like, as it has a standard MIT license and submit Pull Requests for improvements and updates. There’s a todo.txt section with things I might add to it as I have free time (whenever that mythical time might be).

Cherry picking commits with GIT

I have a project in which I’m maintaining both a beta and a release branch. Bugfixes need to be applied to both branches, except in cases where the bug has already been fixed in the release branch, in which case it would only need to be addressed in the beta branch.

Yesterday I ran into a case where I wanted to just merge a single commit from “beta” to “release” in order to apply a fix from “beta” directly to “release.”

It Kind of blew my mind how easy this was…

Mind Blown!


1. Find the commit you want to take from the source branch beta. In this case its hash was af19aadbcfa61d2d2816307044318d637d35cee5.

git log

2. Switch to the branch where you want to apply the commit.

git checkout release

3. Apply the commit from dev as a new commit of equivalent changes to the beta branch.

git cherry-pick af19aadbcfa61d2d2816307044318d637d35cee5

4. Resolve any merge conflicts(this may happen automatically if no conflicts)

git mergetool

5. Commit (this may happen automatically, I forget)

git commit

6. Push your changes to your GIT remote.

git push

Commit in beta [insert image a]

Commit in release [insert image b]

Charts and explanation stuffs

You can also string these together to apply more than one commit at a time, but that’s content for another post.

In addition to not imploding our universe into a parallel one with talking sheep, this just worked as expected. Slightly shocking…

Happy GITing.

On the topic of changing project or job





