On Salary Requirements

A friend of mine who’s actively looking for a job pinged me yesterday morning looking for advice on what salary to request.  My friend’s requested salary was a required field on the application form.  I don’t like this, and I said as much via Twitter. Asking an applicant for a salary requirement before letting them meet […]

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On Social Media Terminology

I’ve got a high school reunion coming up, which means I’ve been added to a group for it on Facebook, which has immediately been followed by a small avalanche of friend requests from people I haven’t spoken to in years. It got me thinking about the different terminology that social media sites use. On LinkedIn, […]

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Talking About the Weather

I was staring in anger at my car thermometer this morning when I had a little bit of a revelation. You think about the weather and, in general, people understand concepts.  Hot and cold.  Dry and wet.  We’ve attached numbers to them and we know what they mean but only because we’ve made this association […]

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Building a Custom Hockey Puck Display Case

Building a Custom Hockey Puck Display Case

A couple years ago when I has having my basement finished I set aside an area for displaying some of my hockey memorabilia.  Actually, it was more an area so that I could start collecting the things I always said I would, as I’d kind of held off on collecting much due to space constraints. […]

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Problem Solving and Hockey Photography

I’ve written about applying development-like problem solving to realms outside my day job before and another interesting case of that came up for me this week. I’ve been spending a lot of time over the last couple days at MSU’s Munn Arena for the annual MSU Pro Camp, where a bunch of former Spartans and affiliated […]

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Flashback to 1997

Earlier today, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels tweeted out an interesting look into Amazon’s past. If want to learn more about building for the long term you should start with Jeff Bezos’ 1997 letter to shareholders http://t.co/IjmT51ua8T — Werner Vogels (@Werner) July 28, 2014 Now, there are lessons to learn from that letter and I don’t […]

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Thoughts on Children’s Stories

One of the things that being a parent has taught me is that children’s bedtime stories have some weird stuff in them. Take Margaret Wise Brown’s classic, Goodnight Moon. The first half or so of the story is spent detailing the items that live in “the great green room” where a rabbit child is going […]

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On Problem Solving and Deck Repair

One of the things I love about my job – probably the thing I love most about it – is that it provides me interesting problems to solve. Yes, I like writing code, and writing clean code probably prevents having to solve problems in the future, but the code itself is just a tool to […]

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Stupid Little Projects

Sometimes it’s the pointless little projects that are surprisingly fun. I recently upgraded my phone.  I’m not going to lie, at the end the main reason I loved my old Galaxy Nexus wasn’t the technology but the fact that I had a custom case with the DetroitHockey.Net logo on it.  Half the point of the […]

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