These are a collection of articles that may not fit well into the primary categories of Dev Leader. Many of them are likely older articles that still offer value but are not exactly aligned to the organization of more recent content on the website.
Articles The Real Reason People Won’t Change: Admittedly, when I read this article on my phone the full posting wasn't available to me. I was only able to read the first page of the article, but the concept was enough to get me interested. "Competing commitments". Heard of it? I hadn't but it seems to explain a lot. Competing commitments are, as you might have expected, commitments to things that are in conflict. The article has a ton of examples, but the concept of competing commitments offers insight as to why some people seem stubborn in their ways, despite everything else being lined up for success. A simple example might be someone who is a die-hard advocate of the project they are working on and really wants it to succeed. However, they're actually inhibiting the success of the project because…
My Team Triumph - Canada You probably haven't heard of it, but I can assure you that will change. Today I was fortunate enough to participate in the first My Team Triumph race in Canada. My Team Triumph is a program that allows people of all ages with disabilities to participate in endurance events. With a great volunteer staff, a few angels, and all of the amazing captains, this was made possible. My Team Triumph takes their inspiration from Team Hoyt, whom you've probably heard of. Now I can't do the Hoyt story any justice, so I suggest you head over to their site to get the full details. Team Hoyt is a father-son team that has competed in over a thousand races; however, their team is slightly different than your average racer in these events. Dick Hoyt, the father,…
Migration: Bye to the Pi Well... it happened. If you checked in earlier this week, you might have noticed Dev Leader was completely down on Thursday. Quite a bummer... but the show must go on. Migration to a new host was necessary, but that wasn't without some hiccups. For me, having a site hosted was still a pretty new process. I had tried it a couple of times before, but running a web server that I controlled always felt better. Just more control I suppose. Migration started off sort of sour where I was required to re-install Wordpress on my host a few times due to some technical difficulties... And of course, it was hard to sit still while I knew my site was down. Once I finally had Wordpress launched, the only part of the migration that went smooth…
Well this is super embarrassing... But I had to do an emergency host migration from my Raspberry Pi to a more reliable service. It appears as though my Raspberry Pi is no longer with us. Quite a shame. Anyway, my apologies for the downtime. Hang in there! EDIT: Getting closer... I think all the posts are back up... New theme... I'm busy re-configuring plugins and then I have to go try and update all the missing graphics. Ugh. On the bright side, the site should be about 5x faster. EDIT2: Just fixed up a handful of pictures. Not totally jazzed to go through them all right now, but I at least updated my popular articles. It's definitely been a treat getting back up and running.
v6.2 Release: Mobile Forensics Upgrade I like to be able to use these weekly article dumps for little summaries of what's going on in my work life, and I think this is a perfect opportunity to acknowledge our latest product update at Magnet Forensics. We just pushed out v6.2 of Internet Evidence Finder and we're incredibly proud of the work we've done. Like any release we have, we pour our hearts into making sure it's a few big steps forward. We've done our best to listen to customers and work with them to address any bugs, but we're always trying to push the boundaries in our features. Some of the new offerings in v6.2 of Internet Evidence Finder include: Dynamic App Finder: We now offer a solution for recovering mobile chat applications that we may not have otherwise supported. This…
Movember Preparation You might think we're a bit early on this one, but at Magnet Forensics we're going to take Movember to a whole new level this year. If you're not familiar with Movember, you may want to head over here and get a rundown of the history of it. Movember started in Australia between a group of people who wanted to (somewhat jokingly) bring the moustache back into style. The next year they started getting people to grow mo's for causes. Now people participate in Movember to raise awareness for men's health, and it's bigger than ever. Our team members of MoMagnets have started discussing the various styles of mo's that they'll grow this year. It looks like there's going to be some intra-team competition to grow the best mo. The top contenders? It's looking like: Matthew Chang Cameron…
Innovation and You There's no denying innovation is important. You often see startups oozing with innovation completely disrupt a market and consequently, there are tons of people out there with dreams to do the same thing. How do you jack up the innovation level in your company? Why is it that startups seem to be so much better at innovating even though multi-million dollar companies have the people and financial resources to throw at R&D? Why do big companies suck at innovating? The answer starts with your employees. Empowering your employees to innovate and embedding innovation in the work culture is key to ensuring your company continues to innovate. With big companies, the focus moves from innovation to profit maximization. Over time though, some small team of highly innovative individuals are going to find a way to do it differently…
Recognition - Weekly Article Dump Not all of the articles this week touch on recognition, and to be honest, I didn't pick it as a theme for the articles either. Recognition is more a topic of discussion that's come up over the last week at Magnet Forensics, where I work. Being a team lead and part of the management team at Magnet, I'm often part of conversations about motivation. Providing recognition is an excellent way to motivate your staff and shows that you truly appreciate them. We've been trying to get better at recognizing staff for doing an awesome job--especially because we have so many awesome people working with us. It's pretty obvious with our Profit Hot 50 placement that we've got some kick-ass people. Recognition, whether it's one-on-one or in a public setting, has a huge impact. I don't…
PROFIT HOT 50 It's with great honour that I can say the company I'm part of, Magnet Forensics, has achieved the 7th place in the Profit Hot 50 rankings for 2013. Last year Magnet Forensics was also on the list ranked at number 16th, but we've shown ourselves up by moving a full 9 positions! Our ranking in the Profit Hot 50 is even more impressive considering we're the only company from Kitchener-Waterloo region in Ontario--Known for it's incredible startup community and success stories--that made the list. We're excited and tremendously proud of our accomplishments, but it's certainly going to be quite the challenge for us to move up in rank next year. It's a challenge we're all ready to take on though. You can check out the ranking over here or at the official Profit Guide posting. Articles I'll put…
In the past, I've dabbled a bit with hosting my own server on a spare outdated box that likely should have been thrown out. My least favourite thing to do is sit down and tinker with trying to get services and such configured so that they all work together... But once it's working, it's glorious. Enter the Raspberry Pi. Earlier this year I decided I wanted to get a Pi. Why? I wasn't too sure... But they're cheap and nothing bad could come of it :) Once I got the thing up and running I was reading about how people were using them. Hosting a Wordpress site was definitely one of the uses, so I figured I'd try my hand at that. There are other guides on The Internet about how to do this, but this is what got me up…
