These articles focus on aspects of working within the tech industry. This includes careers, company structures, and general landscape of all things tech.
Quality And Agility Last week, at Magnet Forensics we were fortunate enough to have a very talented quality expert come in and talk to us. Paul Carvalho was able to bring a great deal of information, perspective, and activities to our development team that truly proved to be an eye opener. We were all extremely excited to get to sit down and hear what Paul had to say. There's lots to read about Paul over at his STAQS site, but I'll re-iterate some of it here. Paul has held many roles when it comes to software development. He's been a developer, a manager, a tech support person, and part of quality assurance. He certainly has a full perspective on software development. Coming from a science background, he does a great job of explaining why things are a certain way or why…
Happy HalloweenHappy Halloween, everyone! I hope those of you who were out and about with your own little ghouls and ghosts had a safe Halloween this year.Halloween costumes were pretty creative again this year at Magnet Forensics. I tried going with my own Horse Lime attempt, but it's difficult when not many people know what the Horse Lime actually is. Regardless, my awesome mother put together the lime portion of my costume, and I was extremely grateful for that (and yes, I'm in my mid 20's. No judging). I think it turned out pretty damn good.This year, Saige won our Halloween costume contest. As Old Gregg, it was hard for that to not be a sure-fire win. Complete with Bailey's in hand, I think the only thing that could have made it better was a set of watercolours to go…
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…
Problem? If you've ever had a job, as I'm sure anyone reading this has, you've probably been on the one side of this situation before. You tell your supervisor/leader/manager/someone-responsible-for-the-thing-with-the-problem that simply, "There's a problem". If you're in or have been in one of those positions I just listed, I'm sure you've been on the receiving end of it. But as I said, you probably did the same thing at one point so don't go holding it against anyone just yet. What's the big deal with telling someone there's a problem? I mean, don't you think someone should know if something is going wrong? Especially if they're the one in charge of it! We can't continue operation with this problem. We can't release the product to the customer with this thing missing or broken. We can't sell our product or service…
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,…
Everyone has their own definition of "ideal" and we all of expectations of others. Try to lead by example and emulate your version of "ideal" to be effective.
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…
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…
