Posts

Leadership & Management / Startups & Small Business

Job Titles and Responsibilities

Your New Job Title Congrats! You did it! You finally have that new job title you've been working so hard towards! Let's be honest with each other here--you were working hard for the title, not because you just wanted to see your company flourish with all the hard work you were putting in. Of course that wasn't bad or anything, it was just a nice side effect of you getting your new job title. Some great things happened once you received your new job title too! Your responsibilities shifted so now nobody can come after you when your pesky clients are complaining about your sales process, when your code won't compile into your finished product, or when employees are having conflicts in the workplace. You're literally only responsible for the two new tasks that you have attached to your job…

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September 12, 2013

Articles / Leadership & Management / Startups & Small Business

PROFIT HOT 50 – Weekly Article Dump

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…

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September 7, 2013

DIY

Raspberry Pi + WordPress => A Beginners Guide to PiPress

In the past, I've dabbled a bit with hosting my own server on a spare outdated box that likely should have been thrown out.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…

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September 4, 2013

Leadership & Management / Startups & Small Business

Burnout – Weekly Article Dump

Burnout The trend in the articles this week is all about burnout. Burnout is a serious issue that can affect a wide variety of people. When an individual becomes so dedicated to something and starts devoting all of their time to accomplish a goal, burnout can set in. This is especially noticeable in startup companies where it's typical to work longer-than normal hours. Of course, there's nothing wrong with loving the work you do and wanting to put in more time! The problem ends up being when all of your waking time is geared toward one thing and everything else (including sleep!) starts to take the back seat. This is where burnout can set in. Articles The Six Deadly Sins of Leadership: Leadership isn't always easy, but there's definitely a few things you should avoid doing as a leader. Jack…

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August 31, 2013

Articles / Leadership & Management / Startups & Small Business

Failure – Weekly Article Dump

Failure: Should You Fear It? Thanks for checking out this weekly article dump, and sorry it didn't make it out on Friday. I was out visiting family in Alberta and I didn't have enough time to get this post all set up. Better late than never! The theme for this past week seemed to be articles about failure. Not all of them, of course, but a lot of authors are writing about what it means to fail and why that's not always such a bad thing. Do we need to avoid all failures in order to be successful? Articles Stepping Away, So Others Can Step Up: In this article, Jonathan Bush discusses something that's often hard for leaders to do... Step away. It's difficult for many people to disconnect and have trust in their team to get things done. Trust should…

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August 26, 2013

C# / .NET / dotnet / CodeProject / Programming

Events: Demystifying Common Memory Leaks

Background If you've poked through my previous postings, you'll probably notice that I love using events when I program. If I can find a reason to use an event, I probably will. I think they're a great tool that can really help you with designing your architectures, but there are certainly some common problems people run into when they use events. The one I want to address today has to do with memory leaks. That's right. I said it. Memory leaks in your .NET application. Just because it's a managed language doesn't mean your code can't be leaking memory! And now that I've got your attention, let's see how events might be causing some leakage in your application. (There is source that you can download and run. Check the summary section at the end!) Instance-Scope Event Handlers One of the…

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August 19, 2013

Articles / Leadership & Management / Startups & Small Business

Leadership Reads – Weekly Article Dump

Great Leadership Reads Here's a collection of articles I've shared over the past week on social media outlets. There's a lot of great leadership reads this time around! If You Don't Treat Your Interns Right, You are Mean...and Stupid: This is a great post by Nancy Lublin that talks about something many full-time people share a common (and usually lousy) perspective on: interns. In my opinion, if you aren't going to treat your interns well, you shouldn't be hiring them. One key take away point from the article is ensuring that you treat your internship programs as something real and meaningful. Now, as a computer engineering graduate from the University of Waterloo and from being part of the leadership staff at Magnet Forensics, I've seen both sides of the story. Companies should treat their interns well, but interns should also realize companies…

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August 16, 2013

CodeProject / Programming

API: Don’t Forget About The Non-Public API!

Background From an object oriented programming perspective, an application programming interface (API) is often referred to as the way other developers can interact with the public members of your class(es) and interface(s). Of course, API can be used to describe how one interacts with a web service (or other types of services), but for this discussion I'm limiting the scope to that of interfaces and classes. Limiting the definition of API to public members (or the equivalent of C#'s "public" in other languages) is omitting one huge part of what it encompasses. The purpose of this post is to clarify, in my opinion, why I think forgetting about the non-public API can lead to bad framework and API designs. API And The Audience I've written before about what I think makes a good API, and I had some comments on Code…

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August 14, 2013

Articles / Leadership & Management / Startups & Small Business