If you work in the tech industry you've heard it before: "we only work with the best." While this phrase may not have caused you to pause before, it should. It's one of the most counter-productive mindsets a person, a company, or an industry can have, and it is rampant in tech. Here's why it is so destructive:
I wish there were a better metaphor for this blog post than the tried-and-true iceberg. But the iceberg is really the best image; like technology products, icebergs show the world only 10 percent of their surface, with 90 percent of their total mass chillin’ out down below.
Once we get past POC and MVP, we need to start thinking about the entirety of the product we’re building. Here are four features that our clients commonly overlook, but, like the parts of an iceberg supporting the surface, are needed to support the whole.
I’ve been asked this by several employers recently: “What would you do here if you knew you would not fail?”
Not fail?? Not possible…
When it comes to my career, my path has always involved becoming successful enough at a current role that I’m propelled into the next opportunity. What kind of path would I have if something I did failed? Do I trust you and this company enough to risk my current job and my future career path to run the risk of failure? Would you support me enough to ensure success?
Looking for a new job is tough business. In a sea of innovative, qualified candidates there is pressure to stand out from the rest. I’ve heard of, read about, and experienced some dramatic ways candidates have successfully captured the attention of their soon-to-be employer. I’ve also experienced the flip side — attention-seeking methods that backfired and resulted in a negative return on investment for the candidate.
Over the years I’ve been asked on many occasions, what is leadership? Having the privilege of working with John Alderson and building upon his lessons has fine-tuned what I believe are the Four Pillars of Leadership that are needed for successfully leading any company or organization (small or large) in any field. It could be video stores, social workers, rock musicians, or developers — I’ve worked with them all.
Django is a fantastic, powerful web development framework. It's great for development, but hosting it can be a bit of a puzzle. WSGI? Daemon mode? What's going on here?
This article will show you the basics of getting your Django sites running on an Ubuntu server running Apache 2.4.x, using WSGI.
In this article, we will see how to:
Many of us in DevOps/Cloud/Site Reliability/System Engineering have long been using Puppet to manage our Apache and Nginx configurations. However it seems like every Windows deployment I come across using IIS is either not in any form of config management, or is managed through a series of VBScript and PowerShell scripts or System Center.
Hi. My name is Dan and I am a pessimist and a Sr. Software Engineer, hoping to be promoted to a Junior Software Engineer one day.
I feel like I could be considered a job jumper. Why do I switch? Why can’t I find someplace where I can be happy? Why do I find the negative in companies? Does happiness exist? I can honestly say it does.
Chaos is a major pain in the ass. Yes, it can be invigorating, challenging, and propel you in your life or career: but I’ll be the first to admit that it’s extremely hard to appreciate chaos for its creative and life affirming capabilities when your life feels like it’s careening out of control like a clumsy puppy.
At Metal Toad, inclusion is important to us. We have our monthly inclusion special interest group (SIG) that works hard to make sure our workplace is inclusionary and to give back to the community. But aside from that, our Toads create inclusionary spaces within our walls on their on accord.
Our Toads are proud of our brand and we can't get them enough swag to sport it. We live our core values of help, respect, curiosity, value, and experience — and part of design's aim is to make sure this line runs through everything that we create.
It may be selfish, I’ll admit it — but I love pleasing others through acts of service. While I work hard and don’t derive my self-confidence or self-worth from it, I certainly derive a whole lot of happiness from it! And who doesn’t want to be happy? That’s why I feel so fortunate that Metal Toad took a chance on me.
I have always been interested in the way things work. As an Agile Project Manager at Metal Toad, I get to take my curiosity one step further and explore not just how things work, but the ways to make them work faster and more efficient as well. For increased efficiency with your daily tasks, I would recommend these five time-saving tech hacks:
I am scared. I am scared to write this and I am intimidated because my writing will be out in public to be read, critiqued and, in my mind, judged. I am nervous because this is real and it is vulnerable and guess what… I’m telling you, and myself, that it is okay. It ain’t easy, but I guess that means it’s important.
Photo credit: philozopher via Foter.com / CC BY-SA
A few months ago, a senior executive of a large company asked me, “With our Agile transformation, how am I going to screw it up?”
The question shook me to the core.
I arrived in Portland two years ago with the intention of rebooting my career. When I left New York, I left behind a successful career in client service roles at marketing and digital agencies. It was a career I loved for many years, but I was no longer invigorated by the challenges. It was time for a change.
Recently as a leadership exercise, our COO Tim Winner asked the leadership team to “come up with the title of your book.” This book, he explained, would be about who we would become as leaders 20 years from now. If or team fast forwarded and were reflecting on our career and our lives, what would our individual book be titled?
I was intrigued — what an incredible exercise, and a new way to think through what I wanted my legacy as a leader to be!
One of the most interesting things about agency culture is the freedom for employees to show their personality. To be quite honest, I think there is no better example of this than someone’s tchotchkes.
A tchotchke (pronounced CHOCH-ka) are small, often miscellaneous items. I picked the phrase up in college, and I’ve been using it ever since.
If someone had asked me a couple months ago, “Are you a designer?” I would have said "hell no." The extent of my design experience is a poster I made in Publisher for a high school business class. Or arranging clip art in Word, if you count that.
In my career, I've found that there are two types of "agile" software process maps. There is Agile, with a big A, that is usually purchased from non-technical people by non-technical stakeholders. Big-A Agile is a series of meetings, metrics, and reports used to structure and monitor software teams. I've even experienced story estimates as hours, and a requirement to list "actuals" on each story to verify the estimate was correct.
There’s perhaps nothing so intimidating as sitting in a room full of experts and knowing nothing about a particular subject. There’s also perhaps nothing so inspiring as having one of those experts pull you aside, listen to your questions, and teach you the name of whatever game they’re playing.
This is how I felt during Metal Toad’s Annual Hackathon.
