Bryan Nichols - Bonpixel

Consensus Kills

How a culture of consensus kills innovation If you work in software, especially as a front end developer, you understand technology fatigue. For those of you who may be unfamiliar, technology fatigue is where you are fatigued by the pace at which technology progresses and/or the rate at which

Life

Spring

Spring is a great time of year. The earth stretches it's arms and the slumber of winter is exchanged for eager anticipation of the things to come. Plants begin to stir and the sense of urgency is tangible in the air as all creation surges once again in the cyclical

Advice

Fixin' stuff

Why fixing stuff is awesome I love to fix things. What's More, I'm pretty decent at it. God has given me this strange affinity to problem solve. Put me into a situation where something needs doing and I am like a kid in a candy shop. There are a ton

Work

Be your own mascot

Why it's important to speak up for yourself Navigating the world of business is sometimes tricky. There are so many gotchas to know that sometimes it can be difficult to figure out what the next best plan of action is. Despite the somewhat daunting task of figuring out the details

Development

Effective employment

The true measure of a great job isn't in the perks. I want to take a minute to talk about something I call, "effective employment". What do I mean by "effective employment"? What does it mean to be "effectively employed"? I'll admit that effectiveness

Work

Remote Work

Working remote benefits more than just the employee. Today is Friday. I'm sitting on my deck, in balmy 64 degree weather. A hummingbird flies near me to feed at the feeder 3 ft or so from where I sit. The breeze gently flows over me and fresh air fills my

Development

Shhhh!

Why knowledge workers are vulnerable to distraction Have you ever tried to count to 1000 in your head? Once you've learned the mechanics of counting it's not really that difficult but It does require concentration. Now, try that same scenario again but this time with people talking to you... Once

Development

Where Interviews fall short

Interviews are often terrible at assessing individual competency, so how can we make them better? Ah the interview. Many words have been written about their nature, difficulty and ultimately their shortcomings. It seems that almost every week I read a story on Hacker News pertaining to how this company does

Angular

Angular 2.0

Angular 2.0: Why I am not impressed? So recently Angular made an announcement that they will be using Typescript as the mechanism for building the Angular source. A friend of mine asked me what I thought about this and Angular 2.0 in general. Here is what I told

Sometimes the best thing you can do is back off.

What do you do when you've got a problem on your hands? Sometimes the best thing you can do is back off. Your employees don't want to be treated like children and they don't want a baby sitter. In the professional realm that I work in, Individuals want to feel

Teach others how to treat you

How respecting others and yourself pays off. One thing I've learned in the world of professional development is that things tend to be a lot less professional than I first imagined. One particular subject that routinely comes up is the way in which you are treated by your peers and

On Multitasking, Task Switching, and overloading

Multitasking is doing more harm than good to your work. I just read a great article on Hacker News this morning concerning the role of "DevOps", and its abuse. I thought the point was very convincing. http://jeffknupp.com/blog/2014/04/15/how-devops-is-killing-the-developer/ In summation there were

Ubuntu

Hello Ghost!

How I got Ghost installed and running Today I got Ghost running on my Digital Ocean droplet and this is the first post in production. When I started running Ghost, my server was already pretty bootstrapped because I had (and still have) a few other applications running on it. Per