Estimates are important. Get it right and you can deliver at regular intervals. Get it wrong and you’ll languish it “when is that going to be done?” land. Software engineers are notoriously terrible at estimates. Recently, I sold my house. One thing that stood out to me during the appraisal process was that the appraiser …. Read More
This is Part 3 in my first “20 Minutes of Code” series (if you need to, you can catch up on Part 1 and/or Part 2). We have a TaskJournal application that we’re trying to send out into the interwebs. Last time, we created a Firebase project and used it to ship our production-ready files …. Read More
This is Part 2 of my “20 Minutes of Code” series. Last time, I started to deploy to Firebase hosting but ended up figuring out how to generate a production build with create-react-app instead. For real this time: we’re going to deploy the new production build to Firebase. Of course, the first step to any …. Read More
There are some side projects that I have tried to work on in only twenty minutes at a time. This is an interesting constraint because software is notoriously time-consuming. The result is interesting too. I spend a lot of time distilling my next step down into something that is 1) an improvement and 2) complete. …. Read More
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At American Appworks, we’ve developed a significant amount of technology to automate secretarial work. Now, we’re taking it one step further. Starting today, we are opening our beta testing program to the public for an initiative we lovingly call “Robotic Secretary” or “RoboSec.” Using Natural Language Processing technology, our app allows you to *quickly* track …. Read More
We are currently accepting beta testers for a program we refer to as “Phone to Slack” because, well… it routes text and voice telephony directly into Slack. If you haven’t tried Slack, you should. It’s a great way to help your team keep in touch. It’s one of the few pieces of software that “just …. Read More
One of the projects we’re working on right now is an app to record calls on both iOS and Android. While this functionality exists in one form or another on Android, iOS on Apple devices has limited users’ ability to record calls, even with the help of an app. Apple is very protective of users’ …. Read More
React is built around a simple concept: building reusable components around encapsulated state. It has been attempted before, but React finally accomplishes with elegance. So what does this nerdy stuff mean for customers? It means less time debugging and more time moving forward. React has been so successful that it has made the jump to …. Read More