Nick O'Neill's personal website.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what life looks like after the forced quarantine that we’re now a part of. How do the companies we work at look financially? Organizationally? What does life in general look like after this? I wanted to share with you my thoughts because it’s something that I observe many organizations still being in denial about. My hope and frankly, my optimism, is strictly toward…
As Coronavirus has forced most organizations into going fully remote, many managers and executives are finding themselves unprepared for the scenario. How do we keep productivity up while remaining supportive? What to do about all those critical projects that now feel at risk due to disruption? How can we get through what is likely the worst public health crisis in our lives? As employees, how…
“Where do I find the documentation for that?”, I asked the sales engineer on the other end of the line. “It’s on page 673”, he replied confidently. His fellow team members were quite impressed by the display of organizational expertise. I, on the other hand, was wondering why the hell this company had a 1,000 page long document explaining how to integrate with their service. As soon as the call…
In May of 2007, Facebook deployed what would likely be the single greatest catalyst to their eventual domination of the “social networking” industry, the Facebook Platform. Outside of internet technology enthusiasts and a mere 20 million Facebook users, the event was insignificant. Yet for a small set of entrepreneurial engineers, it marked the first internet gold rush since the original internet…
For the past 20 years I’ve been building web and mobile applications on and off. This journey has brought me through numerous languages and projects. Perl, PHP, Ruby (and Rails), Python, Objective-C, Javascript, and more. A social network, music commerce site, text book search engine, photo sharing site, note sharing application, mobile texting application, blogs, social media tracking system,…
Today, Google expanded their commitment to the full removal of third-party cookies from the Chrome browser. If the announcement came from another company it would be far less surprising. However Google generates billions of dollars a year from third-party cookies. Doubleclick, now branded simply as Google Marketing Platform , is likely the largest ad platform on the internet and the greatest…
Happy new year! It’s that time again when a large percentage of the population writes down resolutions for the year and promptly breaks them. The new Onion calendar sitting on my desk had a great snippet summarizing the situation last week: For some reason, I felt oddly apathetic toward this particular new year. While resolutions were something I embraced for many years, more often than not, I…
I have a confession: my co-workers have a remarkable capacity to trigger me. I mean, it’s only natural that the people closest to me, who I spend the vast majority of my days alongside would know all the buttons to press, right? What’s puzzling though is how knowledgeable they are of these buttons prior to the sharing of any emotional response. This must mean that either (a) they are…
Want to become a leader? Learn to write! Every single day of my mid-twenties I would write for hours. Despite being an awful writer, I became quite prolific, churning out upwards of 10 articles in any given day. My writing skills improved and my reach followed, eventually expanding to millions of monthly readers. Then I burned out and it all stopped. Then this year, I was reminded of the power of…