• • • “You Are Now Breathing Manually…” When someone tells you this, your initial reaction is to likely try to fight the urge to think about your breath, and soon you’ll realize that the more effort you put in to fight it i.e. the more you try to not think about thinking about your breath, the more you’re unlikely to be successful in doing so. It’s only by completely letting go,…
Exactly one year ago, I joined Google DevRel with the hope of helping improve developer’s lives, making them more productive and successful while building on Google’s developer platform. With an amazing team supporting me, I was able to deliver on that dream for products such as Android TV and Nest, and ultimately this success was shown through the delivery of a talk this year at Google I/O. Today…
Open source development is booming and many people, developers or otherwise, are eager to jump onboard! Lots of people have approached me asking how they can get involved in open source projects and how I stay afloat in the ever-changing ecosystem of open source. My answer is: “by editing READMEs”. Large reach. Large importance. READMEs, especially those that exist in GitHub projects, are one of…
Twenty-fourteen has been a fantastic year for me. The following post allows me to both reminisce on all the fun times I’ve had in 2014 (and that not-so-fun time my laptop was stolen) and to also look ahead to the arrival of 2015, where I hope to have bigger, better adventures (and have less laptops stolen)! Between school, interning at Google in California, and traveling this year has been total…
Over the past year I have received numerous emails regarding my internship at Mozilla. I wrote this post to answer some of the more common questions that I was asked. This is my experience based on a technical position so it may be quite different for non-technical roles. Regardless, this FAQ should give you a good feeling for how the Mozilla internships work. Disclaimer: I can’t guarantee you a…
This evening after a long day of working on school assignments ( BORING ), I got a really big urge to start fooling with open data. So I did. I live in Ottawa Canada, and Ottawa has an Open Data Catalog that gives you access to various types of data. In my struggle to find something interesting to do with the data in the little time and imagination that I have, I found myself scowring other…
I made a thing . It only took me this weekend to do, but now there it is. It is that fact, its existence, that made it all worth it. Perhaps I rushed it? Maybe I should have taken a couple weekends, sat on the idea a bit longer? Drilled over the design a bit harder? Wrote more tests before releasing it into the wild? Maybe I should have taken less time and shipped it from day one? Designed in the…
“The truth is generally seen, rarely heard.” — Baltazar Gracian (1601-1658) Recently I’ve been thinking about Shopify ’s mantra “ Do things, tell people ” and it makes me wonder more about what catalyzes success. Here it is discussed that these two things are all it takes to be successful. But I have to ponder, is it simply doing stuff that has the largest impact on success? Or is it telling…
This is the story of how I contributed to GitHub for 177 consecutive days, nearly half a year. I will talk of why I did it and why you should too, or at least why you should do something similar. This is a story about accepting challenges, making habits, and knowing when to stop. I learned a lot through this, and I hope to teach you all something. Let’s begin. We can’t all fight habits as well as…
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As of writing this, I am currently on my flight back to Canada wrapping up my internship at Mozilla for the summer. I just wanted to take this time to reflect on my experience working there and why Mozilla has been a truly life-altering experience! Overall it was AWESOME , but WHY, you ask? Well keep reading there cap’n, and I’ll tell ya! 1. The projects were awesome My internship specifically…
PhotoGPS is a simple and fast web app you can use to instantly plot your photos on Google Maps, based on where they were taken. It does this by extracting the GPS location (latitude & longitude) from the Exif metadata within the photo itself, and then using Google Maps API to display exactly where this is in the world. In modern browsers, there exists an API for reading files directly in the…
I was inspired today by a Lifehacker post to go paperless. I am in the midst of decluttering my life in preparation for moving, and with a large box full of documents laying around, I thought this would make the perfect day project. One large problem about going paperless is that you still need the information on the paper you currently have laying around; it’s not as easy as simply throwing it…
I very recently created an app called tmprtr . It is a very simple weather app that uses your location to get weather data. I created it using navigator.geolocation which in modern browsers requests the user to allow/deny the website from getting an accurate geolocation. This is great because I get a very accurate location for the user and they get the weather! But I wanted to do better.…
In the last couple days, I fired up this personal website for myself to showcase some of the projects I have been working on as well as to get even MORE experience developing for the web. I wanted something simple and static, nothing too fancy, something I could understand inside and out just in case I ever needed to make a modification. I wanted something that I could use to create content when I…