As the end of another year approaches, it's always a time for reflection on the last 12 months.  Family, and community, is a vital part of civilisation. Familial bonds are what has made the human race so pervasive and successful. In every extended family there are a variety of diverse members with mix of gender and age.  Yet in the global technology community (and STEM to a broader extent) this diversity is lacking, both in gender, and race.

Many in the industry will disregard this to a "pipeline problem", a lack of interested candidates from an early age.  And, whilst I agree that this is a major aspect of the problem, I don't believe it's the only one, and there's another one which may be simpler to improve.

Have you ever attended a conference or workshop where you wish the presenter could easily share their slides?  Or, are you a presenter and you'd like to share your slides with the audience in a frictionless way?

The longer you work as a software developer, the most likely you are to need to learn a new language or development stack. As I've done this many times, I've discovered a few tricks that help get me productive quicker. So, what are those things?

If you could change just one thing in your life by forming a new habit, what would it be?

In July 2018 I left my full-time job after working at that company for nearly seven years.  The company had gone through an acquisition and the culture and focus of the business had taken a turn away from my passion.  Over the preceding months I had become pretty unmotivated and wasn't being very physically active.

Life events like changing jobs give us pause to reflect on things and realized that I hadn't been doing things that were important to me, like regular exercise, catching up with friends, and eating healthily.  Given that I was about to start a new routine, I decided that would try to exercise every day.

I've recently been talking to people about my new “FinTech” venture and I’ve discovered that this term isn’t very well known outside the startup community. In the last few years there have been a number of new terms popping up all over the place. BioTech, FinTech, MedTech, etc…

So, What is FinTech*?*​

Friday 27th July is my last day at Tatts/Tabcorp and I wanted to say thanks to everyone who has made my last few years at Tatts a memorable time.  I've had the privilege of working in almost every area of technology, either directly or indirectly, through the improvement team.  I've also been lucky enough to get to meet a lot of people from different areas of the business through leadership programs and fund-raisers!

For people who work in a technical profession it's vital to continually learn and grow our skills to keep up with the pace of change.  However, one area that's too often neglected by technical staff is that of leadership.  For the past few months I have been participating in a new Technical Leadership Accelerator program which focuses specifically on leadership skills for technical professionals.  The course just finished a couple of weeks ago and I wanted to write a bit of a review.

Last week Cale and myself both took a week of leave from our full-time jobs in a large company and we worked on our startup (FairDealFX) at Fishburners, a co-working space in the Brisbane CBD.

Neither of us are strangers to the startup community, both having been involved in other startups and startup weekends in the past. However, this was the first time I'd spent time in a co-working space as a "resident".

Within the first few hours I was starting to understand why so many small, constrained, startups are able to take on the big guys at their own game. I hope this article will help you learn about some of the great things about co-working spaces and some thoughts on how you might integrate them into your traditional workplace.

Convention Tests, AKA: Protecting "future me"

I needed a way to ensure that I didn't stupidly include internal data types in WebAPI methods

Every business these days is working in a fast moving, disrupted, technology-driven world. In order to survive we need to be constantly thinking outside the box, and potentially contrary to the ways we've been working for years.