I was just looking back over old files today and noticed a blog post I wrote from 2010  talking about the amazing advances in technology during the previous decade.  I knew at that time there was a new technology revolution on the horizon, but I could not have predicted how dramatically it would change our world in such a short time.  I am talking here about the API revolution and the evolution of micro-services.  Depending on what you do for a living, you may be deeply involved with the new reality this has brought forth, or you may not have even heard of it.  Either way, your life is different today because of it.  Easy to use APIs have transformed how we use software over the last decade and microservices are now taking that a step further by making functions that have been traditionally linked available as separately scalable services.  

Ten years ago I had a half dozen servers in my network doing a variety of tasks.  Some were for development, some were file servers, some were for communications, and the whole farm sucked up a tonne of power.  My office never needed to be heated in the winter because the heat from the servers was enough to keep the room cozy warm.  I took on the process of moving from physical servers to the cloud a few years ago and have not turned back. It has been an interesting journey and the deployment is constantly evolving with changes in technology.

The easy path for web and email migration was to use a hosting service.   I looked around a bit before taking that leap and found dotster.com which offered both Linux and Windows web hosting as well as a decent replacement for my Sendmail+Dovecot+SquirrelMail deployment.  Next I moved development and experimental work to VMWare VMs on my workstation, and finally I moved all the files, and bulk storage to dropbox and OneDrive.  That was five years ago.

The story does not end there, even though it sounds like it should.  Recently, I moved to G-Suite for documents and mail which moves most of my PC file storage into “the cloud” and many of the applications that were once on my local computer, now live in web services.  I am almost at a point where I can simply login to any web browser and have everything I need on-line.  The days of needing to access my own personal computer are nearing an end.  With the addition of Amazon Web Services (AWS), I can easily replace any of the experiments I was doing in VMWare with EC2 instances and scale the shape of the instance at will.

Last week I replaced a website that once consumed and entire physical server with an AWS CloudFront instance using S3 storage services that can scale independently.  I have an application running on one of my hosted servers that will be transformed into a set of Lambda triggered scripts over the next few months.  The concept of a computer server from a decade ago has been completely shattered.  You can now think in terms of functions and outcomes, building only the scripts and actions you need in the micro-services that you need for as long as they are required and in many cases pay for them by the event.

This is a completely different world from a time when you carefully planned the build of a physical server to include the CPU, RAM, network, and storage required for the current need as well as growth over the next few years.  Where that kind of thinking used to be a critical skill, no one even cares anymore.  It is irrelevant.  If you spin up an EC2 instance with too little RAM, or not enough CPU, you simply scale it up to your current need.  Did you build it with too much storage?  No problem, just reconfigure and move on.

I am currently reviewing all of my services and looking at options for efficiency improvements.  It looks very much like my digital future will be entirely built on distributed scalable services.  That is a crazy realization for someone who used to make a living building servers.

I first tried the “lifeboat exercise” as part of a business management planning session several years ago, and I found it so useful in helping me stay focused and run a small team that just do it continuously now.  I was surprised to see that this is not standard business practice for many managers so I thought I would write about it here.  It seems that many of the things I do as a business manager are non-standard, but seem valid.  Maybe I really do need to sit down and write that book I have been joking about for a while.

The lifeboat exercise comes from a psychology discussion examining morality under pressure.  Consider this – “You suddenly find yourself in a lifeboat with 15 people. However, it can only support 9. If you were in command, who would you choose to survive?”  The traditional exercise continues on to give a profile of the 15 people, and you have to determine who survives.  This discussion, however, leverages that concept toward business survival and focusing on what your minimum viable team is and how this can bleed over into your personal life.

Small startups go through some well-known growth stages.  At each stage, the founders have some tough decisions to make, but those usually boil down to a choice between getting much bigger and risking everything or downsizing and sacrificing people, projects and dreams.  Even the largest, most successful businesses need to consider the concept of waste and bloat.  I have seen a company with nine CTOs and they indeed had to go through the process of who to keep and who to reassign.

If you manage a team, imagine the CEO coming to you one day in confidence saying that there was a critical need to downsize to keep the doors open.  You may have 10 or 15 direct reports or more, but in order to keep the company afloat, you need to reduce your team to 5.  Who do you retain?  Who needs to be let go?  Who stays on your team and who is valuable but should be reassigned to a different group?  These are tough decisions that no one ever wants to make, but sometimes it happens.  The idea of doing the exercise on a routine basis is to avoid having to make that decision under pressure.  You can tailor that to your own reality so if you have 5 direct reports, maybe you need to reduce that to 3.  

While on the surface that seems like a simple numbers game, the mental process can be gut-wrenching.  If you have fantastically creative and highly motivated people, then losing any one of them could have a critical impact, and that is where it gets really hard.  It forces you to think of the greater good, not only individual contribution, and it forces you to look inward.  You have to at some point consider that YOU may be one of the people left behind.  Do you sacrifice yourself for the good of the organization?  Would you?

Luckily for me, I have not ever had to follow through on that mental exercise, and I think that is actually a result of doing it in the first place.  When offered the opportunity to expand and hire, I’ve been able to do a mental check on the results of my last lifeboat exercise and determine that our team could cover temporary workload increases or learn more without expanding unnecessarily.  This has helped to remove the spectre of having to reduce staff in leaner times and the whole team prospers.  I believe when an entire company operates this way, a smaller dedicated team can do amazing things because you are always assessing value and avoiding bloat.

This whole concept can be translated to other things as well.  I consider the same process when developing software.  Can I build a functional deployment with 3 features instead of 5?  Do all the extraneous frills actually add any value, or can you deliver a smaller, but better product?

You can do the same in your personal life too.  Ask yourself if you really need all the “things” in your world or if you could live without.  Ask yourself “If you needed to leave your home tomorrow and you could only take with you what you could put in the back of a pick-up truck, what would those things be?”  Clothes, pictures, furniture, heirlooms and keepsakes?  What is critical, and what is just taking up space in your house?

Running through this mental exercise monthly can save the stress of having to make critical decisions under pressure and helps me streamline my life and my work.  Hopefully sharing this will help you too.

Read more.  Write more.  Golf more.

Last January, I promised myself I would complete that trifecta of soul management during the year.  The first I completed – the other two I did not have much luck with.

It turns out that reading more can be done by expanding your reading list to the point where you need an extra hour a day just to skim the headlines – the world is a busy place.  In today’s world, generating a select news-feed is relatively easy.  The hard part is filtering the hundreds of headlines down to the few that actually matter.  It helps to follow a few key influencers like Bill Marriott, Richard Branson, and Bill Gates. There are also a great number of garbage, fluff, duplicate posts that can be ignored – I am amazed at what passed for journalism in 2016.

Catching up on news headlines to stay current is only one part though.  Sadly, most news is written for a grade 10 reading level at best and I find myself sometimes struggling to get past poor grammar and horrible sentence structure.  Exercising the brain requires a well written novel or technical journal.  Thankfully, there seems to be an endless supply available still.

I have a stack of books and other publications on my desk now that represent my “to read” pile so to keep myself honest, I’ll review them here after I have completed them.  The stack already includes interesting titles like The First 90 Days and An Astronaut’s Guide to Life.

Writing is more complicated.  With all that reading, it is hard to write anything in an unbiased manner.  Two novels in various states of creation, random short story projects, and a couple of blogging commitments have spread my efforts thin.  Must F O C U S ….

The funny thing about writing is that the more you do it, the easier it is.  Like 10,000 monkeys, if I type enough words, eventually something useful will fall out of it all.  The magic is in the editing.

Golf was a complete write off.  Who has time?  I will really need to make an effort to get out and walk 9 holes at least once a month this season.  If I recall correctly, the last time I did that it was quite relaxing.  I am not a scorekeeper and that annoys some people I have golfed with in the past.  All those numbers just get in the way of a great walk on a nice day.

So how does your reading list look? Is there an interesting book waiting on the bookshelf just dying to be read?

When was the last time you wrote anything more complex than a shopping list?  Start small – write a thank you letter to someone who deserves one.  Or jot down a few paragraphs that describe your day.  Before you know it, there is a full journal in your hands and you are searching for a new Moleskine to crack open.

See you on the golf course.

celebrations, but we have pretty clear evidence that this is really harmful to our ocean dwelling friends. We are still finding animals with those plastic six-pack can rings wrapped around their heads and feet even though it has been a known threat for decades. There is hope though in some new technology making these actually edible if they end up in the ocean. 

The first week of January has always been a “reset” time for me.  While it can be argued that January 1st is just an arbitrary date on the timeline and should not be considered some magic time to cast personal resolutions for change, the changing of the calendar is a great excuse to pause, take stock and reset.

I could write yet another variation on Clement Clarke Moore’s famous poem and struggle yet again to find a rhyme for “Vixen”, but I won’t do that.  I could just post a nice classic picture of the Jolly old man with his Caribou friends and a sleigh full of toys. I won’t do that either.

At this time of year, most of us are enjoying the hustle and bustle of the busy holiday season, picking out just the right presents and decorations or immersing ourselves in holiday baking.  We rush from place to place searching for just the right thing, shop till we drop and gorge ourselves on turkey and sweets.  At least most of us do.

For many people, this is a season of despair.  It is a season of reminders that they have less than others or will soon be in that position.  It is a season filled with memories of lost loved ones, hospital stays, and empty chairs at the dinner table.  For many people, this is the most depressing time of the year.  The thing is that in many cases, those people hide their crippling despair very well.

So this year, I won’t decorate my website with snowflakes and write a catchy Christmas poem.  I won’t overtly push my Christmas joy on people who don’t necessarily want it.  That will be difficult because it really is my favourite time of year.   I will however continue to support my local food bank and shelter with more than usual cash donations so they can multiply that into useful food, shelter, blankets, and clothing for those who need it.  It is cold out there and there are more unemployed friends and neighbors than any previous year I can remember.  People who were “fine” last year may be struggling to put food on the table this year.

One thing I can do as a writer, as a story teller, is to raise awareness and maybe remind people that the joyous season is not so for many.  This season, perhaps the best present you can offer is a shoulder to lean on, an attentive ear to listen, a warm blanket and a friendly smile.  Sometimes the people who seem happiest on the outside are disintegrating inside. At this time of year more than others, there is a greater divide and more tension for those who are struggling financially and emotionally.

That grocery store clerk who just rang through your $40 turkey, probably cannot afford one themselves and likely has to work through the holidays to pay the rent.  That neighbor who puts the tree up at the last minute is grieving the loss of a family member.  The college student you see at the bus stop every morning has lost hope of having any productive future.  For those people Christmas time just sucks.

So my gift to all my friends and family this season is an ear, a shoulder, a hug and a warm blanket.  If I reach out to you in some random way and ask how you are doing, it is because I really want to know and I really want to help, to listen, and to get you through it.   If I can take the time to donate to the food bank, I can take the time to hold your hand.  You are important and you are not alone.

May the peace of the season find your heart and warm it.

Our mother left this world over two decades ago, but during her life she profoundly affected the lives of many, many people.  I consider myself extremely blessed to be her son.

She taught me to be colour blind.  Skin colour was never part of a conversation in our house that I ever remember.  Looking back now I realize our closest friends ranged through a rainbow of skin tones and it was completely irrelevant.  Watching her, it was clear to me that a person’s character was more important than where they were born or the language they spoke.

She taught me to never stop learning.  Our house was always filled with books of every kind.  Her bookshelf introduced me to the magical words of Farley Mowat, Ogden Nash, Pierre Berton, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov to name only a few. In her forties, she took the initiative to go back to school to pursue a degree – which she completed with honors.  Nothing was ever off-limits and no knowledge was ever bad.

She taught me to love unconditionally.  You know how in many communities there is that one woman that every kid calls “Mom”?  There was that one house you could go to when you were too scared to go anywhere else?  That was my mom.  Our doors were never locked and she always had time for everyone – particularly youth.  That inevitably led her to youth ministry and the hundreds of young adult lives she guided.  She never placed judgement, never criticized, never blamed. She was one of the best listeners I have ever had the privilege of knowing.

She taught me to respect all living things.  I grew up engulfed in the stories and the history of the Inuit, Haida, Salish and Maori cultures. The first children’s story I remember was how Kiwi sacrificed his wings to save the forest floor.  I learned about Raven and Whale and how all the animals have a heart and sole. I was taught to care for and protect the world around me.

She taught me faith.  “All will be well” is written on her grave marker.  That may sound ironic but it is one of the most important lessons I ever learned from her.  She moved forward through difficult times on the raw belief that it all works out in the end.  Raw faith.

My experience with her shaped my understanding of the word “Mother”.  It means strength, protection, knowledge, and faith. It does not require the act of childbirth or any genetic connection at all.  A Mother is caring and loving and enduring.

I hope you are blessed to have someone in your life you can call Mother.

Happy Mother’s Day.

Hi.  My name is Tom and I am a writer.
I went cold turkey about 11 months ago on some advice I read about managing your demons.  It was bad advise.

My last post before this was December and I was closing out the year, reflecting and being philosophical. Shortly thereafter I read something somewhere about writers who tend to spend more time writing and ranting rather then “doing” anything actually useful.  After some introspection I decided I would drop writing as an active thing.  No more blog, no more deep posts, no more serious non-fiction.  I was going to focus on “doing” as opposed to “writing” – also known as thinking about doing.  I lasted a whole 11 months before falling off the wagon.

As it turns out, the writing part is actually the catalyst for the doing part and it took me a while to figure that out.  Like I said – bad advice.  I much prefer the advice of Will Wheaton on making life changes and the value of writing (and reading and other stuff).   Sadly, anyone I would turn to for advice – my mentors, coaches, would-be-sponsors – well, they are all writers too so I find no sympathy there. 

I am a story-teller.  It is what I do and denying it is just soul-crushing, it is just wrong.  While I tried to contain my need for literal expression, I was not successful at all and instead, it crept out in other ways.   Last week, a co-worker asked a simple question by email and I replied with a three-page diatribe on the proper use of the acronym for P.O.C.  Yesterday, I wrote a Facebook status update that was so long, it spilled over the edges of my 19″ screen.  That one will likely become a more formal blog post at some point.  Another coworker commented that if I added up my business communications for the first half of November, I probably had already written the 50,000 words needed for the NaNoWriMo competition.   It is a sickness I am happy to surrender to.

I held back diligently during the Canadian election in October which was really really hard to do.  I restrained myself from commenting on yet another mass shooting or the one a day killing stat in the US.   I even  stopped myself from bursting with excitement when we finally got high-res photos of Pluto’s moon Charon.   I will not apologize for being a science geek.

For what?  Nothing, that’s what.  Holding back from expressing myself in written form did nothing to make the world a better place, nor did it help me focus on physically doing any more than I normally would.  In fact, the opposite happened – which in hindsight is obvious.  Writers are visual thinkers – they blurt out thoughts and emotions and chaos all over nice clean pieces of paper, permanently defacing them for the better.  Sometimes they are just words, but sometimes they bring people and ideas together.  Sometimes they stir up emotions and drive people into action.  Many times, they cause controversy and force people to express their own opinions just to counter yours.  Writing is good.  It is valuable.  It has meaning.

I am a writer.  I am a story teller.  I create worlds in my head and cast them out onto printed works for the universe to consume.  I generate controversy and conversation and I bring people together more then I tear them apart.  I am the physical engine at the business end of a pen.  My words inspire, challenge, examine, and thrill.  My thoughts are deeply consumed in the inner-workings of the human experience and I will not be swayed by political pressure to ignore a story screaming to be told.

Be Awesome.  Change The World.

Dawn.
End of darkness.
Creative thoughts start here.
Creative thoughts percolating in my brain over night like an unwatched pot on the stove boiling over finally emerge here –  at dawn.

It is New Years Eve,  December 31st 2014.  I look back over the past 364 days and try to compose a picture in my mind of what I have accomplished.  Who have I helped? What have I changed? Is the world a better place because of something I did? Is it? I hope so.  I hope that I have taken enough time out of my day to help others with their problems, to help someone get a better view of reality, or to make someone else’s life more livable.

This past year I logged over 50,000 miles (80,500 Km) of air travel and transited through 65 airport stops.  In those travels I have to wonder if I made anyone’s day a little better with a smile, or just by having a little more patience with gate staff.  I am sure I did in at least a few cases.  With that much travel you tend to see the same flight crews and gate attendants several times a year.  I often see the same same captain making sure she gets her box of TimBits for the crew before she boards her RJ700 for the leg to Denver at 7AM.  Those American pilots love their Canadian donuts 🙂

We all come in contact directly or indirectly with dozens of people every day and making just one extraordinary gesture can have a cascading effect.  Pay it forward.  Do something for someone else just to make their day better.  Be awesome just because the world needs more awesome.

I won’t make any new year resolutions, they are fleeting and easy to dismiss.  We all need to work daily on self improvement, being better to the planet we live on, and being better neighbours to each other.  The day on the calendar should not make a difference.

Be Awesome. Change the world.