Movember Wrap-up
At the start of December, it's time for a lot of us to shave off our glorious Movember badges from our upper lips. This year, MoMagnets did an absolutely amazing job raising money for Movember. At the time of writing, we're sitting at just under $2400! An incredible effort by Magnet Forensics and all of those that helped with their generous contributions.
My 'stache didn't quite get to where I wanted to this year. It was close, but it was another connector-less Movember for me. I was almost able to get some twisting done for some not-so-legitimate connectors. Oh well... Here's what I ended up rocking for most of the month:
Matt Chang definitely took the lead for raising the most of all the MoMagnets members at over $700! Mica Sadler is sitting in second at just under $400. That's nearly half the team's total between these two beauties. We also had a very gracious contribution from our CEO that I wanted to call out. Thanks so much, Adam!
There's still a bit of time left before donations are closed for the 2013 Movember season. We have until the 9th to get some final contributions in! If you're feeling generous, please visit our team page and make a contribution. Every little bit helps, and we greatly appreciate it!
Articles
- Top 5 Reasons People Love Their Jobs and How You Can Love Yours, Too: Some great points on why people love their jobs. Some of these may be pretty obvious, but it's important to be reminded about what keeps people engaged. Among the top things: the work culture, the amazing people you get to work with, and autonomy. If you're trying to create an awesome place to work (or if you're looking for an awesome place to work) then these are probably things you'll want to focus on!
- 5 Things Zapping Your Company's Productivity: Ilya Pozin always has some interesting articles. This article takes the perspective that some of the fancy perks or awesome processes you have in place may actually be hindering productivity. One common theme that was brought up under two separate points in this article is that sometimes people need a spot where they can work in peace. People like having an fun collaborative culture, but many personality types require some quiet time in order to buckle down.
- Reduce Your Stress in 2 Minutes a Day: I'm not the type of person that truly believes doing one tiny thing for only a moment every day is going to have an enormous positive impact on your life. However, I do think that if you can take the time to try and do a few little things here and there, that overtime, you're likely to have more a positive outlook. In this article, Greg McKeown shares a few tips on relaxing and trying to regain some focus. I don't think it's anything that's going to be life-changing, but it never hurts to think about different ways to catch your breath.
- Building a fast-failure-friendly firm: This was a pretty cool series of slides put together by Eric Tachibana that I thought was worth sharing. There are lot's of articles on failing and why it's important--especially for innovating. This series of slides provides a high level perspective on how you can approach failing... the right way!
- Code Smells – Issue Number 3: This is an article I wrote about Code Smells. This entry talks about the use of exception handlers to guide logical flow in your code and alternatives for when your class hierarchy starts to get too many very light weight classes. As always, I'd love to get your feedback. If you have other code smells, or a different perspective on the ones that I've posted, please share them in the comments!
- 5 Bad Thoughts That Will Throw You Off Track: This short little list is worth a quick read through. There are a ton of things that distract us every day, but the distractions you can easily control are the ones that you cause. Examples? Don't take on too much at once. Don't try to make every little thing you do perfect. It's a quick read, but well worth the reminder!
- Not Crying Over Old Code: Another programming article for this week. As the article says, the common meme for programming is that your old code is always bad code. However, there should be a point in your programming career where old code isn't bad, it's just different than how you might have approached it now. If your always experiencing your old code being bad, then maybe you're not actually that great at programming yet! Or... maybe you're just too damn picky.
- Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me When I Was Learning How to Code: This article by Cecily Carver is something I've been hoping to come across for a while now. It's another programming article--a good read for experienced programmers but incredibly important for newbies to check out. Cecily covers some of the roadblocks you experience early on, like code never (almost never) working the first time, or things you experience throughout your programming career, like always being told of a "better" alternative. I highly recommend you read through this if you dabble in programming, or if you've ever considered it.
Please visit our team page for MoMagnets and make a Movember contribution if you're able to! Remember to follow Dev Leader on social media outlets to get these updates through the week. Thanks!
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