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Wednesday, October 26, 2011 in
Jason Collins is the Vice President of Engineering and Nerd
Shenanigans at ReadyTalk. He's been doing this long enough that he
remembers the days of punch cards (or at least the days of jokes
about old guys and punch cards). When he's not at work, he spends
time with his wife and being a Geek Dad to his 4 sons. He's also a
huge fan of comic books, single-malt scotch, Harley-Davidson
motorcycles and hanging out in his nerd-cave playing 8-bit video
games and tinkering with digital photography. Connect with Jason on
Twitter @ReadyTalkGeeks, @TheOEM or on LinkedIn.
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Friday, October 26, 2012 in More from ReadyTalk
So what exactly is a Feature Frag? It's an event focused on feature
development; it's quick, it's competitive and we want the best
ideas and prototypes to be left standing when the dust
settles. Let me shed some light on this newly minted term for
you, dear reader. Here in the halls of ReadyTalk Engineering, there
are a few things that are part of who we are. Video gaming happens
to be one of them. Many of our engineers grew up playing 8-bit
video games or spent more quarters at the local arcade... Read More
» »
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Thursday, March 15, 2012 in More from ReadyTalk
I'm a geek. I'm also a dad to 4 wonderful, geeky boys. I like
to think that I'm raising my boys to be complete geeks, the kind
that randomly quote Star Wars and Bladerunner and dream in code.
One might think this would be easy, given how much technology is
surrounding us, constantly buzzing and beeping and reminding us to
Tweet. But I think the real thing that is needed is exposure to
true engineering ideas and principles. How do you get a 10 year old
to think the way a programmer would? How do... Read More » »
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Thursday, February 2, 2012 in More from ReadyTalk
In the ReadyTalk nerd book club, we just wrapped up reading and
discussing Continuous Delivery by Dave Farley and Jez Humble. You
know, there are those tech books you read that you hope to gain
some useful insights from or some knowledge that will ultimately
make you a better programmer. Then there are those books you read
that you hope will fundamentally change how you think about
programming and engineering software. Continuous Delivery falls
into that second category. For this book, we roughly... Read More »
»
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Thursday, January 19, 2012 in More from ReadyTalk
It’s 2012. Everyone typically has great intentions this time
of the year in putting foot to pavement and nailing down some
concrete resolutions; things they really want to get done over the
next year. I’ve been thinking a lot about this in the context of my
current role at ReadyTalk and the roles of those who surround me.
One of my resolutions is for personal improvement. Professional
growth, and getting better at “your craft” is one thing that is
constantly on my mind. With my team, I'm... Read More » »
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Wednesday, November 30, 2011 in More from ReadyTalk
Recently one of our software engineers approached me and asked
about the possibility of ReadyTalk helping sponsor the local Global
Day of Coderetreat being held at Uncubed, a local downtown Denver
co-work space. I had never heard of this event so I did some
reading up on it and in the end it was absolutely something I
wanted ReadyTalk Engineering to be a part of. If you are unfamiliar
with this event, it has a very grassroots feeling based on how it
came to be. Corey Haines and a few... Read More » »
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Tuesday, November 1, 2011 in More from ReadyTalk
The employees of ReadyTalk were recently challenged by Dan King,
the CEO, to come up with a corporate vision. The format of this
vision is supposed to be an article, written sometime in the future
10 or 20 years from now, about ReadyTalk as a company. We were
tasked with doing this within our respective teams; to craft this
visionary article and bring it back to the table and present it.
The idea is then to combine the best of all these visionary
articles into one, ultimate article. One article...Read More » »
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Friday, September 16, 2011 in More from ReadyTalk
We're growing within engineering at a steady pace here at
ReadyTalk, so I've been experiencing the joy that comes with lots
of interviewing. I know, you're probably thinking I'm delirious,
but I've truly learned to appreciate a good interview. More on that
in a moment. What I want to bring attention to is the common thread
I've seen in every good candidate that I've talked to...and that is
passion. I'm trying to understand or define this passion in my own
terms. Is it a part of someone's...Read More » »
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Thursday, September 1, 2011 in More from ReadyTalk
As many of you regular readers may know, we're an agile development
shop. We have been running a process known as SCRUM for quite some
time now. We've had a lot of success with it, and we've learned a
lot along the way. That's how these agile processes work; continue
to inspect and adapt and evaluate and adjust. If something isn't
working, put some time and energy into thinking about why it isn't
working and figure out a way to improve it as a team. As we've
grown and scaled to more small SCRUM...Read More » »
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Thursday, August 18, 2011 in More from ReadyTalk
Every year at ReadyTalk, we bring on a few interns for the summer
to be a part of engineering. This is typically a couple software
engineering interns and a QA engineer intern, and we've generally
had them focus on individual projects or even help with
ancillary work that will benefit our engineering team in the long
run. This year, we decided to try something new. I wrote in the
past about our new intern efforts and I wanted to follow-up and
reflect on how things went. We came into summer... Read More » »
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Wednesday, March 16, 2011 in More from ReadyTalk
Continuing in our Engineering Lifestyle series, we are going to
touch this week on the topic of "giving back." Here on the
engineering team and within ReadyTalk in general, we really try to
give back to the community in many ways. From an engineering
standpoint, we love to give back to the local academic community.
Being located in Denver, we're surrounded by several great
universities, and many of our engineers graduated from local
universities. The first thing we focus on every summer is... Read
More » »
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Wednesday, February 16, 2011 in More from ReadyTalk
Work. It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye, right?
That saying may be well suited for some industries, such as
professional sports and knitting, but in the technically driven
industry of software engineering it isn't quite accurate. Instead,
the saying would be something like “All work and no play makes Jack
a dull boy...” This is the challenge of the work we engineers have
self-selected for ourselves. There is always some aspect of the job
that is dull and mundane, and overcoming...Read More » »
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Saturday, November 13, 2010 in More from ReadyTalk
Several months ago, one of our engineers had the great idea of
starting a technology book club within the engineering team. We put
some effort into getting this off the ground and it has since
morphed into what is fondly know as the "Nerd Book Club." We meet
on a weekly basis and participation from week-to-week varies from 5
to 15 or so. The most recent book, The Myths of Innovation, has
intrigued the CEO enough to come and join our conversations, which
has been really awesome. So, how did this... Read More » »
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Tuesday, October 26, 2010 in More from ReadyTalk
Hey there! Let me introduce myself. I am Jason Collins (aka. "JC"
around the office), and I am a member of the Engineering Team here
at ReadyTalk. We've recently been recruited by the Marketing folks
to contribute material to the ReadyTalk blog, so you'll be seeing
us here from time to time. We've got a lot to contribute to the
blog that we hope will help give people an understanding of the
culture here at ReadyTalk, and more specifically in the engineering
cave. Topics will range from how we've...Read More » »
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Authors
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Guest Author
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Bo Bandy
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Paul Carollo
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Jason Collins
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Dan Cunningham
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Brandon Hess
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James Kenly
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Teresa Lawlor
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Mike McKinnon
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Michelle Nikolayevsky
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Beth Toeniskoetter
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Susan Ulrich
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Kelly Valdes
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Simone Verhulst
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Anita Wehnert