Articles and Guides

Decoupling Technical Architecture to Enhance Resiliency

01/31/202511/07/2025
by Chris Smith

In an era of rapidly evolving technology landscapes and customer expectations, organizations must build systems that are not just efficient but resilient and adaptable. Decoupling technical components—a design principle that ensures different parts of a system operate independently—is a cornerstone of achieving these objectives. Let’s explore the importance of decoupling, what to watch out for, metrics that measure its success, and how to communicate its value to stakeholders.

Productivity

GTD: Back to Basics – Part 2

05/09/202405/09/2024
by Chris Smith

When I think about productivity systems, I fall back to the one I am most comfortable with, GTD. The methodology has always resonated with my philosophies on how to accomplish the incremental steps toward my goals. In this part of the series, we will focus on the latter of the foundational areas that were explored in Part 1.

Coding

Launching DevTinker Experiments

02/13/202402/13/2024
by Chris Smith

Finding a place to store and manage some clever tricks and coding implementations has led us to create our Experiments section. Here we will play around with designs and functional prototypes that we are sharing with anyone interested. We will be launching the new section by the end of March 2024, so please be on the lookout for changes that are coming. Below we will host some previews of what is to come.

Follow the countdown on our Github Pages site!

Productivity

GTD: Back to Basics – Part 1

09/07/202305/09/2024
by Chris Smith

Productivity

When I think about productivity systems, I fall back to the one that I am most comfortable with, GTD. The methodology has always resonated with my own philosophies on how to accomplish the incremental steps toward my goals.

In recent years, I have focused more on the reflection and the workflow process steps in an effort to understand the requirements of each. Getting clarity on how my system would interact in relation to those steps with a focus on how I can improve the integration into my life in increasingly frictionless ways.

Productivity

Tracking Personal Progress Better

02/28/202302/28/2023
by Chris Smith

Productivity

How do you measure your growth? What metrics do you trust? What tools do you use to help record and display those metrics? Do you apply it only to things like personal fitness, budget, or some other specific area of your life?

In most areas of business and critical life areas, we use data to track how we are doing, whether it is a general sense of position or progress towards a goal. Why should we, therefore, treat the rest of our life any differently? Now, I am not talking about making your life all about work.

Productivity

Story Mapping: An Introduction

01/26/202301/22/2023
by Chris Smith

Visual learning and storytelling have existed longer than spoken languages have been in existence, from when cavemen painted stick figures on cave walls, people have used the visual versions of storytelling to transcend barriers and work to bring people into the same context for the understanding of what is being presented.

During the early 2010s, I was introduced to the concept of knowledge mapping, an effort to organize various clusters of knowledge or capabilities within groups or organizations to help streamline efforts to spread that knowledge. Out of those that were working on such problems came Open Knowledge Maps, primarily focused on organizing the world’s scientific expertise into a visual matrix of who had the best perspective on a given topic.

Productivity

Bullet Journaling for Productivity

01/13/202301/22/2023
by Chris Smith

As part of my evolving productivity practices, I turned to physically keeping notes as I kept hearing that cognitive studies proved that they assisted in the retention of the information that was written down. This was important for me since I wanted to make sure I was adding a component to my workflow that was beneficial and something that I would stick with as well. The solution ended with me keeping a regular series of Bullet Journals to track the critical needs of my GTD Journey.

Productivity

Applied GTD: Observations through Experience

01/08/202301/22/2023
by Chris Smith

Productivity seems to be top of mind for me almost constantly these days, whether it is focused on myself, my team, or even my family. It has an impact on all of our activities, whether we are doing the chores around the house, working on projects for the office, or even getting a gathering organized. I know that for those that are reading this, those statements are fairly obvious since mostly like-minded people are the most likely to be reading this, however, on the off chance someone new is exploring and stumbles across this, well… Welcome and hope you find some of this helpful.

The details I am sharing are based completely on my personal observations while striving to integrate the GTD practice throughout my life and career. I am a take-it-or-leave-it kind of person when it comes to what should be done versus what is practical and most efficient. Keep that in mind as we get into some of the more interesting observations that I have made over the last decade-plus while using the Getting Things Done (GTD) Methodologies as the anchors for my personal productivity practices.

Productivity

Locking in your Productivity Focus

08/26/202208/26/2022
by Chris Smith

After recently returning to work from an extended leave, I found myself getting a little overwhelmed with the number of things that I needed to complete. In the past, I would work my GTD process steps to try to beat back the volume and handle all of the important and necessary things as they come. Now after developing a healthier mindset while being out, I am seeking to change how I interact with my day. I have spent some time reading about habits and changing behaviors that have been established over time and feel that some of those techniques may assist in the direction I would like to go to improve my productivity.

Developer Skills

Agile Documentation for Large Scale Activity

08/18/202208/18/2022
by Chris Smith

Technical documentation in software engineering is the umbrella term that encompasses all written documents and materials dealing with software product development. All software development products, whether created by a small team or a large corporation, require some related documentation. It is inescapable for any process or product that will need any length of operation time and support to survive.

Interesting Thoughts

Productivity

Productivity