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Failure. It seems we talk about it more than success in the startup world. Mark Evans suggested that in “Canada, unfortunately, failure is a four-letter word”. Our fear of failing here prevents us from reaching, from leaping, from succeeding. Some other guy suggests that safety nets are for failing. The idea that allowing yourself the […]

Ever since DHH’s keynote at Railsconf 2014 and his subsequent blog post TDD is dead. Long live testing., the development world (or at least the Ruby community) has been abuzz with thoughts on Test Driven Development (TDD). Uncle Bob, as well as a number of other influential members of the community, have jumped in to give […]

Personally I’ve had a long standing policy to not respond to unsolicited Requests For Proposals, known as RFP’s. In the early days, I couldn’t give you a sound reason for my avoidance. I’m sure my main reason was that I didn’t feel confident I could craft a worthy response to your 64 page fancy-pants RFP […]

Recently the company I work at, Boltmade, was undergoing a rebranding. Naturally we looked at the websites of other software development companies to see what they were saying about themselves. To me, one site stood out. 8th Light says in their company principles that, “we take responsibility for the correctness of our code by testing […]

If you’re freelancing, starting a business, or even just looking for a new job, that iphone selfie may not be the best foot forward. Our headshot day is back on Jan 23rd. We’ll have Noelle here again shooting headshots for our ThreeFortyNine members. It takes less than 30 minutes. You’ll receive two final versions that […]

We often bring guests into ThreeFortyNine who have domain expertise our members value. Recently we had a technical writer in for the day, this Wednesday Dec 11th we have some legal action. Kevin Holbeche from Fasken Martineau will be in our building and hosting open office hours. Kevin is a patent lawyer who can advise […]

Entrepreneurs eat what they kill. Bootstrapping and creating something from nothing, however, can be a long, lonely, penniless road. Depending on the business, it can take months, maybe even years, to bootstrap and grow a new business to the point it can pay it’s founders a decent salary. In the meantime, how do these technology […]

I’m excited to start talking about a new project in the works. In a previous life I helped run, and grow, a software development services company named BandOfCoders with my good friend Bobby. I was involved for 3+ years and stepped out to get involved in a startup project. Since then I’ve dabbled with custom […]

We have a lot of bootstrappers at ThreeFortyNine. What’s a bootstrapper? Wikipedia says “Bootstrapping or booting refers to a group of metaphors which refer to a self-sustaining process that proceeds without external help”. The free dictionary says “To promote and develop by use of one’s own initiative and work without reliance on outside help”. The majority […]