Last weekend I visited Upper Canada Village. Most remarkable were the mills still operational to this day. As it was 150 years ago, water powers the sawmill, wool mill and flour mill. Power is produced on a continuous basis to cut lumber, produce wool fabric, and grind wheat into flour…

In this day and age of internet and computing, things move really fast. Innovation requires you to constantly reinvent yourself. Staying still will get your company killed. Change is the only constant. We’ve all heard variants of these cliches over and over. They do however hold the key to longevity…

Like millions of workers across the world, I have an hour commute to get to work. Fortunately public transport in Montreal is very good. In fact the metro is extremely efficient. During rush hour a train passes every 3 minutes. Even better, I am able to have a seat 9…

Its January and time to register my kids to winter sessions for their evening and weekend activities: piano, Scouts, judo and badminton. Most of these registrations are still paper-based requiring me to go in person, fill in a form and write a check. On a cold Monday evening, I had…

Importing data from Excel is a very common workflow for many applications, especially during on-boarding. For example at Amilia an administrator can import existing clients into their CRM. We provide an Excel template facilitating this process. The tedious part is building this Excel file. Usually, the admin will have a…

Rapid Application Development or RAD is a technique to develop and test applications very rapidly. In short, RAD is all about involving your customer as you develop the solution. They get to test as you build in order to adapt the solution iteratively. Construction is intertwined with user design. It…

As a developer, whatever industry you’re in, you will work on data imports more than once in your career. It often goes something like this… Megan (project manager) We’ve got Joanna, new big and important customer with 5,000 records of existing data. We need to import them into our system. …

On November 19th, 2018 WordPress 5 is coming out. This major release completely changes the interface for writing pages and blog posts. The TinyMCE editor gets replaced by blocks — WordPress’ own page builder if you will. It is called the Gutenberg editor. Gutenberg will change a lot of things…

A couple weeks ago I was in Indianapolis at a conference. I met a developer working for a web agency and asked if they used WordPress. With disdain he quickly replied: WordPress is unpleasant to work with and came quickly become a mess and a nightmare to maintain. We avoid…