NEW EPISODE – Tech Talks in the Silicon Forest
Featured Guest – Mark Farley, VP of IT at Thermo Fisher Scientific In this episode, John interviews Mark Farley, Vice President of Information Technology at Thermo Fisher Scientific. Thermo Fisher Scientific is a world leader in serving science, with annual...
Announcement: Scholarship Winner Angela Pawlowski
Philip Lilly Memorial Scholarship Winner – Angela Pawlowski Congratulations to our 1st Philip Lilly Memorial Scholarship Winner, Angela Pawlowski! Angela demonstrated a clear commitment to leading with compassion, breaking down barriers, and improving...
Roundtable Discussion Topic: Challenges and Best Practices when Managing Remotely
In October, ProFocus hosted a discussion of Portland based technology leaders. This was a roundtable discussion. John Boone, the President of ProFocus Technology, moderated the discussion. The leaders in attendance offered various advice, best practices, and lessons...
A Story About Hiring – a Manager’s Struggle to Do It All
In today’s market, technical leaders sometimes have two (if not more) full-time jobs. They must manage their teams, keep projects on track, and maintain all other day-to-day responsibilities. They also must attract, hire, and recruit top talent. Making these strategic...
So You’re Moving to the Silicon Forest?
If you’re moving to Portland, you might be wondering which neighborhood to live in. You should first know the genius of the city’s layout, which is split into 4 primary areas: NW, NE, SW, and SE. They are divided by the Willamette River (going north and south) and...
Tips for Implementing Agile the Right Way
There’s lots of buzz about agile — as well as plenty of misconceptions about what agile is and isn’t. Agile offers a variety of benefits, from a better final product to improved collaboration, which has led many organizations to adopt an agile approach. But seeing...
Pros and Cons of Cloud Computing
Every so often, software development goes through major disruptive changes. The introduction of object-oriented programming was a major paradigm shift in the way a computer programmer breaks down project requirements into distinct islands of code referred to as...
Why Enterprise Programming Is So Challenging
If you backed me into a corner and asked me what’s the toughest and most challenging kind of software development I’ve ever experienced, I’d have to say hands down, it’s the world of enterprise software development. To be clear, enterprise development is all about...
How a Developer Measures Success
How should a software developer measure their success? When I was younger and starting out in my professional software development career, I used to think it was how much code I sling. Like Clint Eastwood in “A Fistful of Dollars”, I liked to pretend I was a...
How Developers Level Up
I’ve been a video game nut ever since I was a kid. I especially loved those Dungeons & Dragons style role playing fantasy games where you played a lone hero out to save the world from unspeakable evils. Every role playing game, whether it’s paper based or computer...