A collection of 5 things from the week that I found interesting, am enjoying, or am working on.

This week:

• I’ve been learning about: Single Sign-On and Sign-Out in .NET Core with OpenID Connect and IdentityServer4
• I’ve been watching: Andrew Tokeley’s talk on High Performance Product Leadership
• I’ve been happy to see that: Webstock is back on this year
• I’ve been thinking about: Lambda School sounds great
• I’ve been playing: The Witness

Using Git on Windows is way easier once you find a combination of tools that you’re comfortable with.

In this blog post you’ll learn about:

• Using Git via the command line on Windows
• A great Git GUI client for Windows and Mac
• The tool that I use for diffs, and resolving any Git merge conflict that may occur (including 3-way merges)
• Using Git with SSH authentication on Windows via .bashrc and Bash shell
• My .gitconfig

Impromptu speaking in front of an audience is challenging for most of us. Even the famous author and public speaker, Mark Twain, has been quoted as saying “I never could make a good impromptu speech without several hours to prepare it.”

If you struggle with scattered thoughts, or mind blank when impromptu speaking, then this blog post will help you.

In this blog post, you’ll learn some techniques to structure your speech when you’re on the spot, and some ways to quickly generate ideas when your mind goes blank.

In this blog post, you’ll learn how to host a sample Python web app on Elastic Beanstalk, using HTTPS, without a load balancer.

After following the steps in this blog post, you should end up with something that looks like the following image:

A collection of 5 things from the week that I found interesting, am enjoying, or am working on.

This week:

• The Competitive Advantage of Design (Philip Fierlinger)
• How to get rich (without getting lucky)
• Startups that are hiring remotely in 2019
• 15 Things You Should Know About Product Managers
• How website builders can differentiate themselves in a heavily commoditised market

A collection of 5 things from the week that I found interesting, am enjoying, or am working on.

This week:

• Sometimes Netflix preview images and descriptions get out of sync, creating amusing mashups
• Troy Hunt’s tips on personal finance for technology professionals
• Patrick McKenzie on: Should you choose a commercial license or donation model to monetise your open source project?
• A great thread discussing when to practice TDD (Test Driven Development)
• Blender 3D tutorial: Create a Modern Bedroom in Blender in 35 Minutes

In this blog post I’ll show you how to scrape Income Statement, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow data for companies from Yahoo Finance using Python, LXML, and Pandas.

I’ll use data from Mainfreight NZ (MFT.NZ) as an example, but the code will work for any stock symbol on Yahoo Finance.

The screenshot below shows a Pandas DataFrame with MFT.NZ balance sheet data, which you can expect to get by following the steps in this blog post:

After taking you step by step on how to fetch data from the balance sheet, I’ll show you how to generalise the code to also generate a DataFrame containing data from the Income Statement, and Cash Flow statement.

After creating the Pandas DataFrames, I’ll then show you how to scrape data for multiple symbols, and finally, export everything to an Excel file, so you’ll have output that looks something like this:

This post was last updated in April, 2020.

Prior to October, 2019, Yahoo Finance conveniently had all this data in a regular HTML table, which made extracting the data super easy. Since then, they’ve updated the page with a new structure, which was a wee bit tricker to get the data from. Fortunately, it’s still possible. Read on to find out how.

One of the books that I read over the summer break was “Are we there yet? Insights on How to Lead by Design” by Sam Bucolo.

For the first few years of Sam’s career, he worked as a design consultant. As he gained more design and problem solving experience, he came to realise that he was often getting the wrong brief from his clients.

Sam found that while companies could conceptualise new products or services, the sticking point was aligning this conceptualisation to their business models, which meant that time, and time again, projects significantly fell below expectation or failed completely.

These experiences led Sam to specialise in Design Led Innovation.

My notes:

There are three elements of Design Led Innovation:

1. Customer value: This is the starting point, and is about being clear on who the customer is, and the problem that the business is solving for them.
2. Management Mindset: The correct mindset to create a strategy which has been built around new insights about the customer.
3. Strategic alignment: Ensuring that all business processes and systems are aligned with the customer’s problem.

I’ve been using Hugo for my blog for the last few years, and recently published my first theme - Silhouette Hugo.

I recently received an email with the following question:

What is the simplest way for me to rename the categories Development and Golang into other names, like Projects and Gallery? Is this in partials or template or theme or where?

I figured that this might be a common question, so decided to share it in a blog post.

Here’s how to rename categories in Hugo, in the context of my theme.

A collection of 5 things from the week that I found interesting, am enjoying, or am working on.