Kent Fenwick - Ewakened

Consistency Is Hard

I will write a book, how hard can it be? I think back to this article I read So You Want to be a Writer?, that prompted me to publicly commit and write this writing daily and back then, in September I committed to write 80 posts by the end of the year. I have written… 7. Consistency is hard. I have read many books on habits, on kaizen, on daily improvement, all of that and all I have really learned is that consistency is hard. Am I too hard on myself though? I’ve got a busy day job, a healthy

Legacy

When I was younger I spent a lot of time thinking about my legacy. Now, I do too but in a very different way. I came up in the age right after the dot com boom and bust. I learned how to program and build web and mobile apps in 2003. In fact, I remember getting a ride home with a friend of mine in Comp Sci in 3rd year who told me he picked up a book about Rails. I had no idea what he was talking about. I worshiped Musk, Thiel, Levchin, Rose, Ferriss and others. These were my tech idols and gods

VR Arcade Phase

VR is in the arcade phase. When I go to play a game, it looks amazing and fun, and when given the option between campaign or arcade, I pick arcade. The games are loud, often involve guns, and much like when I was at birthday parties back in the 90s they get boring after about 15 mins. There are exceptions. Super Hot never dissapoints and I do love Horizon Workrooms as weird as I feel when I sit down to type at my computer in VR. So I think about the opportunies that are waiting in the next 5-1

Recruiting via Problems

So I was thinking about that problem you are having, have you thought of… This is when you know you have them. When they are ready to invest, or join your cause. Like Cobb in Inception, you have planted an idea so deep into their that it is now living rent free in their mind. No, that analogy doesn’t even do it justice. Let’s try again. You have planted a seed deep into their subconscious and not only is it living rent free in their head, but they are watering the seed. They are taking care o

A book in me

I found myself writing this one Sunday evening and it’s true. Of all the times I have had something to say, I finally think I have enough words to say what I want, in a way that I haven’t seen before. What stops me from taking a step forward isn’t that I am too lazy to get started or put in the work, quite the opposite. My problem is the crushing imposter syndrome. In order to make something worth reading, I feel like that has to say something about me and my life. That somehow my life is worth

Future Fomo

How do you judge different great opportunities? How privledged do I need to be where my biggest concern is deciding between great outcomes. Ultimately, how much money is enough? What is important in daily life? Should you shoot for the moon? Aim for the stars? Looking into the future there are a few things that are clear. Web3 isn’t going anywhere and legacy Web2.0 business will slow turn into Web3 businesses. Everything from media, to insurance, to banking, to lending, to commerce will sit on

VR Mind, Beginners Mind

Starting something new is never easy. Every now and then it’s important to go back to being a beginner. Here we go VR. I see you.

Why people won’t read your thesis

I am in the final stages of finishing my masters thesis under the supervision of Ron Baecker. Together, over the course of nearly two years, Ron and I, with the help of many others have created Friend Forecaster, a context-aware system designed to help you remember people’s names. I am very proud, relieved and excited to be finished my masters, however, as I sit here and finish the last two or three pages I can’t help but wonder who will ever read it. I have come to the conclusion that people w

Trying and failing is better than not trying

So last night I had some delusions of grandeur and my buddy Nick wasn’t around to talk some sense into me. Here’s the story. Recently, I have been experimenting and using Compass, a really great CSS framework that comes with a base of excellent default styles and custom styles along with blueprint-css, yui and other CSS framework support. Anyway, it’s amazing and has great Rails project support. I decided to try YUI, Yahoo’s CSS framework since Chris Eppstein told me that it had great Flex /

The day I fell in love with CSS

I can still remember how I celebrated Canada Day 4 years ago (July 1st, 2005). I am not necessarily proud of how I spent my time but it was definitely memorable. I woke up around 9:30am that day, went outside and smelled the fresh air. It was a warm 23 degree and the sun was shinning. I read the first few pages of the newspaper, cracked open a Corona, said goodbye to the sunshine and retired to my computer in the basement not to see the light again until 8:00pm that night. I spent the better

Colour: a Fun Way to Enhance User Experience

Bruce Mau’s Optimism Palette Recently I was hired to do some contracting work with Bruce Mau Design and learned a valuable lesson about colors and websites. One of BMD’s designers Jim Shedden asked me to update their www.brucemaudesign.com site so that when the user navigated to a new page the colour of certain elements would change. At first I wasn’t totally sold on the idea but gladly accepted the task. It was a pretty cut and dry type of task that required some javascript. Since their si