Development | Crafty Penguins

Tips for Software Product Managers

Development, Entrepreneurship, TrainingBy Wim Kerkhoff July 6, 2019

The “Inspired” book – by Marty Cagan This post is based on resources from the excellent and popular book from Marty Cagan on Product Management. Here are some resources for summaries and excerpts from the book, which is a must-read for anyone developing a SaaS software product. https://www.amazon.ca/INSPIRED-Create-Tech-Products-Customers/dp/1119387507/ref=dp_ob_title_bk https://www.mightybytes.com/blog/inspired-marty-cagan/ https://svpg.com/assessing-product-opportunities/ https://svpg.com/ – Marty’s website and blog…

Saving your bacon by getting you out of Linux server trouble

Development, DevOps, War StoriesBy Wim Kerkhoff May 31, 2019

We have recently launched a new service to help new clients who need some help with a (semi-)urgent server, network, or code issue which might only need a few hours of an expert’s time to resolve. This service, called Get Me Out Of Trouble, is designed to quickly match up your unique need with an…

Automation using Node-RED – LFNW 2019

Conferences, Development, TeamBy Wim Kerkhoff May 28, 2019

Recently, at LinuxFest 2019, Rob presented on Node-RED. Here is an interview with Rob about what this is all about, and a link to the Youtube video recording. Here is what he covered: Connecting to a Raspberry Pi’s GPIO for digital I/O. Connecting to Google Home and Google Assistant for voice I/O. Connecting to Slack…

Using DevOps Tools to Improve Business Operations and Profit

Conferences, Development, DevOps, War StoriesBy Wim Kerkhoff May 24, 2019

Myself and Richard will be presenting at the BC Tech Association next Thursday. We will be sharing our story on how we repurposed DevOps, software development, and system montioring tools to transform our business by visualizing the key drivers to our model. Learn why this important for any business and team, and what happens if…

Journal notes from Open Source Summit 2018

Conferences, Development, DevOps, TeamBy Wim Kerkhoff May 16, 2019

In Summer 2018, our Crafty Penguins team visited the Open Source Summit here in Vancouver BC. Here are some gleanings of “what’s cool” from the post-event journal notes from the sessions we attended and found interesting. Lots of buzzwords in here! The following key takeaways were provided by Richard, Rob, and Curtis. Linux Keynote conversation…

April 25th is World Penguin Day

Development, DevOpsBy Wim Kerkhoff April 25, 2019

Today is World Penguin Day! As our Crafty Penguins company name is obviously derived from Penguins, and particular Tux who is the Linux Mascot, we are giving these lovely birds some homage today. Crafty Penguins is the brand of the Linux professional services division of Kerkhoff Technologies Inc. Riddle provided by my 9-year old son:…

Improving WordPress site performance and reliability

Databases, Development, MarketingBy Wim Kerkhoff March 12, 2019

When it comes to a money-producing website, speed and reliability do matter. The era of 33k dialup when visitors would patiently wait a minute for a site to load are LONG gone. As we help clients to improve user experience on their WordPress websites and use WP ourselves, we wanted to share some of our…

TopLeft: Tools & Features to Visualize Our Work

Development, DevOpsBy Cameron Sweeney December 7, 2018

For the last couple of years, we’ve been working to implement Kanban philosophies of work for our teams at Kerkhoff Technologies Inc. and Crafty Penguins. One result of that work is the development of a tool we’ve called TopLeft to interface with our CRM, ConnectWise Manage, so we can better visualize the work that we do. We are selling this as a…

Improving website page time for user experience and more leads

Development, MarketingBy Wim Kerkhoff November 24, 2018

In the rush to create web applications and sites that look snazzy and are functional, something that often gets overlooked is basic user experience in regards to performance. Here are some questions to ask: Could my Google organic search ranking be low because my site is so slow? When somebody clicks a search result (either Organic…

SQL data, time series, and awesome graphs using Grafana and Prometheus

Databases, Development, DevOpsBy Nicole Macfarlane November 5, 2018

Grafana has a lot of cool built-in drivers for connecting and running SQL against databases. You can see at a glance literally anything you can think of. Do you want a dashboard showing users who are active in a table? Do you want to see how often they’ve logged in? Or how many tickets you…