2019 - Michael Bianco

Archiving a QuickBooks Online Account to QuickBooks Desktop

If you run a small business, you probably use QuickBooks. I’ve been impressed with the product: the rate of improvement continues to stay constant over the last couple of years (one of the most important criteria in picking a software platform for your business!) and it’s surprisingly pleasant to use. If you close a company, you’ll want to archive all of your QuickBooks data for at least a couple of years in case you get audited. However, QuickBooks Online does not have a low-cost “audit backup” option to access a read-only version of your data. If you cancel your subscription, you only have 90 days to reactivate your subscription and restore your data…

Why You Should Open Source Your Thinking

Open source software (OSS) has transformed the technology landscape. I can’t imagine any software company build without OSS at the core. What makes OSS magical is the serendipity of how it’s created. Someone throws an initial idea on the internet, and if others have the same problem, they join in and organically refine and improve the original idea. Others silently lurk into the project, start using it, and run into some bugs or edge cases which they report (and sometimes post a fix for). Before you know it, there’s a robust piece of software that has been tested under a variety of circumstances by experts around the world. Amazing. Blogging has similar properties…

Optimize Your Charitable Giving Using a Donor Advised Fund (DAF)

I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of recurring revenue. Building a business or a portfolio of investments which passively create recurring income has been interesting to me since I got my first paycheck. Over the last year I’ve been thinking: why can’t I (slowly) create a charitable asset that kicks off income each year which can go tax-free to charities? This way, instead of giving to an organization once, you can build a mix of assets that generate enough income to perpetually give to the organizations you carry about? This idea, combined with the recent tax law changes that made it more challenging to get a deduction from charitable donations (10k SALT limitation makes it harder to itemize), got me researching…

Habits, Systems, and Scripts

I’ve been ‘auditing’ various areas of my life. After being obsessively focused on work for a long time, it’s been helpful to think deeply about the habits and pre-written scripts that I’ve developed across a bunch of areas of life. In most cases, the habits I’ve adopted over the years are a function of taking the path of least resistance than an intentional choice. Here are some things I’m looking at: Information Consumption (news, email, podcasts, reading, etc) Exercise Eating Prayer Marriage Friendship Thinking through what I want from these categories, where I’m not satisfied, and asking ‘why’ multiple times until I get the root cause of the delta has been insightful…

Handling Web Timeouts in Heroku

I’m a huge fan of Heroku. Way back when, I used to manage the entire deployment infrastructure manually. I’d grab a VPS from RackSpace/AWS, install nginx, configure ruby, tinker with deployment scripts, and then in the weeks ahead endlessly tinker with settings when things didn’t work just right. Although I did enjoy the capture-the-flag feel of finding the right service configuration to solve a problem, once Heroku became a thing I switched over every application I managed. There’s a huge amount of leverage in never having to worry about the details of your deployment infrastructure. Heroku is expensive, but it’s orders-of-magnitude cheaper than hiring a devops expert. However, there are some limitations…

The Feeling of Fast

Momentum is a powerful force. Once you are moving it’s easier to get keep moving. If you’ve already crossed off an item or two on a less-than-ten-item todo list, you’ll be able to get the rest of the tasks done faster. The perception of speed is sometimes more important than your absolute speed. I’ve found that the “feeling of fast” creates the momentum that drives effective execution. It’s worth spending the time and money to optimize various aspects of your work & life in order to create a feeling of moving quickly. For example: A faster computer or phone reduces friction and makes it feel like you are getting more done…

2018 Goal Retrospective

Every year I enjoy doing a retrospective on last year’s goals. I believe there is value is "open sourcing your brain": your ideas may help someone and you may get invaluable feedback to help you improve. There’s also a strange sense of social accountability created for myself that helps me ensure I improve this year. So, with that in mind, here we go! What worked Doing something small to move a goal forward. Once you see progress you’ll be motivated to dig into the goal more and make progress. Reduce friction on goals which you are not naturally motivated to achieve. For instance, if you want to drink more water everyday, buy a water purifier to make the water taste better. Scheduling time on Sunday to work on goals…

Year: 2019