Words

Why ‘passion’ has no place in business

by Matthew Stibbe on November 21, 2011

This is going to be one of my (hopefully) rare curmudgeon posts. Apologies in advance. I just had an attack of the Victor Meldrews this week. I get very cross when I hear people talk about ‘passion’ in business. Either in mission statements (e.g. Microsoft: “your potential, our passion”) or in CV covering letters (e.g. [...]

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That doesn’t mean what you think it means

by Matthew Stibbe on October 27, 2011

Back in 2006, I ran a post titled The worst press release ever. It made fun of all the words that people use in press release, like ‘quantum leap’ and ‘holistic’, when they don’t actually know what they mean. I was thinking of that when I read this on Callan Bentley’s blog. (Hat tip: Communicating [...]

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40 essential online apps for freelancers

by Matthew Stibbe on March 22, 2010

Online applications give me a competitive edge. I want to be a ‘big little company’ with the same (or better) IT capabilities as the biggest of my clients. I try to make the maximum use of online applications because they let me deploy new capabilities quickly without adding to my IT or admin burdens. This [...]

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When writing, optimise the algorithm not the code

by Matthew Stibbe on February 15, 2010

Back when I used to be a programmer, I quickly learned that you could get a much bigger performance boost by changing the algorithm – the underlying structure of the code and data – than by optimising the code. For example, you could rewrite an inner loop in assembler rather than C and get a [...]

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Found in translation

by Matthew Stibbe on November 27, 2009

In this second guest post, Lingo24’s founder Christian Arno talks about the joy of words and the hidden linguistic pitfalls that translators must avoid. Linguistic diversity As all translators will know, it takes a considerable amount of time and effort to learn a second language. But with genetically-related languages such as Romance, there is often [...]

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