September 23, 2021
Vancouver's Growth Since the 70's
“"Vancouver has proven that a city can grow and prosper and still become a green capital — a global leader in addressing climate change." – City of Vancouver” Pictured above is an aerial view of Downtown Vancouver and West End...
September 16, 2021
Telosa: City of the Future
“"The mission of Telosa is to create a more equitable and sustainable future. That's our North Star." – Marc Lore” What does one do when they become a billionaire? Build a city, of course. Telosa is the vision of Marc...
August 26, 2021
The Park Theatre in Cambie Village
I had the pleasure of visiting a theatre again—the first time since Covid hit. Park Theatre is one of Vancouver's oldest, which opened in 1941, and passed through multiple owners since being acquired by Cineplex Entertainment. What I loved is...
August 12, 2021
Fifteen Fifteen
“"Born from an idea of three-dimensional living, Fifteen Fifteen introduces horizontality to an urban tower." – Bosa Properties” Overview • Developed by Bosa Properties • 202 units • 42 stories • Units starting at $900,000 • Estimated completion 2027 Precision-driven...
May 22, 2021
eXp Shareholder Summit Takeaways
eXp World Holdings, Inc. capped off its 2021 shareholder summit in the EXPI Campus, with world-renowned speakers from all walks of life sharing their journeys to success. The list included names like Grant Cardone, John Salley, Jamie Kern Lima, and...
May 14, 2021
Urban Fringe Communities: Marpole
“"In a metropolitan region where expansion from the core is still taking place, predominantly on a horizontal plane, older urban service centres on the metropolitan fringe demand consideration as foci for new urban growth, provided their suitability in terms of...
February 01, 2021
The Virtual World of eXp Realty
eXp Realty, The Real Estate Cloud Brokerage, is the fastest-growing global residential real estate company, and the largest by geography in North America. The international LLC was founded in 2009 by Glenn Sanford and is a subsidiary of eXp World...
December 22, 2020
How to Route Emails with Action Mailbox
Action Mailbox is a feature introduced in Rails 6 that enables you to route incoming emails to controller-like mailboxes. It opens up interesting use cases for how you can deal with inbound email in your own application. There is perhaps...
November 26, 2020
Managing Subscriptions with Stripe Checkout
Software as a service (SaaS) nowadays makes it easy to integrate e-commerce solutions into your application, and nothing comes close to the capabilities of Stripe. Founded in 2010 by Patrick and John Collison, Stripe has democratized online payment processing for...
October 30, 2020
Sea to Sky
““He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.” - Socrates” The District of Squamish is only a 45-minute drive from Downtown Vancouver and is considered a small adventure...
October 11, 2020
Digitization of Mortgage
“mort-gage (old french) noun1. Death Pledge” CMHC released a publication on Mortgage Data Standards–analyzing the impact of initiating a system of data standards in the Canadian mortgage industry. One aspect of the data standards framework I'm paying close attention to...
September 30, 2020
Opendoor
From laying off 35% of its employees in April, to becoming a publicly traded company valued at $4.8 billion via merger with Social Capital Hedosophia in September, Opendoor has been the talk of the tech world as they reinvent how...
September 10, 2020
Shaping the Future of Proptech with GIS
“"A framework to organize, communicate, and understand the science of our world." – Esri” Global real estate is an asset class more valuable than all stocks, shares, and securitized debt combined, at $228+ trillion. There are remarkable technologies pushing the...
August 22, 2020
Transferring Data in Postgres
“"We believe that databases need to excel at more than simple selects to be useful for complex tasks, and our positive experiences with PostgreSQL has done nothing but reinforce that philosophy." – David McNett” Migrating data hardly ever comes without...
August 04, 2020
SaaS + Fintech
“"Once one software solution demonstrates it is valuable, the customer base will consolidate around that company for all its software needs." – a16z” a16z released an article on how SaaS businesses can scale to new vertical markets by directly embedding...
July 31, 2020
Outsourcing Design
Good designers are hard to come by—it can be a costly process to find the right candidate, and you may end up paying for work you aren't satisfied with. Now that we basically all live on the internet, meeting in...
July 01, 2020
Journey to Nowhere
““Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and...
June 14, 2020
Streaming Real Estate Data
Big data in real estate is a prime use case for real-time stream processing—a programming paradigm that allows us to instantaneously respond to data as it arrives. It is the antithesis to batch processing, whereby all data is loaded into...
June 02, 2020
JWT Authentication
Implementing authentication for third-party access is no small feat, but is imperative in order to compete in a complex API economy and expand business capabilities. With every application, securing protected resources always poses a unique challenge, particularly considering how rapidly...
May 17, 2020
Multiple Databases with Rails 6 and RDS
Rails 6 shipped with the ability to use multiple databases in one application, making automatic connection switching as simple as adding a connects_to method in the respective class. To go a step further, we'll set up an Amazon RDS instance,...
May 14, 2020
IRAP Funding
Launch Academy presented a webinar on everything you need to know about the Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP)—a cross-Canada network of 255 industrial technology advisors, with $300 million in support for more than 3,000 development projects annually. Having gone through...
May 08, 2020
AWS Lambda Functions for Python and Ruby
I love to program in Ruby as well as Python, and AWS Lambda functions provide the perfect solution to combine both languages' capabilities without additional server configuration. The aws-sdk-lambda library makes serverless computing workflow dead simple, by providing a gateway...
May 06, 2020
Background Processing with RETS and Sidekiq
Managing large quantities of real estate data is computationally intensive, and well-suited for background processing. The task involves importing thousands of MLS® listings into a Redis in-memory data structure store, using an open government API for geocoding, and association with...
April 24, 2020
Python for Real Estate
“"Maintainable code is more important than clever code." – Guido van Rossum, creator of Python” During this lockdown, I've been spending time taking online courses, specifically in the areas of Data Science, Machine Learning, and Python. My go-to platform right...
February 06, 2020
75Hard
75Hard is a mental toughness program that spans a year, consisting of a daily regimen, and a tactical guide to winning the war with yourself. The tasks are simple when taken at face value, but the intent and consistency you...