I worked as a full stack engineer/developer for many years before going into more leadership type positions, where an understanding of the business itself became much more important than specific product experiences, features, or codebases. Along that journey I’ve needed to learn a lot of acronyms and concepts that aren’t a part of pure engineering, […]
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Replacing Wink with Home Assistant
I used to have Wink set up, managing some smart home devices throughout our house. I liked it because the app UI was quite nicely done, and it seemed to be compatible with “everything”. I had even upgraded from their version 1 hub, to the version 2. But then a few months ago they decided […]
Using Dynalist as a Productivity Tool
I’ve been searching for years for the “perfect tool” to help me take notes, organize ideas, and keep track of all the tasks I need to do. I’ve also been deeply obsessed with lists forever. At some point I came across Workflowy, which I quite liked. I don’t remember why, but I then discovered and […]
Remote Work At Scale
COVID-19 (aka coronavirus) has many companies suddenly experimenting with remote work for the first time. I tweeted yesterday that unfortunately people are likely to have a pretty rough time due to the rushed nature of the experiment, and some folks asked if I could expand on that, so here we are. There are already a […]
Management Communication: Priority Exceptions
Constantly-changing priorities and surprise projects erode team morale and leave everyone unsure of if they’re working on the most important thing, or if they’ll ever get to finish anything. While being adaptable and flexible is critical for most teams, it’s always important to have some kind of roadmap and approach to prioritization and planning work. […]
Arc’teryx Norvan SL Hoody Review
Before we get into any details, let me just get this out of the way — I absolutely love this thing, and giggle every time I get to use it. It makes no sense, I know, but here we are. OK — now that you know how biased I am, let’s jump into some details. […]
Engineering Management Lessons From Mountain Biking
Since moving to Colorado, I’ve been lucky enough to get out mountain biking pretty frequently. I love it. On some rides you’re just trying to get up or down the mountain in one piece, but on some rides you get good time to think quite deeply. On a recent ride I was rolling around (pun […]
Keyring 2.0 and Keyring Social Importers 2.0
Yesterday I released new versions of both Keyring and the Keyring Social Importers packages, containing a bunch of updates and new additions. If you’re already using them, you should have update notices in wp-admin. If you’re not yet, then download them at the links above, or search for “keyring” in wp-admin under Plugins > Add […]
DJI Mavic Air Review
After drooling over it for months at Costco, I picked up a bundle package with a DJI Mavic Air back in November. I’ve now flown it a fair bit, and wanted to write up some observations on it. First of all — this thing is amazing. It’s so much fun to fly, and honestly feels […]
Thoughts to Ponder
Loved these thoughts from the outgoing Chief Data Scientist of the White House: Dream in years Plan in months Evaluate in weeks Ship daily Prototype for 1x Builder for 10x Engineer for 100x What’s required to cut the timeline in 1/2? What’s required to double the impact? h/t ma.tt