So the other day I’m standing in front of my closet, wondering what shirt I’m going to wear that day. And for whatever reason I’m unable to make a decision. Intellectually I realize it’s really very silly. I’ve got like 5 or 6 perfectly good shirts to wear, yet I’m unable to commit to picking […]
The chore I hate the most in my house is definitely laundry. It’s just never-ending, especially now that I have a couple of kids. It’s better now but it took some mental improvements to myself to get there. Mainly because I had to change my psychological approach. I used to see laundry as a TODO […]
So I’m reading The Slight Edge, a pretty awesome book by Jeff Olson, and it is dawning on me how his basic principles apply to Agile. One anecdote that he mentions several times is that when a rocket is flying to the Moon it is actually off-course for over 90% of the time. Now that […]
I used to have a personality quirk, and I still do to some degree, where I have to know exactly what all is going on around me to a great level of detail. In my house I could tell you exactly what is in every closet, drawer, or shelf in the entire house. Even movies […]
So the other day I’m sitting around reading about geeky technical stuff (as I am wont to do) and come across an interesting synthesis of thoughts that can combined in a fascinatingly gestalt-ish way. I’m reading about the history of microservices and service oriented architectures, and how the original thinking for them evolved from a […]
As a technical manager and leader, a great deal of your responsibility is to mentor, coach, encourage, and grow people. Accomplishing tasks and moving projects forward is indeed important, but you need to make sure that you are taking care of people. But in order to do this you need to have a toolbag full […]
I’m sure many of you have heard of the famous Google 20%. This is the concept that Google engineers are allowed to spend 20% of their time on whatever they want. The idea is that many of the company’s most innovative and disruptive initiatives come from such a policy, and it also helps with employee […]
Several times in my career, I have missed deadlines, delivered buggy solutions, or otherwise had failures and setbacks with my engineering efforts that weren’t really my fault. In two specific cases, unknown bugs were discovered in third-party vendor products in edge cases, and the bugs trickled up into our products in a customer-facing way. So […]
Some days, when I sit down at the keyboard to write or work, I just can’t get going. My mind is blank, or fuzzy, and I just can’t focus, and can’t think of what I’m supposed to actually do next. Some days, when I’m coding or immersed in technical work, there comes a time during […]
I’ve talked before about how security doesn’t have to be hard. In fact, if approached correctly the basics can be easy. Let’s start with the most basic of all. Patching. I’ve compiled a list of articles, linked at the bottom of this page, but I’ve read several times that, surprisingly, one of the number one […]
Knuggets of Knowledge 