Today’s blog post is going to be a little different. Recently, I have been involved in several situations, all involving me advising and advocating for people who are struggling with different work/life balance challenges. These are people who have personal situations going on and are trying to find ways to continue to work even in […]
I’m sure everyone here has heard the expression, “Painted myself into a corner.” The idea is supposed to be that you are in a place where you have no choice but to make a specific decision or perform a specific action, whether you want to or not. Well, as you’ve no doubt figured out by […]
You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time. John Lydgate and/or Abraham Lincoln Here is one of the hardest lessons to learn and manage as a leader and manager. […]
Like many people, I can get stressed and overwhelmed. This is fairly common, I suspect, in many jobs because so many roles are about juggling and organizing multiple thoughts and priorities and tasks all at once. When it gets to be too much, I get what I call, task overloaded. I have tried to teach myself […]
I remember when I was first learning the art and science of software engineering, a really big part of almost all of the techniques was around “reusability”. I suppose even then schedule overruns were fairly common (and given that Brooks’s The Mythical Man-Month was published in 1975, I suspect I’m right), and it was assumed […]
I talk a lot about having to put thought into things. I even have a term for it: “Stare at the wall mode”. (You’ve probably heard me use this term before on this blog.) This is when you are wrestling with something in your mind and are working on trying to solve a problem or […]
Formal Agile and Scrum training uses things like Story Points or T-Shirt Sizes for user story estimation. Although I have done lots of reading and training, I still have a hard time understanding how this would work in real life, given that it is very intentionally stated in the formal academic training that the Points […]
So I like to work out (sort of). I mean, I don’t always enjoy the act of working out but I enjoy the satisfaction of doing it. But I’m not very good at it. I can’t run a marathon, bench 250, do more than three pullups, and I’m one of the last to finish a […]
Have you ever heard of the Bystander Effect? (I think of it as the Bystander’s Dilemma). According to britannica.com, its “the inhibiting influence of the presence of others on a person’s willingness to help someone in need” (https://www.britannica.com/topic/bystander-effect). I’ve seen this play out many times in a work meeting. Have you ever been in a […]
Last week I talked about the importance of domain knowledge. I asserted that if you are building, supporting, or selling something, that it was important to understand the domain that you were working in. Otherwise, you would face challenges. But that’s the ideal use case. What about the pragmatic reality of the situation, where this […]
Knuggets of Knowledge 