Meta

10 years is a long time. The last time I updated this blog, Obama was still president and nobody knew what a Coronavirus was. I was also just wrapping up my tenure at Upworthy after being laid off and getting ready to begin my time at Stitch Fix - which ended up being the best part of my entire career. I experienced a lot of growth there, from a fairly insecure developer to someone who became a decent manager. I learned how to build teams while I was at Stitch Fix. And I learned what a company that is run by someone who understands the emotional part of work can be like. ...

{% blockquote Chris Knight and Lazlo Holyfeld http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/trivia?item=qt0435761 Real Genius %} “How’d I do? I passed! But I failed! Yeah!” “Well, then I’m happy and sad for you.” Last night I made a mistake. In an effort to continue pairing with people I really enjoyed pairing with, I scheduled 2 pairing sessions for the same evening. I left 30 minutes between them, I prepared as I should… but I was stressed and it made both sessions worse. ...

It’s really easy to be bogged down with all the crap in life. There is a good amount of it and I don’t know anyone that doesn’t struggle with keeping a good attitude at some time or another. I’ve struggled at various points to stay positive both in my personal life and publicly. I don’t think it’s wrong to have negative thoughts or to even voice struggles or frustrations, but there is a danger in openly venting. It creates a culture that is great at complaining and bad at doing anything about it. It creates an entire set of people bogged down in the crap of their lives, and because of the loud voices they hear all around them, it seems like there is no escape from it. There is so little good that comes from complaining publicly. ...

I had a great pairing session with @thecommongeek tonight. It was my first live-remote pair programming and I wanted to to a little “post mortem” on it to record my thoughts. We spent some time on introductions and then jumped into a problem. Since my box was all set up, I typed. I’m more experienced than Dennis as a coder, so I viewed it as the potential to mentor him a bit. I also learned from him both in the “how to be a better mentor” department and the “how to pair better” department. ...

As coders, we’re often given tasks to do. These tasks can sometimes overwhelm even the best of us. How many times have you stared at a problem and when you finally sat down to attack it, you spent a quarter of the time you expected to on it. If only you hadn’t spent 3 hours playing Angry Birds. There are lots of things you can do to “hack” your productivity, but most of them are focused on helping you keep track of tasks instead of motivating you to get going. ...

I’ve recently been curating a playlist on spotify for High Energy Electronic Music so that I could have something high energy with no lyrics, or at the very least very simple ones that were easy to ignore. The big point was to have something high energy that got me into the coding groove. I have to say that it’s worked. Having a driving beat and some hard hits has made it really easy to get motivated to code on. Suggestions for similar artists/songs welcome.

When you’re in the same room, often your communication is done via waving at each other, overhearing a conversation, happening by a desk, etc. It’s accidental communication in many cases, and it’s good. But it can have detrimental side effects to productivity when interruptions can happen at any time. That was the main impetus behind deploying HipChat to our organization–having a way to allow people to communicate without directly interrupting. Let people come to the communication, rather than taking the communication to them ...

Pull Requests are used often in the open source world, but less so on private teams. They are a great way to provide an automatic, team-wide code review mechanism. If your private team doesn’t use pull requests, I’d encourage you to investiage it. Why would you move your team over to pull requests? it provides a mechanism for code and source control review it gives more visibility and accountability to the whole team you can (optionally) restrict access so only trusted members bless the merge What is the Pull Request process like? There are lots of resources about how to submit pull requests out there, but the basics go like this. ...

I am trying out Octopress as a new blogging engine. I have seen several people use it and I appreciate the lack of PHP :)

Over the course of human history, we’ve generally done things as best as we can, working the same tasks over and over again. Our brains have gotten good at repetitive tasks, though our hearts long for something unique and challenging. Only in the past 200 years have we begun to truly automate much of our lives. With the dawn of the industrial age, we’ve seen automation begin to change our lives. ...