Engineering an Interesting Life
On some of the worst run projects I ve seen, leaders trying to get them back on track would set a date. Never, ever, in that circumstance, have I seen a date be met. No-one believes in it, no-one is willing to work overtime to meet it. It slips. Another one is set. And another. Maybe [ ]
Just about everyone gets overwhelmed sometimes, and many of us deal with that by working harder. This is a reasonable response to a single unexpected thing, or a bad week, but it s not the right response to systematic overwhelm. Then you need to stop asking the question what do I do next (or worse: how [ ]
Claude Steele’s first book Whistling Vivaldi gave me one of the most useful framings I have for bias. Stereotype threat: in a situation you care about, the worry that you re about to confirm a negative stereotype about your group degrades how you do. So when I saw he had a new book Churn: The Tension That [ ]
We re doing a big release this week for DRI Your Career. Mostly bug fixes and reliability work nobody will notice, but the two things worth mentioning: We ve come a long way since it was just Jean and Claude the intern , but mostly very iteratively. We d come to a point where it seemed worth rethinking. We [ ]
To be brutally honest, this (making Claude my social media manager) all started because I felt inadequate about self-promotion. And being an engineer, my response to feeling bad about something is to ask what I can build and what data would make the feeling go away. So at the start of the year I built [ ]
After the first cohort of DRI Your Career I wrote that the first time you do something, you can believe in it but you can only really hope. But we just wrapped up our second cohort of DRI Your Career and have two other courses we ve run full cohorts of. I m going to call it [ ]
I used to panic when someone asked me what I thought about an acquisition. I had vague opinions, weakly held, because I didn t know enough to reason about it. My opinions were about the product and the team. Knowing that most acquisitions fail to deliver their value (and having seen a couple up close) the [ ]
Scaling The core problem of scaling a team is that not everyone can know everything. Scaling is the work of systematizing that so that things are understandable, knowable. It s turning tribal knowledge into documentation, automation, and process. It used to be that only the automation was for the machine, but now documentation is machine [ ]
If you re reading this on cate.blog, things look different. I m pleased with how it came out. Getting there was more difficult than I expected. I came into this confident. I used to work on WordPress (admittedly, the mobile apps but I did the support rotations and lived in P2 like everyone else). I have [ ]
The volume is up. More PRs, more pings, more incidents, more asks coming from more directions. I used to have 8 directs that dealt with most things, and organized and routed information to me for what I had to help them with, but since embarking on a new adventure, I ve been rebuilding a different system [ ]