Work-from-home father, eater of pizza, maker of useful things.
I wanted to share three screenshots from different stages of TinyWins ’ daily habits view. This was inspired by Gregory Ng’s recent post and in particular the part on vulnerability and the process: For designers, this means embracing vulnerability. Showing the sketches. The failed prototypes. The weird experimental versions that don’t quite work but are fascinating. Perfection is boring. Process…
I’ve known regular habits in exercising, reading and journaling would be beneficial to my well-being but have failed in making them stick. I’d go strong for a few days…maybe even a week until something else “important” would derail my progress. Then I discovered comedian, Jerry Seinfeld’s “Don’t break the chain” method – a simple habit-building system Jerry’s system entails a red marker and a…
I crave community but admit, I’m not good at online community. I’ve been contemplating joining a couple of online communities but have hesitated. So I’ve been introspecting what’s really the reasons that prevent me from sticking around online communities and here are my observations. FOMO Fear of missing out ( FOMO ) I believe is one of the big detractors of why I haven’t been good about online…
Years ago, I wrote a little command-line app to journal . It took a single string and saved it to a simple text file. Kind of like tooting , but only to yourself. I fell in love with the simplicity of writing a command-line app because it had constraints especially in terms of what you could visually. Today I came across a site called Bookshelf Town . It is supposed to be a minimalist Goodreads…
I’ve worked in different sized companies and worked with various types of software engineering leaders. In my experience there are three typical archetypes when it comes to engineering leadership. In this article I wanted to describe each of the different type of leader and the common traits they may hold. Cultural leader This type of engineering leader is less technical, but technical enough to…
Managing up when done right feels like performing a Jedi mind trick – getting your manager to do things for you. One of the best lessons I have learned about managing up was from my past work colleague, Alex Kohlhofer . Alex said, that at work, we all have bags of poop. And your job is to scoop some poop out of your manager’s bag and place it into yours. Your boss is busy. Likely context switching…
A few weeks ago, I assessed areas of my life and decided to take off some of the hats to refocus in areas where I thought my energy was needed. One of the hats I decided to take off was running a local job board called, Research Triangle Jobs. Since writing about my decision to not run the site, a few friends had reached out and shared ideas to either find a new owner by transferring of the…
Cal Newport often speaks about constraints or limits as a means to quality output. Something I’ve been mentally toiling over lately are the many hats that I currently wear and the desire to take some off in order to better yield quality results. Now I know not all aspects of my life will have quantifiable results. Quality results for example as a father, is more of a feel good about myself because…
The summer Olympics is back in full force and my family and I have been enjoying watching these extraordinary athletes from around the world compete against each other. But sadly, one thing that seems to not have returned with this year’s Olympics are the International Collection Apple Watch Bands. Released during the 2020 Olympics, Apple released 22 limited-edition bands with matching watch faces…
The traffic to my site has been taking a nose dive for a while now. I can’t quite remember which year it was but in its peak, this site had some 20K folks visiting a month. Something I was quite proud of. But as life got busy and my career pivoted from an individual contributor to an engineering leader, I realized the types of things I wanted to write about shifted. This led to writing paralysis.…