Design Executive, Leadership & Management Coach
I’ve been writing an annual retrospective for myself since 2020, which I started for obvious reasons at the end of the first pandemic year. The whole process helps me put things into perspective and avoid the dreaded recency bias I warn many of my coachees against. However, my last public retrospective was published in 2018, featuring a different time, a different world, and a different Zaharenia.…
Has anyone else wholly lost their tolerance for uncomfortable clothes & shoes after the pandemic? I feel I cannot function without hoodies, T-shirts, leggings, and yoga pants anymore. If I have to leave the house, I always reach out for one of my million black leggings, a T-shirt, and an overshirt. When I don’t, sweatpants and slippers are my attire du jour. I shudder at the thought of wearing…
1. Alpha I joined Twitter in January 2007. I won’t pretend I remember what I was thinking back then. That phase of my life is a bit vague. About a year before joining, I think I was finishing up with university (or was I already done?), and I was working in a job I hated. I remember commuting to job by bus, listening to music on my iPod nano (RIP) and feeling miserable. As a young adult joining…
If you follow me on Instagram , surely you’ve noticed that for the period between July 15th and September 15th, I was posting daily highlights on my Story . During this dumpster fire of a year, I went ahead and took a two-month sabbatical to rest and realign myself with what’s essential in life. Since then, I often get questions of how did I manage to get a sabbatical, or if it worked in making me…
Notion has been the most radical change in my workflow for 2020, and one of the most exciting pieces of software I’ve used in a long time. I consider it part of the new crop of “smart document” software which started with Dropbox Paper and includes Coda and Airtable . It’s a combination of a text editor, a spreadsheet, and a wiki. Its killer feature is that you can create databases that you can…
🙋♀️ This is a cross-post from my newsletter, Leading by Design . If you liked the post below, consider subscribing ! I post one issue per month. Countless teams around the globe face the uncertain reality of a pandemic. Teams that were never remote-friendly (or even remote-tolerant) are now required to work from home for an abstract amount of time, and these are just the lucky ones. Companies…
Goals, objectives, KPIs. They are my favourite thing in the world to hate, both when I was working as an individual contributor or as a people manager. My weary amygdala sends a fight or flight response every time I have to commit to anything, especially when it’s tied to a specific date. I always disliked setting goals for myself and now, for my team. As it turns out, I’m not alone in this. Jason…
This is the first time I’ve ever tried to do a retrospective blog post. I started to do one last year, but all that’s left is a post outline in Bear , never to be edited. I always thought retrospectives were basically bragging and patting yourself on the back. I felt uncomfortable with the way people put their achievements, successes and failures out there. Don’t they understand that people are…
I swear in the last month I’ve talked more about how Slack affects our attention span more than any other issue (apart from Trump, probably). Most techies agree that Slack is detrimental to their productivity and negatively affects their attention span. All of a sudden, everyone’s looking for ways to avoid it. As I work from home, Slack is essential to my workflow. It’s the single lifeline I keep…
It feels that new structured naming conventions for CSS are popping up every day. The way I see it, this means that we’re all working on bigger, more complex CSS codebases, and conjuring random class names on a whim just won’t cut it anymore. One of the first conventions I liked was BEM. I first read about it in a blog post by Harry Roberts back in 2013, who used simple examples to explain the…