Category: development

Stay Soft

I wrote this as my farewell in Slack, and wanted to keep it, so it’s turning into a blog post! Tomorrow is my last working day at Gusto, which has meant a lot of good-bye conversations, some tears, and a good bit of advice. It’s bittersweet leaving a company full of kind people, but the […]

Racing Robots

This was originally published on the Creative Coast’s (now Startup Savannah) blog way back in 2016. With AI, it’s feels even more relevant now. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You […]

Wrapping up National Blog Post Month

Between writing a blog post almost every day and going back to the beginning of this blog and re-reading stuff I wrote over twenty years ago, it’s been a bloggy month over here! I only missed two days. I can live with that. I’ve blogged more this month than I have in years, and that […]

The expert is calling from inside the house

I’ve played product manager more often this year than I have in years. It’s been a fun role to get back into. It’s also been a long time since I played product manager at a larger company. The last two times were tiny startups, and well, it’s a very different experience. With tiny startup product […]

Avoiding cynicism

I mentioned this last week, but while I’ve been fixing formatting issues on my old blog posts, I’ve made the mistake of reading some of them. Getting a glimpse of me 20 years ago has been interesting – he was so angry, usually about work, and talked about it a lot. That guy was on […]

The past is embarassing

This blog is twenty-something years old, and has moved blogging platforms at least three times, and between various WordPress installs at least another three times. Some of the older posts got messed up along the way, so I’m going back through them and trying to fix them. Re-reading stuff I wrote from 2001 is… something. […]

Mid-caffeination Mastodon Thoughts

Derek Powazek posted this on Mastodon yesterday: An actual use for machine learning that I’d want: a bot that records all the posts that cause me to block someone, saves them into a db, and then automatically hides posts that match above a certain threshold. Derek on Mastodon I love a good brain exercise, so […]

Strategic apathy

I have a bad habit at work of saying “I don’t care” without qualifying it. It comes off as sarcastic or dismissive, when that’s not how I mean it – which means I need to find a new way to express it. Most of the time, it pops out of my mouth when my manager […]

App Defaults

Why not do an old school blogging meme for day 13? Well, that’s what I’m doing today, so… let’s go! I’ve seen it a couple of places, but I last saw it over here, which is where I was convinced that it would be today’s post. I’m pretty much all Apple for end-user things. I’m […]

Just trying to be understood

If you are writing the clearest, truest words you can find and doing the best you can to understand and communicate, this will shine on paper like its own little lighthouse. Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining. Anne Lamott The creation of all […]