The beginning of this year I made a commitment to write at least once a week. For those few people counting, that has clearly not happened. While I don’t like to make excuses, I think I have some really good ones that certainly trump blogging in my internal scale of importance. The tl;dr is that life got in the way and I’m totally OK with it. First off, my wife is pregnant!...

One thing that is always hard when you’re new to something is knowing how to get started. When I try to learn a new language or library, I often get analysis paralysis because I have no idea what is the right way to do things. I can instantly imagine the way I’m organizing my project or writing some code is the beginning of a huge mistake that will be painful to sort out later....

I made a commitment to write more this year. Let’s see how it is going.

There are times in your career where you need to make some decision. Finding a new job is a great example, but there are smaller aspects such as taking on a project, doing a side projects or joining a group all can have an impact on your career. There are tons of articles that provide advice for what sorts of things you should do to help your career, but this is more about when you’re confronted with a new opportunity and you’re trying to evaluate the impact on your career....

One challenge I’ve found is how to fail and learn without ruining plans and losing trust. In order to write up a plan you have to make assumptions. As with any assumption, you can easily get it wrong, throwing your well organized plan into a tailspin. When your assumptions impact commitments to others, it is natural that those folks might lose trust that you’ll deliver what you say. At the same time, what about failing fast and learning from those failures?...

I mentioned to a mentor of mine that there are tons of resource for working with people as a manager, but there are so few resources for the nuts and bolts of the job. He mentioned that as he has moved up the organizational ladder, the requirements get more vague because many leaders simply don’t know what they want. The result is that part of the job is creating a dartboard they can start throwing things at to find out what they actually want....

Every so often I get tired of looking at the same old screens. It is not as if there are tons of programs I use throughout the day. There is a web browser, slack and Emacs. At some point I get antsy and want to see what is I could improve things. Specifically, I recently was thinking about my desktop environment and if something lighter weight might help save a little power and speed things up....

Isn’t there some other email and calendar other than G Suite?

When I’m in meetings, I try to take notes. There are TODO items, things I’d like to remember and questions I might want to ask about. The problem is that I don’t have a good way of taking this information and easily using it when I’m doing the work. All of these notes go in an org-mode file in Emacs, but it is pretty ad-hoc, even though Org supports features like agendas, tagging and meta data....

Trying to understand your audience by asking those around you.