Author: Cate

2020 in Photos

January 18, 2021.Reading time 1 minute.

Since 2017, I’ve been posting a photo every day to Instagram and photo.cate.blog. I kept that up last year, posting 363 photos in total. In 2020 most challenging was the monotony of long periods of lockdown, but I’m glad I kept at it. In 2019’s recap post I wrote, “when writing has felt impossible, it’s […]

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2021: Habit

January 11, 2021.Reading time 4 minutes.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. ~Will Durant, paraphrasing Aristotle I used to be a fan of setting a word as an intention for the year. I fell off it at some point, or at least off documenting it, I think around the time that my […]

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12 Days of Creativity

January 4, 2021.Reading time 28 minutes.

Something that I was struggling with as 2020 came to a close was that I was leaving the year the same way I started it – feeling burnt out. Whilst things had improved – I had managed to get a better baseline, address life debt, change the situations that had caused me to be burnt […]

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Interview in Capital.bg

December 30, 2020.Reading time 6 minutes.

I was interviewed for capital.bg for an article about people who had a good 2020. The original is in Bulgarian, so a moderately edited (in line with my original answers in English) machine translation is below. Cate Huston – a pandemic love story and a new dream job The Englishwoman Cate Huston, engineering director at […]

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The Great DomestiCation

December 13, 2020.Reading time 25 minutes.

I staged my house, photographed it, and wrote up a very detailed post of the ~year long project that was buying and renovating it. I call it: The Great DomestiCation.

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Supermanagers Podcast

December 11, 2020.Reading time less than 1 minute.

I recorded an episode of the Supermanagers podcast and it was really fun! We talked about many things including the importance of coachability, why you should get rid of your boring meetings, and the worst manager I ever had. Listen on: [iTunes] [Spotify] [Google Play] [Anchor]

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You can fix your hiring process: Here’s your five-step plan

November 25, 2020.Reading time 1 minute.

My latest in Quartz… As a manager who has usually taken over teams that have been struggling in some way, there is something that I’ve consistently had to do: fix the hiring process. Hiring well is a huge lever for team transformation. Getting it right doesn’t just mean hiring good people (although that part is crucial), […]

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DevInterrupted Podcast and AMA

November 18, 2020.Reading time less than 1 minute.

I recorded a podcast recently for DevInterrupted, where we talked about async communication, team experiments, and the post Eli and I wrote about hotfixes for your newly remote team. I’ll also be doing an AMA on Friday 7 am Pacific / 4 pm Central Europe in the DevInterrupted discord.

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Hotfixes for your Newly Remote Team

September 23, 2020.Reading time 30 minutes.

As many of us accept the new reality, hair increasingly wild, and perhaps having embraced a pandemic wardrobe (daytime pajamas are a legit work outfit now), there’s no return to the office in sight for those of us who can work remotely. It’s time to consider some of the ways in which our teams are […]

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