Career
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The Trouble With Imposters
→: The Trouble With ImpostersTech culture doles out imposter syndrome on one side, hubris on the other. Originally published in Model View Culture, April 2015. There’s something ironic about the fact that as the deadline for this piece approached, I opened the document and stared blankly at it. Frankly, opening it was progress—I’d been intimidated to come back and…
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All the Leaves are Brown and the Sky is Gray
→: All the Leaves are Brown and the Sky is GrayIt’s a weird thing to reflect on my career and realize that very little of the code I wrote is still in production – because very few of the things I worked on are still in production. Most of the products I have worked on have failed. We build with bits not bricks. Architects and…
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The Organised Manager
→: The Organised ManagerMy adored Camille is writing a book on management, which will no doubt be amazing, and asked me to contribute a section on being an organised manager. She says, “Managing people is hard, and and as an industry we’re bad it. We lack the experience, the tools, the texts, and the frameworks to do it…
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Trip Report: The Lead Developer 2016
→: Trip Report: The Lead Developer 2016Last year I spoke at the Lead Developer, and this year I was excited to come back as an attendee. It was really great last year, but speaking is super stressful and always my priority is to give a good performance, so I sometimes don’t get to enjoy events I’m speaking at that much. Or I’m…
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Worthless Intent
→: Worthless IntentOne of the things that I write about in my lessons learned from 6 months of managing blogpost was about my realisation that intentions do actually matter. “I’ve long found discussion of “intentions” completely worthless. I just don’t want to hear about it. Especially in the context that it invariably is – men who tell…
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Book: Leadership and Self-Deception
→: Book: Leadership and Self-DeceptionI read Leadership and Self Deception (Amazon) years ago, several times. It was a book that profoundly changed the way that I think about things, the way that I approach the world. When some conflict arose at work, I saw how the ideas in the book would help, and tried to get everyone on my…
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Big Co. vs Small Co. & Job vs. Career Stability
→: Big Co. vs Small Co. & Job vs. Career StabilityI gave a talk at Self.Conference the other week called “Some Things I’ve Learned About Color”. There’s no video, and I haven’t shared the transcript – I will eventually share this content, because people have connected with it and because I think it’s important. But I’ve yet to figure out how to do that. It’s…
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Book: First Break All The Rules
→: Book: First Break All The RulesI spend a lot of time obsessing about: 1) how to be a good manager, and 2) how to have any idea if I am doing a good job. So I was happy to discover First Break All The Rules (Amazon), because it contains (data driven!) information on how to be a good manager, and also…
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4 Situations Where Managers Write Code
→: 4 Situations Where Managers Write CodeThe two hardest things about becoming a manager have been: 1) the emotional exhaustion, and 2) letting go of the part of my identity that was tied up in writing code. I accepted that writing code wasn’t the best thing I could do reasonably quickly, but it took longer to finally stop saying I was…