Category: Extreme Blue
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Presenting Gives Me Nightmares, but I Still Do It: Here’s How
I get very nervous presenting, although it’s something I do relatively often. This is not out of enthusiasm for getting up on stage, but rather because I find myself in the position of being the least unwilling engineer. After my last presentation I was told that I didn’t need to be nervous, because I was…
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But, I Don’t Want to be an Entrepreneur: Permission and Choice
Tina Seelig, author of What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 (Amazon) teaches courses in Entrepreneurship and Creativity at Stanford. I was fascinated as to what teaching entrepreneurship would consist of (you can see the course list here). The big message I found in her book was about giving yourself permission – permission…
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Patents and Prior Art
As part of Extreme Blue, my team and I put in two patent applications. One of them was put on ice, and the other has been deemed publish. This is pretty cool! So I’ve been working on it since last week. The end is in sight – I hope. This has meant reading a disgusting…
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On Leadership
They call Extreme Blue a leadership development program. I didn’t get it at first, but by the end I did. I also started to see why I had been picked out as someone “showing leadership” – though I have so far to go there. It’s around that time of year when I re-read 7 Habits…
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10 Things I Learned About Presenting in Extreme Blue
You can distill a 15 week project to a 4 minute pitch. In fact, you can probably distill anything to 4 minutes if you truly understand it – the trick is learning what to leave out. Images are trickier than you think. For instance, our project involved a university and we wanted to have a…
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I am an IBMer
Tomorrow is the last day of Extreme Blue. At the US Expo in New York last week, I stood 6ft from Sam Palmisano, and listened to him talk about IBM’s vision for a smarter planet. He spoke about why we need to build a smarter planet and how IBM is trying to engineer this vision.…
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Failure Is Not An Option
Having admitted that I seek out a high level of stress, it’s timely that I have, once again, gone way past the level of stress that I like to operate and hit the “woah this is damaging to my productivity” bit. I wrote before about How to be Crazy Busy Without Losing Your Mind and…
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My Secret Life as an Introvert
My friend Maggie tells me I’m an introvert. Not because I’m shy, or because large groups make me nervous, but because I don’t get my energy from being around people. I was surprised by this, because I guess I’ve always considered myself to be extroverted and so I asked another close friend and he said…
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Programming Toolboxes and Functional Hats
Much to the entertainment of my teammates and mentor, on Monday I punched the air and exclaimed: YES! I am a <long product name> NINJA! We’re exporting some data from this product (let’s call it Product X) and I had fixed a 3-4x expansion in the number of records it was producing. This made me…