I have been working for distributed companies for over 5 years – long before this pandemic malarkey and everyone becoming a “remote work expert”. The reality of the past 18 months for many people has been a lot of terrible remote work. Including for me at times – I love remote work in “normal times”, […]
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 […]
I’ve never been good at what you might call “life admin”, but I used to keep track of it through having a high level of 1) recall, 2) guilt and anxiety. I can’t say this system was working well, I was pretty behind on this stuff (such as… still having an Australian bank account five […]
(or: be careful what you incentivise) When we design processes, we are heavily biased to design processes that we would be successful in. We see this with hiring processes, and we see this with promotion processes. You might think having multiple people would help with this but this seems just as likely to create the […]
At the end of last year, I somehow found myself as the lead of a team that was 4x as big as my previous one. Many things were different, but one of the big ones was changing from having one person on each platform who really knew everything that was going on… to having some […]
This is the second part of running an org survey. You can find the questions in part 1. What Does The Data Look Like? First step is color-coding the spreadsheet to show trends in the numbers. I made a sample spreadsheet and generated random data – so it looks a little chaotic – but you […]
I just gave my third talk of the year, so this marks the half way point as I will do 6 events, total. This included my first opening keynote, and the largest audience I have spoken in front of yet (>700). Now I have a break until September. It seems like a good time to […]
Predictable. The team has a regular cadence. They can set goals and expectations around deadlines. Challenge: Shipping compiled code. Most advice about improving team velocity talks about continuous delivery. Ship constantly! As many times a day as you call! Roll back if you need to! Tell us about that time you broke prod! YOLO! Here’s a fun […]
I’ve been having a productive time, up the mountain. I’ve achieved things at work, blogged regularly, sent out Technically Speaking with Chiu-Ki, made some progress on The Dark Place that is my personal inbox, I feel fit and healthy. I’ve achieved this by skiing for two hours weekday mornings (longer at the weekends) – hard, […]
I had one of those days last week. I woke up later than I wanted to, and it took me a while to get moving. Then just as I was getting started, I realized that I had to deal with some insurance thing, which was – of course – a complete pain. Eventually, I was out […]