A bit over a year ago (14 months ago) I joined DuckDuckGo as an Engineering Director on the Mobile – now Native Apps – team. The biggest thing driving a change was getting back on a positive learning curve. Two big realizations pushed me to start responding to recruiter messages (around a year before I […]
One year ago today, I tweeted: ✨ first day @automattic ✨ — cate, a human being (@catehstn) November 7, 2016 Three weeks after that, when my support rotation ended… https://twitter.com/catehstn/status/803379914988810242 As I recall, my friend James described it as “the most low key new job tweet”. I pointed out the extremely descriptive emoji for my […]
I’ve been working with a coach for the best part of a year now. I started because I called my friend Camille stressed out of my mind and she said – like a good friend will – you need someone to do this for you. It was one of the most helpful pieces of advice […]
Since that article on Uber dropped, I’ve been watching people’s reaction. There was the shock from people who should know better, and the lack of surprise from many women but there was also something that I can only describe as a PTSD reaction from many technical women I know. I saw it on Twitter. I […]
I know a number of people who have been laid off recently – the market is on a downturn and this is more common than seems to be being talked about. I’ve spent time helping a few people try and find their next thing lately, and after some iterations I now have a process. 1. What […]
The final part of interviewing for my last job involved coming to Colombia for 3 days and having 21 1:1s. FYI, this is the kind of thing that immigration finds very suspicious and resulted in me being detained and searched for drugs in Canada. But I digress. I firmly believe that people should interview their […]
This post comes from multiple requests from friends with whom I have talked about leaving tech, and returning to tech, and the way that I started to think about money relating to that. Money is a loaded topic, and I want to be up front here that this is written from a place of financial […]
What Got You Here Won’t Get You There (Amazon) initially irked me because it fell under a class of book that I call “Advice for White Men” (my blog post on this topic). It’s about how you can be oblivious to certain characteristics, and never receive feedback on them – and of course all but […]
I 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 […]
For 2015, I chose the word ship. I did this for a couple of reasons: Taking some “time out” can easily turn into achieving nothing. It was important to me that I had something to show for my time. I wanted to bias towards putting stuff out there. I am very achievement oriented, and this […]