I'm back to blogging and posting weekly. I had a great start to 2023, reflecting and setting personal and work goals. Despite a rough economic outlook for 2022 and a challenging one for 2023, I entered this year more recharged than ever.

In the upcoming months, I'll be sharing how I manage my daily routine in Notion, updates on how I journal and set goals, and more takes on engineering management and technology. If you haven't already, subscribe to the RSS to get updates weekly.

Posts

• Version 6

• Books I Loved in 2022

• Don’t Be Amazon

• Laravel Performance Refactor

• Unsubscribe

• Focus Mode, Notify Less

• How I Keep Track of My Books

Books

• Futureproof, by Kevin Roose - The line “It’s not what they are doing online. That’s what they’re not doing off-line”was a great way to contextualize screen time and the use of technology in every day life. As AI beings to take hold in work situations, how does human life adjust?

• User Friendly, by Cliff Kuang - A great depth of research on user experience and what it means to make things user friendly. There are many great stories in this book, I particularly like the story about how three mile island nuclear melt down because of bad read outs.

Links

• Be a Good Interviewer - Use interviews to boost your professional reputation and grow your network. Every ~30-60 minutes spent with a person should add 1x person to your personal fan club.

• Tax Filing Websites Have Been Sending Users’ Financial Information to Facebook - Phenomenal reporting by the Markup, as always. Digital privacy is getting harder and harder to reel in, be careful out there with your personal data.

• Removing uncertainty: the tip of the iceberg - A great write up about not focusing on getting the big, complex done - but instead to focus on continually removing the uncertainty.

• A Massive Top-Down Plan To Fix a Massive Top-Down Mistake - I always find it interesting that many downtowns are just large parking lots of different shapes and sizes. This article shows a way to improve Kansas City Downtown area by focusing on walkable neighborhoods.

• Apple Maps vs Google Maps - A great comparison between the UX of Apple Maps and Google Maps. One of the biggest takeaways for me was how each contextualize the data shown on the screen. Great read.

• Watch Out for Low Resolution Writing - Chris gives some great examples of high and low resolution writing and has made me think about how I can improve on some lazy behavior in some slack threads.

Other

• Took a small trip to Fort Wayne, Indiana to go to the Three Rivers Distillery and picked up some nice Bourbon, Moonshine and Gin.

• I got this new hot sauce called Brooklyn Delhi which is going to be featured in Hot Ones season 20. Its so tasty and medium heat. While you’re on the Heatonist site, you should do yourself a favor and pick up a bottle or two of the Chili Maple Classic Hot Ones sauce. Delicious on most things.