What I actually needed was simple. One tool. Lightweight. Always with me. Something I could trust to catch tasks whenever they showed up.

Most of my tasks start as one-liners. Half thoughts. “Send follow-up.” “Get batteries.” “Review doc.” I don’t want to stop and think about structure in that moment. I just want to get the thing out of my head. If it turns into something more complex later, I can add context then. Most of the time, I don’t need to.

I also learned that more structure doesn’t equal more clarity. I don’t want a million categories, tags, or projects. I want the system to get out of my way. For me, that means two primary lists: work and personal. That’s it.

Life doesn’t respect clean boundaries, so my system can’t either. I might be on a work call and remember I need to pick up batteries on the way home. Or I’m out walking the dog and remember I promised someone a document review by morning. I need to capture both without friction, wherever I am, and move on.

That’s why I use Things. Not because it’s fancy, but because it’s fast and calm. I have two main areas, work and personal. I can add a task in seconds. I can check it off just as quickly. If something deserves more structure, I’ll use a project, but only when the work is clearly bounded. Projects are the exception, not the rule.

The real value of this system isn’t productivity. It’s trust. I trust that nothing important is floating around in my head. I trust that when I commit to something, it’s captured somewhere I’ll see it again. That frees me up to be more present in conversations, make better decisions, and actually focus on the work in front of me.

A good task system doesn’t make you do more. It makes things quieter. This is a part of a larger tech evaluation I’ve been doing, maybe next in the series I’ll talk about mail clients and getting junk out of the way.

This is something I’ve struggled with for as long as I can remember. It’s not always obvious when I’m the one holding myself back. Sometimes it’s subtle. A quiet hesitation. A story I tell myself about why now isn’t the right time.

Not everything will be great, and that’s okay. You might order an interesting ramen and realize you don’t like it at all. But you tried it. You learned something about your taste. You added a small experience to your life. Other times, it might be exactly what you needed. That trip might introduce you to a lifelong friend. That class might unlock a new interest.

The point is not that everything will work out perfectly. It’s that doing something is almost always better than standing still.

So if you’re like me and occasionally need the reminder: you can just do things.

Going into the Winter Olympics, I had a few teams I was especially excited to follow.

The United States women’s national ice hockey team was absolutely stellar. They went undefeated through the entire tournament, allowed just two goals, and brought home gold. It was dominant in a way that makes you appreciate not just the wins, but the discipline and focus it takes to sustain that level of play on the biggest stage.

The US mixed doubles curling team of Cory Thiesse and Korey Dropkin was another highlight. They were steady, confident, and earned silver, the first Olympic medal for the US in mixed doubles curling.

On the Canadian side, Rachel Homan continues to cement her legacy. Watching her team battle through and defeat the US squad led by Tabitha Peterson for bronze was high-level curling at its best.

There were countless other moments that blew me away. Watching Ilia Malinin push the technical limits of figure skating was unreal. And seeing Alysa Liu win gold felt like one of those pure Olympic moments you remember for years.

The last few weeks have been genuinely fun, watching events live with the office, catching highlights at bars around the city, and winding down each night with recaps before bed. The Olympics are rare in that way. For a short window, it feels like we are all pulling in the same direction, celebrating the same victories. It makes you wish we treated each other that way all the time.

Posts

• January 2026 Review

• Book Review: Engineering Management for the Rest of Us

• Consistency Is Key to Building Trust

• Book Review: Nexus – A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

• When Technology Stops Making Us Smarter

Books That Stuck

• New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

  • I’ve had this on my shelf for a long time and finally took the plunge. What a great book, but then again Robinson always delivers. A little dystopian, doomy and scifi with a scoop of realism and climate mixed in. This felt refreshing in a way that I wasnt expecting from a climate dystopia book.

• Voice Content and Usability by Preston So

  • This book started off strong for me, really resonating the concepts and laying out the frameworks for voice content. But then devolved into an idealistic study on setting up content and navigation, which is good but not what I was after. I am on a quest to make your headphones be the interface device to your computer - voice in and out to accomplish tasks and understand the world around you.

• Conversational Canvas: Designing UX for Voice and Chat by William Webb

  • “A well-crafted digital conversation respects privacy and transparency, builds trust, and learns from both success and missteps.” I enjoyed this book, thinking of experiences more than the framework to build a voice interface.

• I also read my first AI narrated audiobook this month. It wasn’t as bad as I expected by there were words and phrases that just didnt work lacking the human element.

Some Links

• Thinking a lot about User Experience lately, how it's changing with AI and both more and less intrusive technology. Some things seem to becoming harder to use - losing that apple magic of “it just works”.

  • Beyond UI/UX: Designing Adaptive Experiences in the Age of AI - Enter Adaptive Experience (AX), the next evolution in design. Unlike static UI, AX is dynamic, contextual, and powered by AI. It doesn’t just present options; it reshapes itself in real time based on signals, intent, and behavior. The goal is not just usability but anticipation, delivering what a user needs before they even ask.

• Leadership and steering the team has been on my mind a lot this month, from reviews to being more decisive and making incremental changes that make lasting impacts. Here are a number of posts I have been thinking about since reading them.

  • Leadership health metrics - There is an undeniable link between leadership and the performance of teams, […]. If we are to measure what matters, should we be measuring leadership performance too?

  • Getting the main thing right - The lesson here is that you should spend a lot of time and effort trying to figure out what to focus on.

  • “Disagree and Let’s See” - Committing to something you disagree with is an emotional contortion that is hard to do in practice.

  • False velocity is rampant in engineering orgs right now - Much of this is driven by fear and FOMO. The cure? Separate hype from reality. Data helps, but it starts with culture.

Life Lately

We were able to get away for a nice weekend in Wisconsin. Spent some time at a cabin on a lake where I saw more stars than I’ve ever seen and relaxed while taking in some Olympics.

Got some time in at the curling club this month, played some games, practice and volunteered. The addiction of delivering a perfectly curled stone is real.

Hanging out with the dog through the cold and now wet season has been taking up a lot of my time. His personality and goofiness is so fun to watch as he grows up.

One Thing to Carry Forward

A reminder to myself, and anyone who needs to hear it - you can just do things.

The real problem isn’t innovation itself. It’s the quiet shift from using technology to relying on it. When tools start doing the thinking for us, we lose the friction that actually builds intelligence. Struggle matters. Repetition matters. Sitting with uncertainty matters. When everything is optimized, summarized, auto-completed, and spoon-fed, we trade depth for convenience.

There’s also a darker edge to this dependence. Modern technology isn’t neutral. Much of it is designed to capture attention, extract data, and shape behavior in ways we barely notice. When our thinking is constantly nudged by algorithms optimized for engagement, outrage, or profit, critical thought becomes harder. Trust erodes. Agency shrinks. We become users before we’re thinkers.

That doesn’t mean technology is the villain. Far from it. Used well, it’s one of the greatest amplifiers humans have ever created. It gives us access to information that was once locked behind institutions and geography. It enables collaboration at a scale that would’ve been unimaginable a generation ago. It can sharpen ideas, accelerate learning, and connect people who would never otherwise meet.

The difference is intent.

Technology should extend our intelligence, not replace it. It should challenge us to ask better questions, not stop us from asking them at all. Tools that remove all cognitive effort might feel helpful in the moment, but over time they weaken the very muscles we need to navigate a complex world.

The responsibility sits with us. To design better systems. To choose when to automate and when to slow down. To protect privacy and autonomy. To stay curious, skeptical, and engaged.

Progress isn’t about how much thinking we can outsource. It’s about making sure we don’t forget how to think in the first place.

One line that stuck with me is the distinction between traditional tools and AI. Knives and bombs do not decide whom to kill. They are dumb tools. AI is different. It can process information, learn patterns, and act independently. At that point it stops being a tool and starts behaving like an agent. That framing matters, because it forces us to confront how casually we are handing over decision making power to systems we barely understand.

A recurring theme in the book is that human cooperation has always been built on shared stories. We stopped needing to know each other personally and instead learned to believe the same narratives. Religions, nations, markets, and now algorithms. The problem is that while we are extremely good at accumulating information and power, we are far worse at accumulating wisdom. We scale systems faster than we scale judgment.

That gap is where things get dangerous. Democracies do not just die when speech is suppressed. They also die when people stop listening, or lose the ability to tell signal from noise. Information networks optimized for engagement do not care whether they are spreading truth, fear, or outrage. They only care that you keep paying attention.

The most unsettling parts of Nexus are not about killer robots. They are about subtler failures. Silicon chips that create spies that never sleep, financiers that never forget, and despots that never die. Systems that can manipulate humans without ever touching their brains. Language has always shaped societies, but now computers are learning how to wield it at scale, faster and more precisely than any prophet or politician ever could.

The book makes it clear that new technologies often lead to disaster not because they are evil, but because humans take time to learn how to use them wisely. The scary part is that this time, the systems are learning faster than we are. And if AI ends up in the hands of bad actors, history suggests we should not assume wisdom will arrive in time.

This is not a book that makes you optimistic. It is a book that makes you alert. And right now, that might be more important.

Bookshop.org link

I’ve learned that trust isn’t built by talking about what you’re doing or what you plan to do. It’s built through action. Showing up. Following through. Doing the work, even when it’s unglamorous. Over time, those moments stack up and start to define who you are.

When I look at the people I trust most, the pattern is simple. They do what they say they’re going to do. They do it well. And they do it consistently. That consistency removes doubt. I don’t have to check in, remind, or worry. I just know it’ll get done.

That kind of reliability compounds. It earns advocacy without asking for it. You vouch for those people because you’ve seen it firsthand.

Trust isn’t built in big moments or speeches. It’s built quietly, through repeated behavior over time.

If you don’t have trust, you don’t have a long runway on that team.

One line that stuck with me early on was:

“Engineering management requires that you understand power imbalances, people structures, and consider strategies that are outside one particular project”

This is something I think about a lot. Everyone around you has opinions on how to do things, how to run a team, how to structure a project, or what the “right” answer is. As an EM, your job isn’t to pick a single opinion and defend it. It’s to take in multiple streams of input, often conflicting ones, and still move both the team and the individuals forward. That broader context is easy to lose when you’re deep in delivery mode, but it’s where the real leverage is.

Another section that resonated with me reinforces something simple but critical:

“The more your team shows that it can deliver, the more you build trust with other organizations as well!”

Reputation is built by shipping. People can like you just fine, but without consistent delivery and real impact, your team will be passed over for opportunities and growth.

Overall, this is a strong, approachable book with clean and succinct leadership nuggets. It works equally well for newer managers and seasoned ones. It’s now a must read for engineering leaders I work with.

Bookshop.org link

This year really kicked off with a violent occupation of armed forces in Minneapolis being overtaken ramping up and murdering people in the streets with no remorse or consequences. It’s certainly hard to keep focus on work when everyday it feels like the boogyman is lurking just around the corner. Help by donating to your local ACLU, finding local community groups, know your rights and longer term, donating to and advocating for your local politicians that are standing up against what is looking more and more like a fascist take over of the US. Be there for your neighbors.

Posts

• 2025 Review

• Upgrading to Statamic 6

Books That Stuck

• Fall and Rise by Mitchell Zuckoff - A somber book, piecing together the tragedies of 9/11 from different perspectives. Its been in my TBR

• Nexus by Yuval Noah Haraki - I expected this book to be good, but it exceeded my expectations. Going from telling stories and gathering information to building AI and removing humans from the decision making process. Check out my review.

• A Lonely Broadcast by Kel Byron - A fast read, good pacing and interesting but familiar scifi concept. What lurks in the fog? A radio tower and some societal rejects - makes for a great fun book. Looking forward to reading the next in the series.

• Engineering Management for the Rest of Us by Sarah Drasner - One of those books that seems like the other “how to be a manager“ books on the shelf, but the way this is written is simple, actionable and learnable nuggets for new managers and oldies alike. Check out my review.

Signals I’m Noticing

On privacy, what you can do and what you should be paying attention to.

• Who Owns Your Data?

• Tracking Phones In Your Neighborhood

• Your Email Is The Glue That’s Merging Your Identities. Break It Before tT Hardens.

On leadership during review season.

• The Seasons of Leadership

• The Compensation Commandments

AI is here, but you are still relevant. How engineers can use AI as a tool.

• AI Can Write Your Code. It Can’t Do Your Job.

• Continuous AI in software engineering

Life Lately

• Its been super cold this month, temps below zero and the wind chill in the -20s. So I’ve spent a lot more time reading, listening to music and trying to recharge my batteries from the work load this month.

• Found some great female led punk bands

  • swim school - Green Eyes(Want it all)

  • WAXX - HANDS

  • Weekend Friends - Tough Luck (Bleed Me Out)

  • prewn - Commotion

  • Sincere Engineer - Inside My Head

  • And so many more.. just ask me for some recs.

• Joined a curling club and as every 4 years I am pumped for the Winter Olympics. But there have been some exciting games played at the Scotties and Crown Royal Player's Championship.

One Thing to Carry Forward

I bought a bunch of books about voice user experience, so I expect to dive deeper in how people use their voice to interact with computers, and how those computers respond.s

Previous upgrades (3 → 4 and 4 → 5) felt like regressions in performance. The control panel got clunkier, and at times I genuinely disliked using the interface to publish. With the frontend overhaul to Vue 3, the CP feels like a modern app again. Fast, responsive, and pleasant to use.

Upgrading was also refreshingly straightforward for my setup (to be fair, this is a pretty simple site). The trickiest part ended up being Feedamic, not Statamic itself.

Upgrading was pretty simple for me too, but I dont have that complex of a website. The hardest part was upgrading feedamic plugin to the latest, which completely changed how my RSS feed was configured. So I tackled that one first.

Feedamic upgrade

I had been pinned to Feedamic 2.2 because I didn’t want to risk breaking my RSS feed configuration.

After updating the package and reconfiguring the feed through the UI, I hit this error:

Field "content" contains Bard Sets.

Thankfully, this was called out in the Feedamic 3 upgrade guide. The fix was to ignore Bard sets in the RSS feed, which I handled in my AppServiceProvider.

Once that was deployed and confirmed working, I moved on to the core upgrade.

Statamic upgrade

With Feedamic sorted, I branched off and followed Statamic’s excellent 5 → 6 upgrade guide.

Because I’m already on current versions of PHP and Laravel, the actual package upgrade was painless.

My templates are intentionally minimal, so I didn’t need to update any date objects. My app config already had timezone handling in place. The only real change I needed to make was switching from the built-in logo config to a global setting instead. Easy enough.

There was also a change required to the searchables config. I don’t actually use it, but it still needed updating. Again, documented and trivial to fix.

I’m still dialing in my cache strategy around deploys, but overall: this feels like a must-upgrade release purely for the performance improvements. The control panel finally feels fast again and that alone makes it worth it.

Through the year I built and added a bunch of features to an API that helps me track different metrics in my life. Like I published 31 posts here, listened to 9,345 songs, watched 179 movies, read 53 books for 17,463 pages. But more things like my sleep averages, steps and more. The reasoning for this was to gauge how my year is spent, whats giving me energy and whats taking it away. Its been insightful to think about my days this way.

Noteworthy Posts

• Less Meetings, More Meaning: Protecting Focus Time

• Pause and Silence: Learning to Be Present Again

• Scope Tiny, Ship Anyway

• The AI We Were Promised

• The Quiet Side of Leadership: Listening, Observing, Deciding

• If It’s Worth Communicating, Do It Twice

• Making Feedback Land

• The Dopamine of Done

• Two Sentences a Day

Best Books I Read

• 107 Days by Kamala Harris

• FantasticLand by Mike Bockoven

• The Emergency by Thomas Fisher

• Dead Wake by Erik Larson

• Fahrenheit-182 by Mark Hoppus

• The Hospital by Brian Alexander

• Superagency by Greg Beato & Reid Hoffman

• Product Driven by Matt Watson

• Culpability by Bruce Holsinger

• Beyond Words by Carl Safina

• Unvarnished by Eric Alperin

• Rock Star by Jennifer Jones

Reflection on 2025

• We got a puppy this year and he has taught us so much about patience and grace to ourselves. He has been such a joy to see learn and grow this year.

• Like many in 2025, I kept informed on the AI trends, watching carefully how things unfolded and how it could be reasonably used in daily work and life. To be honest, I remain skeptical that its the silver bullet people are claiming - im sure I’ll be writing more about it in 2026.

For more than twelve years, I’ve been adding entries to my DayOne journal. There are thousands of them now. Some are nothing more than a photo of what happened that day. Others are long, thoughtful brain dumps of whatever felt heavy or urgent at the time.

Most entries are simple and mundane. They exist to help me remember what happened or to capture how I felt in a moment that seemed big then, and often smaller when revisited later.

Recently, I started experimenting with a new format, and I’m surprised by how much I love it.

The Template

The entry has two parts:

• Two sentences at the top

  No more. No less.

• Images at the bottom

  A few photos I think will be interesting to look back on someday.

Those two sentences answer a single question: What are the most important things that happened today, and what do I want to remember later?

The constraint is the point. Forcing myself to write only two sentences makes me slow down and decide what actually mattered. It turns journaling into an exercise in clarity rather than completeness.

This doesn’t replace long-form journaling. I still write open-ended entries when I need to think something through or get things out of my head. The two-sentence format is different. It’s a snapshot of the day, not the full story.

I’ve found it’s been a powerful way to cut through the noise, focus on what’s important, and leave behind something I’ll actually want to read years from now.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading and research on maker time, which is apparent in the links section. Optimizing, measuring and protecting time for the engineering team to get meaningful work done. I also blogged about it in The Dopamine of Done, too. This is an area I know can make good teams great.

On my laravel account, I see that I had a pretty productive year deploying to this blog and my side projects.

Posts

• October 2025 Review

• The Dopamine of Done

Books

• The Optimist by Keach Hagey - A biography of Sam Altman published this year. It was interesting to read this book like a historical figure but it really only began a few years ago. We’ll see what the next decade will say about Sam and AI. My two cents is we are seeing the beginning of the end for AI hype.

• Dead Wake by Erik Larson - What an incredible book, as with all Larson’s work. The stories woven so perfectly you can really feel the cheer and happiness as the Lusitania embarks and the air of unknown that the war is bringing to Britain. From the submarine, the logs tell a story that is cold and reads like a stat sheet. What an incredible book, my third from Larson.

Links

• Honor the Maker’s Schedule - “a culture where a manager can drop an event on your calendar at any time signals that they don’t really care about your experience or needs.” Ouch - need to be better at this.

• Makers time and collaboration time: two metrics that help teams improve the timing of meetings to increase team health and productivity - Managers like me are happy to break their day up into 30 minute slots. Makers on the other hand need large amounts of uninterrupted time (eg. 2-3 hours+) in order to solve a problem, get into a state of flow and do their best work

• What Actually Makes You Senior - This blog is perfectly written, I will probably be taking a lot from this in review season this year. “The one skill that separates senior engineers from everyone else isn’t technical. It’s the ability to take ambiguous problems and make them concrete.”

• How To Love Learning Again - Your relationship with learning is shaped by biological, psychological, and social factors that you can influence.

• The work is (often) people - It is easy to reduce our work to the obvious material outputs – the reports, prototypes, business cases, etc. – but the ultimate endeavour is first and foremost a means through which people try to understand and shape the world.

Other

• Went to a couple hockey games, watched many more. Enjoyed some curling matches on youtube, as well. Winter sports are the best!

• We enjoyed the beginning and end of a very short fall in Chicago. But the pup loved the first couple snow falls we’ve had this year.

  

There’s something about crossing even the smallest thing off your list. Closing a tab. Shipping a tiny change. It gives you a pulse of momentum.

With a long holiday ahead and half the world already out-of-office, I found some rare quiet space. The inbox shrank. The task list got lighter. One checkmark at a time.

That progress creates its own reward, a little dopamine hit that pulls you into the next step.

Small tasks don’t just make big goals possible, they make them inevitable.

So write that copy. Commit the code. Send the email. Write that review.

Move, and feel the momentum build.

There is a lot more going on in the world, it constantly feels like a pressure on our daily lives. My goal is to take one step at a time, help in ways I can in the immediate time and make efforts to be the change I want to see in the world.

Posts

• Book Review: Product Driven

• The Quiet Side of Leadership: Listening, Observing, Deciding

• If It’s Worth Communicating, Do It Twice

• Making Feedback Land

Books

• 107 Days by Kamala Harris - A look back on her sprint to the election. A bit hard to read now that we are 9 months into the most historically awful presidency in our modern history.

• Product Driven by Matt Watson - A very easy to approach book for engineers to think more about the product outcomes. I wrote a review over here.

• Rock Star by Jennifer Jones - A memoir from Olympic curler Jen Jones. It was interesting to see from her point of view going through the COVID pandemic and competing in the winter Olympics. Pumped for 2026 Winter Olympics, especially watching the curling matches.

• Time Rider by AJ Hartley, Tom Delonge - A bit of a scifi thriller about time travel and real events. Its a bit all over the place, due to the time travel, but otherwise it was an enjoyable quick read.

• Beyond Words by Carl Safina - What a journey of a book. Watching elephants and wolves live through tragedy and triumph.

  “People have told me that a wolf looks right through you. But you know what I realize? That's because a wolf isn't interested in you. It's always hard for humans to accept that we're not the most important thing anyone's ever seen.”

Links

• Providing technical clarity to non-technical leaders - Sean dives into something I feel like we lose sight of too often, our job as technical leaders is to provide clarity, and communicate the to our partners.

• Your private data isn't as private as you think - big gulp. Privacy is a chief concern for me as we move into the age of AI. Once again, I think of how wonderful the concept of a decentralized data platform is the right thing we should move toward.

• Dont delegate thinking, delegate work - problem solving and codebase comprehension still remain the bottleneck, so this post talks about delegating the execution of the work, not the understanding of what youre doing. Also reminds me of the post AI is Dunning-Kruger as a service. AI giving false confidence but no real knowledge.

• How to think clearly in a world of noise - urging for simplicity, but also honesty and clarity. Kind of a think-y piece, but really thoughtful.

Other

• After deleting Instagram this month, my screen time has dropped to an avg of 3.75h per day - mostly taken up with scrolling my reeder feed, phone calls with family and friends or listening to audiobooks.

• Im still working on my API that collects and aggregates data about my day - music, movies, steps and more. Its getting to a place where its 80% automated and I am really liking adding new features on.

• Had a nice time taking the dog to a farm to get some pumpkins and cider. He enjoyed the hell out of the smells and corn on the ground.

When I give critical feedback, I often ask the person to say it back to me. Not word for word, but in their own way.

It is not a test. It is a check for understanding.

Feedback is tricky. What we say is not always what someone hears. Tone, timing, or emotion can bend the message in ways we do not intend.

Asking them to share how they heard it gives you a mirror. It shows if the intent landed or if something got lost. Sometimes they capture it exactly. Other times it sounds different, softer or sharper than you meant. That moment is the opportunity to realign.

The goal is not to win the conversation. The goal is to make it useful.

Once to inform. Once to confirm.

Leaders often share something important once, in a Slack post, in an email, or a quick mention in a meeting and assume it landed. But communication isn’t transmission; it’s understanding. People miss things. Context changes. Messages get buried.

If it matters, write it down. Capture the decision, the reasoning, and the “why” behind it. Written words create a source of truth for anyone who joins later or needs to revisit it.

Then say it again in person, in a stand meeting, or in a one-on-one. Use that moment to add tone, address confusion, and make sure everyone actually aligns on what’s next.

Repetition doesn’t mean overkill. It means respect for clarity.

The best teams don’t move faster because they talk less, they move faster because they understand more. Again, that's clarity

Takeaway: If it’s important enough to say once, it’s important enough to say again.

Early in my career, I thought leadership meant motion, that visibility and decisiveness were the keys to earning trust. Over time, I’ve learned that some of the best leaders don’t fill every silence. They create it. They use it.

Listening

Listening well is harder than it sounds. It’s not just hearing updates or reading dashboards it’s about understanding whysomeone sees things the way they do. It’s being curious about the tension in a conversation or the emotion behind a metric. The best listening doesn’t just collect information; it builds trust. When people feel heard, they share the truth instead of what they think you want to hear.

Observing

Observation is the next layer. It’s about watching systems, not just individuals, noticing where things get stuck, where decisions slow down or where energy fades. Observation turns noise into signal. It gives you perspective before you step in to fix.

As a leader, you learn to read the room in more ways than one. The way people show up to meetings. How feedback circulates (or doesn’t). How the product roadmap quietly reveals what the team values most.

Deciding

Then comes the quietest act of all: deciding. Real decisions, the ones that matter, rarely happen in the spotlight. They happen after the meeting, when you’ve taken in the inputs, looked at the trade-offs, and chosen a path that’s clear enough for others to move confidently behind.

Good decisions don’t need fanfare. They just need clarity, and the courage to stand by them once made.

Quiet doesn’t mean passive

Quiet leadership isn’t about being reserved, it’s about being intentional. It’s the difference between reacting and responding, between noise and signal.

In a world that rewards speed, visibility, and hot takes, choosing stillness can feel countercultural. But the truth is, the best leaders often lead in stereo: they know when to speak and when to listen, when to act and when to pause.

The quiet side of leadership isn’t glamorous, but it’s where trust, clarity, and great decisions are built.

The book’s style is short, digestible chapters that read almost like a collection of blog posts and are easy to follow, reflect on, and apply to your teams today and moving forward. Watson draws from his own lived experience in startups and product organizations, and that grounded perspective makes the book feel both practical and authentic.

Two insights in particular stuck with me:

1. The importance of clarity over complexity.

Watson emphasizes that great products don’t start with massive roadmaps or perfectly polished visions. Instead, they start with sharp clarity on the problem being solved. He warns against the trap of building features for features’ sake, reminding us that complexity isn’t a marker of sophistication, but it’s often a symptom of losing sight of the customer. His stories of navigating this balance in his own companies drive the point home. It’s a great reminder that saying “no” can be as powerful as saying “yes” when shaping a product’s direction.

2. Building teams that truly own outcomes.

Another key takeaway is Watson’s perspective on accountability. He makes a strong case for product teams that aren’t just delivering tasks, but are owning outcomes end-to-end. This means engineers, designers, and product folks sharing accountability for success. Not just shipping, but actually moving the needle for customers. It’s a subtle but critical distinction, and one that resonates in today’s world where too many teams measure success by velocity rather than impact.

Overall, Product Driven isn’t weighed down by jargon or abstract frameworks. Instead, it offers actionable advice in plain language, reinforced by stories from someone who has built and scaled products himself. That combination of clarity, practicality, and lived experience makes it an easy recommendation for anyone working in tech.

Whether you’re just starting out or leading at scale, Watson’s book is a reminder of what it really means to be product-driven: focusing on problems worth solving and empowering teams to deliver meaningful results.

Bookshop.org link

Posts

• Book Review: The Emergency: A Year of Healing and Heartbreak in a Chicago ER

• July 2025 Review

• The AI We Were Promised

Books

• Becoming a Data Head: How to Think, Speak, and Understand Data Science, Statistics, and Machine Learning by Alex Gutman & Jordan Goldmeier

• I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom by Jason Pagrin - A fun dark thriller-ish book. A good break from the data, software stuff I’ve been reading.

• Product Driven: The Software Engineering Leadership Model for Product Thinking, Ownership, and Outcomes by Matt Watson - might write a review on this later, but its a pretty digestible book, written like a series of blog posts that covers complete topics. Many times through the book I felt like a bad engineering leader, and others I felt like I was nailing it.

Links

• You Have Too Many Metrics - The more You build out, the more metrics you accumulate. The less important some of these become, I’ve noticed this in teams I’ve lead. “The common failure, however, is to not discuss what good and bad actually looks like.”

• Why Engineers Hate Their Managers (And What to Do About It) - The punching bag from all angles. What does it look like to be a good manager to your engineers? How to know you are messing it up?

• METR's AI productivity study is really good - This has been sitting in my reeder for a couple months now, but 19% slower on average is a significant metric. They hype is blowing the bubble up, but there is room to make some of these tools be more effective for engineers.

• TBM 273: What To Do More (And Less) Of - Product-centric teams weave rich context into discussions to improve decision. Resist premature convergence and problem framing being precise.

• Coming Soon: Your Professional Decline - problem solving peaks early and then declines, wisdom from experiences grows into later life. High achievers like athletes struggle adjusting to life post-peak.

Other

• Playing around with Sentry Logs lately on my free account. I love a service that gives some of its most powerful features to hobbyists.

• A couple of metrics for the Month of August I am happy with: Had a 6.91 hour sleep average for the month, while also keeping screen time to 4.93 hours.

• Trying to take in the simple things, slow down and be less reactive lately. Took the dog on a walk where he was being kind of challenging but saw this butterfly swooping around a flower, so I got a shot of it.

If you look around, it seems like every product and headline has AI baked in. But has it really changed much in your daily life?

The promise of AI is compelling: a true assistant that can chain tasks together, handle the small stuff, and free us to focus on the big things. Imagine your phone answering calls, setting appointments, sending emails, booking a haircut, ordering groceries, or organizing meetings, all without the friction. Anticipating what you want and need and then just doing it. That’s the future we’ve been shown in demo after demo.

But when you try to scratch beneath the surface, it’s still out of reach. Even with the advancement in MCP servers, it still feel clunky. They require complicated setups just to do something simple. And when they do work, response times can stretch into minutes. It feels like progress, but it’s not yet practical.

What people celebrate now is mostly busywork automation, the things that shave a few minutes off the day but come with the overhead of setup and maintenance. Useful, sure, but far from transformative.

Still, the promise is worth holding onto. The idea of an assistant that truly understands context and can act on our behalf isn’t here yet, but it feels closer than ever. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but when AI finally crosses that threshold, it could shift how we work and live in ways that actually matter.

This month’s theme was primarily about organizing projects, collecting data and writing improvement docs for the team. It lead me in some interesting areas, finding old docs I’ve written, blog posts I’ve saved and books, new and old. I may write some about this in the future, but the main pillars of my management are still as relevant, being predictable and accountable.

Other than that, I have been hacking away at my side projects a bit more and exploring some new APIs to pull data in an automated way. Less things for me to click.

Posts

• May 2025 Review

• Popovers Make Me Leave Your Store

• The Best Journals Are Boring

• Scope Tiny, Ship Anyway

• The Joy of Building For An Audience Of One

Books

A few AI books I’ve read recently

• Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future by Reid Hoffman - I reviewed the book here

• Co-Intelligence: The Definitive, Bestselling Guide to Living and Working with AI by Ethan Mollick

• The AI-Driven Leader: Harnessing AI to Make Faster, Smarter Decisions by Geoff Woods

More Books

• Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It by M. Nolan Gray

• Loka by S.B. Divya - I wanted to like this series more. The pacing was just really slow.

• The Emergency: A Year of Healing and Heartbreak in a Chicago ER by Thomas Fisher - Amazing book, powerful stories from a Chicago ER on the south side during Covid and beyond. Like other books I’ve read, it's more about the structures enforced by policy vs the medical care given. Check out my review on this book.

Links

• PAC – Personal Ambient Computing - I love these concepts of not-far-off technology. I’ve had a similar idea where your phone is the PAC and you plug it into your car, home or desk and the settings and services show up.

• Prompt caching - OpenAI API - Digging into some performance improvements with my openAI API integration, I found this doc to be helpful in understanding the cache system.

• Every service should have a killswitch - Kind of a no-brainer but often overlooked when building out a new system/code path.

• The first big AI disaster is yet to happen - Another from Sean, thinking about how AI is continuing to be the wildwest, he talks about how we are pre-major disaster where AI is fully at fault.

• Good Engineer/Bad Engineer - Bad engineers think their job is to write code. Good engineers know their job is to ship working software that adds real value to users.

• Employees are imprisoned in an ‘infinite workday’ - Data from Microsoft shows workers are finding it harder to disconnect. And I can attest to that.

• New advice for aspiring managers - I passed this one around a bit this month, some pretty solid advice for people getting into management, but also for folks who are feeling stagnant.

• The New Surveillance State: Why Data Privacy Is Now Essential to Democracy - Data privacy was always essential to democracy, but now that democracy itself is in dire straits the need for strong protections are more obviously pressing.

• 3 Human Skills That Make You Irreplaceable in an AI World - great little article that focuses on some of the things that make humans better than robots.

• GitHub’s internal playbook for building an AI-powered workforce - a long but interesting article on adopting AI in your workflow.

Other

• I've been switching from Aspen back to Insomnia for my REST testing client. Insomnia offers a much fuller feature set and provides a smoother experience.

• Dubai Chocolate has made its way from whatever popular place to my hands. Bought this one with cotton candy in it - i liked it a lot. how’d they get the cotton candy to be dry and melty in there?

Thomas Fisher writes from inside a South Side ER at the height of the pandemic but what makes this book hit hardest is how close it all felt. I live in Chicago. I built and was glued to the COVID dashboards, watching the ICU bed counts, the case spikes, the race breakdowns. Fisher lived that data. He treated the people behind the numbers.

This isn’t just a doctor’s memoir. It’s a gut-punch portrait of what it means to care for patients, for a neighborhood and for a city that so often fails its most vulnerable. Much like the medical system in America. Fisher blends ER cases, personal history, and unflinching letters to patients who didn’t make it. The result is part medical narrative, part social indictment, and fully human.

He doesn’t shy away from the systemic failures: how racism, bureaucracy, and burnout shape outcomes long before someone reaches the ER doors. And yet, he stays. He keeps showing up. That quiet persistence through all the tough times is what stuck with me most.

Reading this felt like exploring the underside of all the charts I obsessed over in 2020, the stories the numbers couldn't tell. It's not comfortable reading, but it's beautiful in its humanity.

One of the most powerful books I’ve read in a long time.

Bookshop.org link

Lately, I’ve been feeling that spark again. I built two small utilities, nothing wild, but enough to reignite my excitement for writing code, testing ideas, and shaving off friction in my daily life.

The Projects

One is an app that collects and aggregates data from Apple Health. I’ve been manually tracking health metrics for years, but this project was about automating what I could and creating a clearer view of my trends by day, week, and month. I even layered in a weekly AI summary that gets emailed to me with simple suggestions to improve my metrics.

The other is a personal link collection app - a kind of Pocket clone. It lets me save articles to read later, but adds AI summaries so I don’t have to reread a whole piece just to remember why I saved it. I also built in a prompt versioning system that I now use across both projects. It’s been a great way to test different AI behaviors and compare results over time.

Why It Feels Different

The things I build for myself break sometimes and that’s ok. It’s not the same frustration as when a paid app flakes out. When it’s your own tool, fixing it can even be kind of fun, no one is waiting for you to fix it. You know the quirks, the shortcuts, the things you never got around to finishing. It’s like that old car you had to jiggle the wiper switch just right to get them to work, but it was your car. You knew how to make it work.

And that’s part of the joy.

These projects give me an escape from the daily grind. A space to sharpen old skills, learn new ones, and actually solve problems and annoyances in my daily life. There’s no pressure to scale, no need to pitch the idea to anyone. Just shipping, iterating, and using something that didn’t exist in my life before.

A Note to Builders

If you’re waiting for the perfect idea or the right time, don’t. Embrace the audience of one. Scope your work small and ship it. The speed and the iterations will build momentum. Eventually, you’ll wake up one day and realize you’ve built something real. Maybe even something you rely on.

And that’s where the joy lives, not in the launch, but in the using.

Suddenly the fun is gone, and the scope is so bloated it doesn't feel worth finishing.

What's worked better for me lately is scoping things down to the point where they almost feel dumb. Stupidly small. I start with the idea, then ask myself: "In the next hour, can I complete one part of this and ship it?"

Yes, ship the one thing.

Example

Pocket, the beloved link collector and read-later app, shut down this year. While I didn't use it a lot, I loved the simplicity of the tool. So I decided I could build that as a simple API, have a web scraper extract the content and return it later when I wanted to read it. I also wanted to play with AI tools, perhaps running the content through an AI prompt to get a quick summary.

I started with one thing: ship a tokenized API framework. Using Laravel Sanctum, I had it stood up and deployed in less than an hour. Next came one endpoint to collect one field, a URL. Shipped.

From there, each chunk I built, I shipped. Each small iteration built on the last until it was finished. Then I created a React Native iOS app to display this content for myself in the same manner.

Takeaways

When the stakes are low, progress is fast. When the scope is tiny, there's no room for scope creep. It either works or it doesn't. There's something satisfying about making something and using it within the same hour. No polish. No audience. Just utility.

I think we talk ourselves out of good ideas by making them too big too soon. We want them to be perfect, to scale, to impress. But sometimes the most useful things are the ones you scoped small enough to actually finish.

You might surprise yourself with how much gets done when you stop trying to make it a thing.

But journaling isn't for other people. It's not about collecting data or beating stats, it's for me. It's a tool I use to remember things, dump my thoughts, organize ideas, and reflect on the day. The things that nag at me all day feel less sharp after I contextualize them on the screen. Journaling is meant to be boring and might really make no sense later. It's okay to be sloppy, misspell words, or form half-coherent sentences.

My journaling has changed a bit over the last few years, but a couple things remain consistent. I'm still making a habit of journaling every night, though I lost my streak in 2024, I'm back at a solid 90+ day streak again. I'm using Day One still, but Apple Journal is starting to gain some of my attention. Once they add a way to import my thousands of Day One entries, it might be time to switch.

I use a simple template, something to get out of my own way: 3 things that happened today. I typically add around 4-6 photos to go along with it. It's usually pretty mundane: going to work, having a meeting with Matt, doing some budgeting work, making a meal, or going out for a meal where I had the cheeseburger. Sometimes I write more in these 3 bullets, but it's really a way to get the things still on my mind down and out of my head.

I also enjoy sitting down sometimes and just letting my fingers flood words onto the page, writing about topics or memories I have at the time—something I woke up thinking about, a news story that's really impactful, or maybe a memory triggered by a smell. These are usually in addition to my evening "3 things" entry, and I might start in the morning, add more in the afternoon, and write even more at night.

The thing that makes this exercise not feel like work is that I allow myself to mess up. It doesn't have to be perfect; this isn't going to be published in a book. Future civilizations aren't going to unearth my iPhone with my Day One journal entries and put it in a museum. I've started to embrace the audience of one in life, and my journal has never felt more fun for me.

What these businesses fail to understand is that I'm comparing their product against competitors offering similar items. When they block me from viewing their product, it signals how they'll likely treat me as a customer.

Instead of blocking the screen with popovers, companies should focus on creating better product detail pages that address customer needs. They should streamline the checkout process, simplify conversion, and then present newsletter value propositions. A better approach might be including signup options in order confirmation emails. Customers who have already purchased are more likely to engage with your content anyway. Simply collecting email addresses is pointless if those contacts aren't converting and contributing to revenue.

Call to action: Developers, stop adding these interruptions to websites, stop creating intrusive plugins, and start improving user experience. Marketers, shift your focus from aggressive email collection tactics to reducing friction in the customer journey and researching better conversion strategies.

Ecommerce platforms and search engines should penalize websites that use popovers that prevent users from completing their intended tasks.

I’ve written more about some of the things I’ve been thinking about and facing in management lately, as well as dusted off some older stuff from my notes, like my post on no-code and why its risky to reach for these tools to start your business.

Posts

• April 2025 Review

• Retention Starts With Communication

• Less Meetings, More Meaning: Protecting Focus Time

• Pause and Silence: Learning to Be Present Again

• The No-Code Trade: Speed vs. Control and Privacy

• What I’ve Been Learning This Year

• Syncing Data to Notion with in Laravel 12

• Book Review: Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future

Books

• Meru - A pretty fun little scifi book by SB Divya. Kind of reminded me of Avatar mixed with Star Wars and some other unique plots. Definitely a great palette cleanser for some of the dense stuff I’ve been reading.

• Code Name: Pale Horse - Watched a youtube video about this guy explaining how he took down some neo-nazi group while working undercover for the FBI, so decided to check out his book. Very good stories and storyteller.

• White Hot Light - This book shouldnt be read when you are around food, or thinking about dinner. Graphic scenes and very interesting details about his experience in the ER and the medical field. What a group of stories this is.

• Superagency - Wrote a review on this book, as I say frequently - I am cautious and slow to the uptake on AI - its unskilling people and killing the planet. This book kind of brings me back to reality, technology is going to continue to evolve and if we dont help steer it, it will go on without us. Check out my review here.

Links

• Advice for New Managers - delegate, over communicate, setting ambitious goals, being adaptable to your teams needs. Great read about getting into management.

• A weekly mind meld - This is a pretty neat framework for collecting and distilling information to consolidate for a leadership group. might start to take some of these into my own weekly cadence.

• They’re Not Better Than You - sometimes you just need to pause and not think about others, and think about where you are, where you are going.

• Practical AI techniques for daily engineering work - I am not super bullish on AI replacing all functions in a business, and I often think AI is replacing skill in the engineering world. But Sean goes into a pretty practical way to start using AI that doesnt feel too icky.

• Klarna users are buying now, but not paying later - The industry trend continues for BNPL repayments being skipped as the option becomes more available for things like groceries (doordash). While not at a tipping point, BNPL is definitely an interesting thing to watch as the economy shifts.

• What to Know About Model Context Protocol (MCP) - As I researched MCP this month, I read and watched a lot of crap from engineering “influencers”. But this article is actually a good explainer on the core of agentic AI, the MCP server.

Other

• I was playing GTA5 on my new xbox and when we got our puppy in March, I had just 2 missions to go. After needing to do mandatory updates to both the Xbox firmware and the game, I finally had some time this month to beat the game again. Such a good and fun game and has me pumped for GTA6 next year.

• This month has been really dusting off the technical cobwebs for me, buiding new things in laravel, learning MCP/researching AI, working with data and doing more architectural work. I’m remembering why I got into engineering to begin with.

• And like the last few months, the pup is keeping me busy and teaching him manners and how to walk has been challenging but fun. He’s starting to show his personality and its so fun to see.

Hoffman’s central idea is that AI gives us superagency, tools that make our actions, decisions, and intentions more powerful. That can be incredible, or it can go sideways fast. He points out we’ve already been blending tech and self for years and AI just makes that fusion deeper.

The part that really landed for me: technology doesn’t steer itself. Progress doesn’t just happen. We have to actively shape it through design, policy, and a willingness to ask hard questions about values.

And maybe my favorite angle: Hoffman leans toward collaboration over competition. It’s not about outsmarting the machines or beating other countries to the punch. It’s about building systems and partnerships that actually improve life.

If you’re curious about AI but tired of the extremes, this book is a refreshing middle path.

Bookshop.org link

Some of these metrics come straight from Apple Health, things like steps, weight, and exercise minutes. For a while, I was using an Apple Shortcut to send this data to Notion, but it was flakey and broke more often than not. One weekend, I decided to stop messing around and built a simple Laravel API service. It stores the data locally, then pushes it to Notion in a queued job. I’ll walk through how that works below.

Prerequisites

Before you can send anything to Notion, you’ll need to set up a few things.

1. Get your Notion API key

Head to the Notion integrations page and create a new integration. This will give you your API token. Add that to your .env file like this:

NOTION_TOKEN=your_secret_token_here

2. Get your database ID

Open your Notion database in the browser and grab the ID from the URL (cmd+L). It’s the long string of characters between your workspace name and the ?v= part.

In this example, the xx999... portion is the database ID.

https://www.notion.so/your_notion/xx9999000011112222333344445555xx?v=1a1a1a1a1a1a1a1a1a1a1a1a1a1a1a1a&pvs=4

NOTION_DB_ID=your_database_id_here

3. Share the integration with the database

Click the three-dot menu in the top right of your database, go to “Connections,” and add your integration so it has access to read and write.

Setting up the Basics

In the Notion database I’m working with, I’ve got two important properties: one called Date and another called Steps. These are case-sensitive and need to match exactly when we send updates.

In my Laravel project, I use report_date and steps in the API request, and map those to the Notion fields later on. I’m skipping over the setup of your models, migrations, and basic Laravel project structure. There are plenty of great guides out there if you need help getting started with that part.

Building the API

This is a POST route in the Laravel API, using a controller method: MetricController@store. I’m also using Laravel Sanctum for API token management, but that’s outside the scope of this post. You can follow the Sanctum docs if you want to add that.

Here’s the general idea:

• Check if a record already exists for the given report_date

• If it does, update it; otherwise, create a new one

• Then dispatch a queued job to update Notion

In the request, I validate the data with a StoreMetricRequest. For now, I’m just checking that report_date is required and steps is numeric, but you can add more validation rules depending on what metrics you’re tracking.

Pushing to Notion (via Job)

The actual Notion update is handled in a queued job. I broke this out into three parts:

1. Finding the Notion entry

We send a query to the Notion API to search for a page with the current date. You need to use the exact field name Date in the filter. All we really need here is the page ID.

2. Building the payload

Once we have the page ID, we build the payload that will be sent to Notion. I keep things flexible by using a language file to map Laravel field names to Notion field names. That way, if I change a label in Notion, I don’t need to hunt through my code to update it. In the PublishNotion job you can see me pushing these mapped values into the array using __('notion.'.$key)

3. Updating the page

We send the payload using the HTTP client in Laravel. If the response isn’t successful, I throw an error so it can be retried later.

Conclusion

Like I said, there is a lot more that can be done with this, and I am doing a lot more on my actual API, but this is something I wish someone had written so I could follow setting up a Notion API sync using Laravel.

But one thing I’ve realized is that I don’t always make time for hands-on technical learning in my day-to-day. So over the last couple of months, I’ve made a more intentional effort to change that. Thought I’d share some of what I’ve been up to, both on the learning-by-doing side and through reading.

One of the bigger things was signing up for a data engineering course through the University of Chicago. I wanted to get a better handle on the tools, terms, and ideas that come up in the work, especially around pipelines and data workflows. The course focused a lot on SQL and Neo4j, which was right in my comfort zone and a good way to shake off the rust. The forum posts made me feel like I was back in college, which wasn’t exactly my favorite part, but overall I learned a lot and earned a new certificate for the collection.

I also circled back to some courses I had bought from Code With Mosh. A while back I started his Django series but never finished. This time around, I completed two out of three modules. The course walks you through everything from setting up a project to writing tests and working with databases and creating APIs. It lined up nicely with the Python and React Native courses I had finished recently, and now I’m planning to dive into his Java course later this year.

On the project front, I decided to replace a clunky setup I had built using Notion and Apple Shortcuts. It was getting too messy, buggy and slow. So I spent a day building a small API using Laravel. I went from the initial idea to a token-based API that I could deploy, all in a few hours. It was a fun sprint, and it gave me a chance to work with Laravel 12, which has changed quite a bit since I last used it five or six years ago when I built my last full fledged app.

I’ve also been poking around in the world of agent-based AI. I’ve been learning about MCP servers, workflows, and how these systems might expose APIs to support intelligent agents. Still early days there, but it has been really interesting to explore. I might write more about that in the future.

On the quieter side of things, I finished a book called The Hospital. It follows a small town and its crumbling healthcare system, and how the breakdown ripples through the community. It made me think about how fragile some of these systems are and how hard they are to rebuild once they start falling apart.

I also read Do/Reset, a book about meditation and mindfulness. I’ve been trying to create a bit more space in my daily life to disconnect and be more present. Still figuring it out, but it has already helped me slow down a bit and be more intentional.

And I’ve kept up my interest in cities, housing, and transit. Two books stood out. Homelessness is a Housing Problem explains how expensive housing drives higher rates of homelessness, especially in large cities. And Inclusive Transportation makes a strong case for designing transportation systems that focus on people and access, not just infrastructure.

That’s the mix lately. A little bit of coding, a little reflection, and a lot of curiosity.

But the speed comes with trade-offs.

The biggest one is ownership. You don’t own the core of what you’re building. You’re using someone else’s platform and working within their constraints. If the tool changes direction, raises prices, or shuts down, you’re along for the ride.

There’s also the question of data and privacy. Most no-code platforms are cloud-based and rely on third-party integrations. That can make things murky if you’re working with sensitive data or need tight control over how it’s stored and shared.

Still, for many early-stage teams, it’s worth it. The ability to test, learn, and iterate without spinning up a full engineering team can save months of work. And once you’ve proven the idea, you can always rebuild with code and more control.

If you’re thinking about going the no-code route, go for it. Just go in with clear eyes. Know what you’re giving up in exchange for that speed, and make sure it lines up with your goals.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how rare it is to be fully present. Not just undistracted, but really there—in a conversation, in a moment, in my own thoughts. The world is loud and fast and constantly pulling at our attention. And sometimes, I didn’t even notice how much I was being pulled around.

But I’ve been building the habit of focus back into my personal life. Not just turning off notifications, but turning inward. Letting myself be in one place, with one thing, and seeing what happens when I actually give it my full attention.

Focus Makes Relationships Stronger

I’ve started paying more attention when I’m with the people I care about. That might sound obvious, but it’s not always easy. It means putting the phone away. It means listening to listen, not just to reply. It means showing up without being halfway somewhere else in my head.

When I do that, even simple conversations feel deeper. More honest. There’s space for nuance. Space for silence. Space to understand each other instead of rushing to fill the air.

Focus builds trust. It makes people feel seen.

Focus Creates Space for Thought

One of the things I found really rewarding was creating time to process. I used to go from one thing to the next, carrying half-formed thoughts around like loose change. Now I try to carve out time just to sit with them. To journal. To go for a walk without some music in my ear. To let a thought fully unfold.

That space is where clarity lives. I get better at understanding how I feel, what I value, what I want to do next. Even ten minutes of quiet reflection brings so much value to my daily life. I notice it in both stressful times and peaceful moments.

There’s a quote I love by Tom Chatfield:

“Pause and silence are the friends of better thought.”

And he's right. Focus isn't just for output, it's for insight.

Focus Makes Learning Deeper

When I’m focused, I retain more. I notice more. I connect more dots.

Reading a book without checking my phone every few pages, forcing the connection to the story. watching a movie and truly analyzing it afterward—the plot, cinematography, and directorial choices. Focus transforms information into knowledge that shapes how I think and view the world.

I’ve even started blocking off time just to learn something for the sake of it. No goal. Just curiosity. And it’s made me realize how much I like learning when I’m not rushing it. More on that in upcoming posts.

Focus Brings Joy Back Into the Little Things

It’s easy to forget how good simple things can feel when you’re present for them.

A walk around the block without checking the time. Cooking dinner and actually enjoying the process. Laughing at something dumb and not needing to share it with anyone. Playing with the dog and just…playing.

These moments don’t last long. But when I’m focused, they land differently. They stick. They feel like mine. And honestly, I think that’s what joy is made of, being fully there for the little stuff.

It’s Not About Perfection—It’s About Presence

This isn’t some productivity project. I still get distracted. I still reach for my phone out of habit. But I’m trying to notice it sooner. And when I do, I try to return to the moment, without judgment, without pressure. Just to be there.

Because the more I focus, the more I realize how much I was missing.

Not because I wasn’t doing enough.

But because I wasn’t paying attention.

It’s not that I don’t like it—there’s energy in the pace, and I genuinely enjoy coaching, unblocking, and collaborating. But the tradeoff is that everything gets a little fragmented. I’ll have an important conversation in the morning and by 4pm, it’s already buried under a dozen others. That’s why I write everything down. Pages of notes, ideas, and follow-ups I’ll “get back to.”

But that kind of scattered throughput eventually catches up with you. You start to feel like a router—just passing signals back and forth, not really doing anything yourself. And when your whole week runs like that, you lose the space to reflect, connect dots, or think a level deeper than what’s right in front of you.

That’s the moment I know I need to reclaim some focus time—because I’m no longer steering, I’m just keeping the ship from sinking.

Why Focus Time Matters

Focus time is where all the scattered pieces of the week finally get a chance to fit together. I think of it like dumping out a puzzle box—meetings, conversations, half-finished thoughts, questions I jotted down but didn’t answer yet. It’s messy until I can lay the pieces out, step back, and actually see what picture I’m building.

This kind of time isn’t just about getting through a to-do list. It’s about reconnecting with the bigger picture—what we’re building, why we’re building it, and whether we’re still pointed in the right direction. It’s where I can think strategically, not just tactically. Where I can zoom out, reframe a problem, or spot a pattern that got lost in the noise.

Focus time also grounds me. When I’m reading code, digging through data, or sketching out architecture ideas, I feel more connected to the craft again. It’s a reminder that leadership isn’t just about managing—it’s about understanding the work deeply enough to support and shape it.

And maybe most importantly, it gives me the headspace to make better decisions. Not knee-jerk calls, but thoughtful ones—the kind that help a team stay aligned and move with purpose.

What I Use Focus Time For

Most of the time, my focus blocks start with a giant backlog of “stuff I meant to get to.” Tasks, approvals, notes I scribbled in meetings. And sure, I’ll chip away at those. But the most valuable part of this time isn’t catching up—it’s getting ahead.

When I’ve protected an hour or more, I can actually think proactively. I can ask: what’s coming next? What’s going to break if we don’t fix it soon? Where can I nudge the platform, the team, or the roadmap to move more smoothly?

Sometimes that means reviewing code or digging through metrics, not because something’s broken, but because I want to better understand how the system is evolving. Other times it’s mapping out architectural tradeoffs, poking at a new idea, or just giving myself time to sit with a hard problem before it turns urgent.

This is also when I think about the team itself—are we structured the right way? Are we investing in the right people, tools, and patterns? These aren’t questions that get answered in between meetings. They need headspace. They need calm.

Focus time is where I shift from reactive maintenance to intentional leadership. It’s where the job feels less like running triage and more like building something that will hold up over time.

How I Protect It (Most of the Time)

The key word here is protect. Because nobody’s going to hand you focus time—you have to build a wall around it and hope it holds.

I block it on my calendar like a meeting. Not just “free time,” but something that looks official enough that people hesitate before trying to book over it. Sometimes I’ll even label it like a real meeting—“architecture review” or “platform strategy”—because let’s be honest, it kind of is.

Do I always hold the line? No. Things come up. Fires happen. But I try to reschedule the block, not just delete it. Because if I start treating it like optional time, everyone else will too.

During those blocks, I go quiet. No Slack, no email, no context-switching tabs open. It’s not about being unreachable—it’s about being intentional.

Why It’s Worth It

The weeks where I hold my focus time feel different. I’m calmer. My thinking is clearer. I don’t just react—I respond. The conversations I have with my team are more thoughtful because I’ve had time to process, connect dots, and bring real insight to the table.

It’s not about getting everything done. It’s about making space to lead with intention instead of just surviving the chaos. Focus time helps me reset, recharge, and re-engage with the work in a way that feels meaningful—not just busy.

The contrast is stark. When I skip it, I feel like I’m skating across the surface of everything, stretched thin and scattered. I check boxes, but I don’t really build momentum. And more importantly, I miss chances to support my team in the ways that actually matter—strategy, clarity, direction.

This isn’t extra time. It’s essential time. It’s the difference between managing the present and shaping the future.

I’ve seen it firsthand across industries: fintech, real estate, even vet offices and mechanics. The common thread? Communication makes or breaks retention. It’s not about dazzling copy or perfectly timed push notifications—it’s about trust. And trust is built (or broken) with every message, email, and unanswered question.

A few things that I’ve come to believe should be table stakes:

• Tell customers what’s next. Don’t leave them guessing. If they have to follow up more than once just to know where things stand, you’ve already created friction.

• Say the right thing. Setting the wrong expectation—even with good intent—is a fast track to disappointment. Customers will forgive a delay, but they won’t forgive feeling misled.

• Own your mistakes. If you mess something up (and you will), say so. Clearly. Blaming the customer, or being vague about responsibility, damages trust more than the original mistake.

• Know when communication really matters. In high-stakes moments—medical, financial, anything emotional—bad communication can end the relationship entirely. Even if the work itself was fine, the feeling it leaves behind is what sticks.

Here’s the hard truth: if your product isn’t one-of-a-kind, your competitor doesn’t have to be wildly better. They just need to talk to your customers slightly more clearly, slightly more honestly. That’s enough.

So before you invest more in getting people to show up—ask if your communication is strong enough to make them want to stay.

Working on the design and updating dependencies gave me a fun return to web development. It highlighted how much has changed since 2009, when I used to write CSS and HTML daily. Back then, jQuery was the dominant JavaScript framework (unless you were using Flash animations).

Posts

• Blogging, Again

• Laravel 11+ Cache Strategy Changes

• Modern Gaming Frustrations: A User's Perspective

• Book Review: The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in a Small American Town

• Don’t Build Monuments — Build Momentum

• Leadership That Goes Beyond the Mission — A Lesson From Moonshot

Books

• Do/ Reset - small book about meditation from the people over at dobooks. Great little book to set the stage for the practice and the reason why I’ve been thinking about simplifying and focusing more.

• Fahrenheit-182 - Memoir from one of my favorite musicians and the reason I like to play the bass guitar. His fight with cancer and the band conflicts were really interesting to read about.

• Homelessness Is a Housing Problem - Cities with the most expensive and constrained housing markets (like Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles) have the highest rates of homelessness—not because they have more people with personal challenges, but because they have fewer places for low-income people to live.

• The Hospital - Wrote a review on this one, really wild to see how a single hospital network in a small area in Ohio is a reflection of the larger healthcare system and how it fails us.

• Mean People Suck - Empathy in the workplace leads to stronger teams, more innovation, and higher performance—while meanness breeds disengagement and mediocrity.

• Moonshot - Leadership lessons from an astronaut. I wrote a quick piece about this too.

Links

• The Hidden Cost of AI Coding - AI tools increase productivity, they may lead to a more passive work experience, reducing the feeling of deep engagement or "flow" that many developers cherish.

• The gap between developers’ ideal and actual workdays - Understanding the ideal vs. actual workweek can help leaders make informed decisions to support developer work and guide future AI tool development.

• Operationalizing developer productivity metrics - Combining qualitative and quantitative data provides a more comprehensive understanding of productivity and improvement opportunities

• Being in the details - Being in the details is not synonymous with micromanagement; it is crucial for accountability and understanding the progress of key projects.

Other

• Completed a Data Engineering course at the University of Chicago—an 8-week program covering SQL, NoSQL, Neo4j, database diagrams, Tableau dashboards, and more. It was rewarding to deepen my knowledge in an area I work with daily.

• Started journaling daily again, building a habit of writing down my thoughts to clear my mind before bed. It's helping me process and understand the challenges I'm working through subconsciously.

• My puppy continues to keep me busy with training and cuddling, while letting me see the world through his curious eyes.

  

Massimino didn’t just pull this out of thin air. He learned it from Apollo astronaut Alan Bean, who realized after returning from the Moon that the success of any mission comes down to how much you respect and care for the people you work with. Spaceflight, like leadership, is high stakes. It demands trust, collaboration, and a deep well of empathy.

It’s easy, especially in fast-paced environments, to treat leadership like a game of tasks and metrics. But people aren’t spreadsheets. They respond to authenticity, to being seen and valued. When you admire your team — not just for what they do, but for who they are — you build a foundation of trust. And when you care for them, especially in hard moments, you earn loyalty that no title alone can command.

This quote reminds me that the best leaders aren’t just the smartest or the most strategic — they’re the ones who show up with heart. It’s not always flashy. It’s not always loud. But it’s how you build a team that would follow you into orbit.

Bookshop.org Link

Bringing home a puppy is a crash course in this mindset. There’s no such thing as “perfect” when it comes to raising a dog—especially in the early weeks. One day, you’re celebrating a successful crate nap. The next, you’re cleaning up an accident five minutes after a potty break. It’s a cycle of tiny wins and new challenges. But here’s the thing: every day builds on the last.

Each “almost got it” moment with our pup—responding quicker to a command, calming down just a little faster, holding it an extra minute before going outside—adds up. You don’t see perfection. You see hope. You see progress. And when we pause to actually celebrate those small wins, it reinforces the behavior—for the pup and for us. That little rush of “we’re getting somewhere” is powerful.

The same principle applies with teams.

Whether you’re managing people or building a product, it’s tempting to hold off until everything feels just right. The architecture isn’t clean enough. The copy needs one more round of edits. We haven’t pressure-tested every edge case. But if you’re waiting for perfect, you’re going to miss your moment. You’ll build a monument no one needs by the time it’s done—when what really drives value is momentum.

That’s why I love the quote: “Don’t build monuments, build momentum.”

Software is supposed to evolve. People are supposed to grow. Products get better when they’re out in the wild being used, tested, pushed, and questioned. You launch. You learn. You iterate. You go again.

The teams I’ve seen succeed aren’t the ones who obsess over a flawless first release—they’re the ones who keep shipping, keep learning, and keep moving. They build momentum through consistent progress. And that momentum? It’s contagious. It creates energy, motivation, and trust.

But here’s the real key: consistency over intensity. Sustainable growth doesn’t come from sprinting until burnout. It comes from building habits, systems, and a culture that values forward motion. One step at a time. You celebrate the little things—each pull request, each bug squashed, each hard conversation navigated. Those add up to long-term wins.

Progress builds confidence. Perfection builds pressure.

Of course, there’s still a part of me that wants things to be great before they see the light of day. That voice says, “Just one more tweak.” But more and more, I’m learning to quiet that voice. Just like with the puppy, I’m learning to recognize that every small improvement is part of a bigger picture.

So if you’re in the weeds—whether it’s with a product launch, a process you’re refining, or your own growth—don’t aim for a monument. Aim for movement. Get that one thing out the door. Take the step, however small. Celebrate it. Then take the next one.

That’s how you build something that lasts.

The reporting is immersive and unflinching. He embeds with CHWC’s leadership, staff, and patients, capturing both the administrative tightrope walked by CEO Phil Ennen and the lived experiences of those seeking care. The result is a narrative that’s as much about spreadsheets and boardroom politics as it is about ambulance rides and ER visits.

What struck me most was how Alexander connects the dots between local struggles and national dysfunction. He shows how CHWC’s fight to remain independent mirrors a broader trend: rural hospitals being squeezed by consolidation, insurance gamesmanship, and the relentless logic of profit. The book doesn’t just diagnose the problem—it makes you feel it.

This isn’t a policy book, but it’s impossible to read without thinking about policy. Alexander doesn’t offer neat solutions, but he makes clear that any fix must reckon with the structural rot in how we fund and prioritize care. His prose is clear-eyed and empathetic, never veering into sentimentality or despair.

If you’ve ever wondered why healthcare feels so broken—especially outside big cities—this book is essential reading. It’s a reminder that behind every headline about hospital closures or rising costs are real people trying to do good work in a system that often works against them.

The Hospital is a powerful, necessary read. It left me angry, informed, and more committed to understanding the forces shaping our healthcare landscape.

Bookshop.org link

But what I got instead was a masterclass in modern friction. Setting it up felt like a multi-day onboarding flow from hell.

• Download the Xbox app to set up the console

• Sign in with a Microsoft account to make an Xbox account (why are these different?)

• Download a system update just to start

• Realize Xbox 360 games are barely backwards compatible

• Add a credit card on the console because the app doesn’t support it

• Download NHL 25 — painfully slow, despite strong Wi-Fi

• Sign up for an EA Sports account just to play (why can’t I use my Xbox login?)

• Buy GTA V (again) because the 360 version doesn’t work — another huge download

• Get hit with yet another prompt to create a Rockstar Games account… I declined

All I wanted to do was play a game. What used to be a quick Friday night trip to Family Video and instant gameplay is now hours of downloads, logins, and unnecessary account creation. Every step felt like it was designed by someone who never actually used the product.

It reminded me how easy it is developing a product to forget what our users are actually trying to do. We layer on features, integrations, and business objectives, KPIs, but forget to ask: are we helping someone get to their “play” faster? That’s the bar. Get out of the way and let people play.

The defaults for database drivers and cache stores had shifted, and getting things tuned for Statamic 5 wasn’t exactly well-documented. I had been using CACHE_STORE=array, which spiked my load time from around 150ms to over 1,020ms.

After a deeper dive into the Laravel docs and poking around the cache config file, I swapped to file in my .env—no deploy needed—and watched load times drop to 75ms. That’s an 89% improvement, just from a single config change.

Anyway, small changes make huge impacts - just be patient

I upgraded Laravel and Statamic, which was an interesting journey, and I made some minor UI adjustments—with more to come. This blog has always been about providing meaningful content that offers something cool to learn or discover.

A lot has changed since my last post. For starters, we got a puppy, and he's been quite the adventure. The experience has taught me valuable lessons about patience, consistency, and building on positivity each day. At work, I've launched several major projects with my team and continued traveling for both business and pleasure. I'm always searching for each city's best cocktails and burgers.

See you soon.

I break this down into two distinct issues. The first is when a person is actively not paying attention, distracted by Slack, email, or reading something else. This wastes time because someone in the meeting may have to go back over what has already been covered.

My rule on this is: if you are invited to a meeting, you are essential to be present and actively participate. There should be no reason to invite people who are not needed to participate. A write-up and summary should suffice for those not in attendance.

The second group is people who are paying attention but not hearing what is said. This may be due to the subject being something they oppose, something technical and difficult to understand, or something more subtle. Everyone has been in a meeting where you are listening to someone with a monotone voice and just kind of trail off.

My challenge for this is: when you are in a meeting and asked a question, act like you are on stage and need to repeat the question for the audience to hear. This provides context between the last person's thought and yours. It shows that you are listening and understand the thought or question enough to say it back more succinctly, and it has the potential to build stronger relationships with your peers. This technique also works in everyday relationships, by the way.

So put down the distractions and listen. Repeat the subject and provide your input. Avoid talking over one another, especially on a video call, as it is rude and annoying for everyone else.

iPhone wasn’t the first smart phone, but its not surprising people think this was when the industry changed. iPad, Apple Watch and even the AirPods are all in the same category, not the first but clearly best in class (at the time of announcement). I think Apple Vision will be looked at in the same way in the near future.

This had me thinking about building software and chasing competition. Often times companies will hyper focus on what their nearest competition is doing and try to launch products that follow in their footsteps. I’ve seen this happen, and I’ve been a part of this in my career. If Company A has a sick home screen, then we need one too - but we don’t have the time or money to build it. If Company B launched a new product focusing on their customer base, we need to launch the same to we can try to get a chunk of their users to come try our app out.

The companies I see winning in this are the companies that pay attention to what their competitors are doing, understanding the landscape of the industries they play in but not simply copying their roadmap to try to get their users to switch sides. The most successful strategy is to pay attention to what YOUR users want to do and build products and features that enhance their lives.

Like Apple, leaning into their ecosystem as a selling point - their users want a seamless transition between phone, computer and AR. They want their technology to work for them and to not have to worry about saving things to a cloud, and upload time and download speed. They want things to just work in their ecosystem without thinking.

What are your users asking for and does it align to what your roadmap is right now? Does your roadmap meet your users where they are, or are you building roads you hope they will use one day? Take a look at the data, conduct customer surveys, build a better product for your users and you wont need to be the first person to introduce a new product, but you will be the best.

The product is ramping in the coming weeks and I am being really reflective of the last 18 months of development time we spent on this launch. How does this work stack up against all the other major work I’ve done in my career. I may start to write about some of my reflections in upcoming posts, but for now here is what May looked like for me.

Posts

• Predictability, Accountability

• Quick Break

• Make a Better Product

• Trust

• April 2023 Review

Books

• Raising Lazarus, by Beth Macy - several stories, reports and data about the opioid and overdose epidemic happening in the United States. It’s a challenging read for the content, the people’s lives changed and the disgusting system that not only allows this but encourages the pushing of drugs on people.

• Franchise, by Marcia Chatelain - In this book, Chatelain presents her well researched history of the rise of Black capitalism in McDonalds franchises. From the days after Dr. Kings death through COVID and the murder of George Floyd, Black owned franchises of McDonalds have been pillars of their communities.

• How to Break Up with Your Phone, by Catherine Price - I’ve been more stressed out lately and on my phone way too much mindlessly scrolling to try to release that pressure. What I knew and what this book helps lay out is those micro-doses of dopamine arent actually helping you, but creating a larger addiction to your phone. This book outlines a lot of data about why prolonged phone use is hurting you and gives a 30 day plan to ween yourself off the phone.

• 99 Bottles of OOP, by Sandi Metz - “Everyone has an opinion about what good code looks like”. This book walks through several examples of how to write better object oriented code such that its more readable.

• The Good Enough Job, by Simone Stolzoff - After reading the first few pages of this I was hooked, not like a nonfiction book might hook you, but in the way that the explanations of work consuming life and why when work feels rough, so does your life is exactly how I have been feeling lately. “By exposing the lies we--and our employers--tell about the value of our labor, The Good Enough Job makes the urgent case for reclaiming our lives in a world centered around work.”

Links

• Measuring Flow and Focus - I always love a nice scientific approach to measuring things that seem unmeasurable. Defining flow and focus time and getting an idea on how engineers get into these modes might be helpful tools for your management of engineering teams.

• National Crash Testing Standards Could Start Including Pedestrian Safety - Up until this proposal, NHTSA was only measuring crash metrics for people inside the car. A car’s safety rating should always include the pedestrians and people outside the car too. There are far too many trucks on the road that are terrible for pedestrian wellbeing, and with these new metrics, maybe it’ll force auto makers to think about public safety when designing new cars.

• Employers need to focus on workplace burnout - Job-related stressors are not being effectively managed by the normal rest found in work breaks, weekends, and time off (World Health Organization, 2019). It is not enough to simply focus on the worker who is having a problem—there must be a recognition of the surrounding job conditions that are the sources of the problem.

Other

Lots of great weather this month. Spent a lot of time outside reading and just being in the sun. I find it a great stress reducer to be outside in some fresh air, with a nice lemonade.

The two pillars of my framework are predictability and accountability. By combining these pillars with honest communication and promoting ownership, I’ve noticed an increase in the quality, velocity, and overall satisfaction of our work. Below, I'll break down each of these components in detail, with the hope that you can incorporate some of these concepts into your own management frameworks.

Predictability

One of the foundational pillars of a successful team is predictability. Achieving predictability requires some up front work on the manager's part. The goal is to be confident in your team's ability to complete work within a given time period. This confidence allows you to provide accurate timelines and estimates when planning new features or products. If you haven't used the PERT method of estimating work, it's a great exercise to explore the relationship between estimates and confidence levels.

In most of the software teams I've worked with, we've used a two-week sprint cadence. To determine how much work can be done in a sprint, you'll need to calibrate by gathering input from the team and adjusting the number of tickets on the sprint board accordingly.

Burn down charts

Jira and many other project management tools offer a report that displays the number of completed, pulled-in, and remaining tickets. This report provides a guideline for each day to show where your work completion should be. While this is a great tool, it doesn't provide a complete story about the work your team is doing. I use this as a "heartbeat monitor," a way to check how we're doing at a high level throughout the sprint. It's even a part of our daily stand-up expectations to view the report and discuss any anomalies, such as if we've pulled in a lot of new work or if two high-pointed tickets are still sitting in the TODO column in the later part of the sprint.

Data

One of the most valuable data points I collect is personal velocity numbers. However, I do not use this information to nudge individuals to increase their numbers, as this can easily become gamified. Instead, I use it to provide some flexibility when it comes to predicting our team's velocity when someone takes a week off or is doing some other task outside of the team's project board. We can expect a decrease in velocity of n this sprint.

As a manager of a group of engineers across three disciplines (iOS, Android, and Backend), I use a spreadsheet to group each platform together and track the individual velocities of each team member. These individual velocities are then rolled up to the platform totals for each sprint. The total is averaged across three sprints to determine the target number of points we can confidently pull in and complete per sprint.

For example, the iOS team's average velocity for the last three sprints is 15 points, as shown in the spreadsheet. With this data, I am very confident we can complete 15 points next sprint or plan a new feature. As time goes on, we will increase this number by stretching and refining requirements and building up our knowledge of the codebase.

Completing the burn down chart every sprint, especially on long projects, can be a simple reward and a signal to the team that their effort is amounting to something and that the project is incrementally getting finished. There is a psychological feeling that comes with finishing something, and small things like the burn down chart can improve our attitudes about the work and our feelings of accomplishment.

Accountability

In their book "Rethinking Productivity in Software Engineering," authors Caitlin Sadowski and Thomas Zimmerman provide insights into measuring productivity in software and changing our mindsets on what productivity really means. One quote I particularly liked from the book is:

Regardless of how accurately or elaborately one can measure productivity, the ultimate bottleneck in realizing productivity improvements is behavior change.

While the data we collect can help us understand our productivity and plan our work more confidently, there is still a bottleneck preventing teams from becoming high-performing. This is where the second pillar of my framework comes in: Accountability.

The framework becomes successful when team members hold themselves accountable for their own work and the work of their peers. One of the things I include in each of our team charters is the expectation that we all want each other to succeed in our jobs, and this pillar exemplifies that idea by tying it to the data we can see in velocity. We all want to finish the work and complete the sprint with 100% accuracy, so we all help our teammates succeed with their tickets.

When we hold ourselves accountable for our team's work, we care more about the tickets we are working on, the requirements, and the designs. We start looking at the quality of the code and the product we deliver to end users and strive to make it better. We feel more ownership over the work because we are attaching our name to all of it, not just our small piece of the puzzle.

Collaboration

Teams that hold themselves accountable at a high level tend to find solutions together, speak more openly about blockers, and collaborate and pair with each other to build better things. This solidifies working relationships and improves trust among team members.

It's important for a team to build trust with one another to achieve this level of collaboration. Being able to ask questions or open up about the challenges you see or have faced in a retro can help us all grow as a team by learning from every experience. As a manager, your job is to encourage and protect this type of collaboration.

During our planning or refinement sessions, improved communication can help us discover that tickets lack sufficient information or requirements. We can discuss known or unknown technical challenges with an area of the app or new technology. Talking openly about these things up front saves a lot of time during the implementation phase of a project.

Coming off an on call rotation that had a lot of late night pages, I am feeling really tired. So I;ll leave you with a couple thoughts about a book I read lately.

How To Break Up With Your Phone

• Make a plan, schedule a time to detox

• delete all apps that dont serve your time

• Most top CEOs limit their kids screen time, why are we not doing this as adults?

• Be serious, put your phone away, use your focus modes

• “How you do anything is how you do everything.”

See you next week!

Over the weekend, I went to two different AMC movie theaters across the Chicagoland area to watch two movies. Movie theaters have been amongst the most vocal about not seeing a return of people post-COVID, and what I saw was clearly the answer to why.

For one movie, I purchased two tickets online for a total of $27.38, which included $4.38 in "convenience" fees. I then had to pay 12% taxes on top of the ticket and fee prices, bringing my total to $35.57.

Upon arrival, I encountered grumpy staff and expensive concessions costing around $40 for a couple of drinks and a pack of candy. The placard displaying the movie name and showtime was turned off, causing confusion about which auditorium to go to. Once the show began, the audience members were on their phones, lighting up the theater, not turning off their ringers and talking, disrupting the viewing experience.

The next movie I watched was a similar experience, but at a completely different theater miles away. The concession choices were limited and overpriced. The placards that detailed the movie and showtime were turned off, and people were on their phones. It was a disappointing experience overall.

Your product is not worth $80. By cutting costs and raising prices, you are creating a further divide between yourself and your core customer base. It is time to build a better product and refocus on the customer by providing a better experience, even if that means sacrificing the quality of the snacks or streamlining ticket processes. Until the value matches the price, theaters will continue to lose out to the ever-growing options of streaming movies from the comfort of our own homes.

Trust is a vital aspect of any relationship, especially in the workplace. It plays a crucial role in the success of a team or organization. It is essential to trust your partners and colleagues to do their jobs and bring their expertise to the table. Without trust, collaboration can be a challenge, and progress can stall. Trusting in each other's abilities and knowledge can lead to more efficient and effective work.

Trust is the foundation of our society. We trust our barber to give us a trim instead of shaving our heads, and we trust other drivers to stay in their lane on the road. We trust the bank to keep our money safe and secure, and to provide us with the funds we need when we withdraw money. In our partnerships, we have expectations of one another. When those expectations are not met, we become disappointed.

Open and honest communication is the best way to build trust with others. Clear and respectful communication is required to establish strong trust with team members. If you call people names or openly question someone's abilities, it can make people feel like you might talk about them the same way behind their backs. When team members feel heard and respected, they are more likely to trust each other. When people feel supported and valued, they are more likely to work towards common goals and trust each other.

Ultimately, trust is a two-way street. In order to earn the trust of others, it's important to be trustworthy. Trust is built over time through consistent actions and reliability. Once established, trust can lead to stronger relationships and better overall outcomes. Not only does trust improve collaboration and productivity, but it can also increase job satisfaction and reduce turnover rates.

Remember, trust is the foundation of any successful partnership. Without it, progress can be difficult to achieve. By building trust and working together towards common goals, people can achieve great things and overcome any obstacles that come their way.

Posts

• Journaling 2

• More About AI

• Staying Organized 2

Books

• Buzz, by Thor Hanson - a great book about bees. small creatures that keep humanity alive.

• Immune, by Philipp Dettmer - a fascinating book from the people who do the great animated science videos on youtube, Kurzgesagt, about your immune system and the details on how cells in your body work and keep you healthy.

Links

• The Effects of Technical Debt on Morale - an excellent newsletter write up about the effects of tech debt on developers morale by Abi Noda. He summarizes a study that quantifies morale, and tech debt, as well as managing tech debt and how it increases morale.

• Be A Thermostat, Not A Thermometer - great article by Lara Hogan about how taking the temperature in the room maybe isnt enough, but being the person who can adjust the temperature is more important as a leader.

Other

It was super nice in Chicago for a whole week this month. Temperature in the 80s and sunny. Otherwise it was pretty rainy and cold. I made every minute of that warm week worth it with a lot of walking, running and being outside.

I have been using Notion for most of my organization for personal and work tasks and I have written extensively about how I manage my work life with weekly dossiers, managing people and on call shifts. Here I will give a high level on that, as well as detail how I manage some of my personal notes, tasks and TODOs.

Databases in Notion

Although it may seem counterproductive to simplicity, databases make sense for my brain and the work I do. I set up a primary database with all my to-dos separated by tags. I use tags to differentiate between work tasks and different types of tasks. I also use projects to assign tasks to a specific project, such as "renovate home office." Within each project, I create a finite list of tasks that must be completed to consider the project finished.

In my TODO list, I use a date field to set deadlines and ensure that I complete tasks at the right time. If something does not need to be done until a later date, the task does not show up on my dashboard. For example, changing the air filter does not need to be done until next month.

I often have many tasks to complete in a given week, so I added a priority field to my system. This way, I can work on the most important tasks first and so on. I have sorted the dashboard in my dossier by priority order. While most tasks don't have a priority assigned, I use the labels "Now," "Next," and "Later" to indicate tasks that require immediate attention, attention in the next day or so, and tasks that don't need to be completed this week.

Calendar

I still use Fantastical as my calendar app, which connects to my Google Calendar, including all my shared calendars. I rely on my calendar to stay on top of my schedule, including upcoming meetings, who I'll be meeting with, and when I need to be there. I use widgets on my iPhone to show me upcoming meetings and frequently check my availability to schedule time with friends.

I recently wrote about AI and how I don't think it's quite ready to take the keys to your business yet. In that article, I talked about the trend of companies using it for larger tasks and relying on it for more output - even if it isn't good at the job yet. While there are certainly some risky and gross applications for AI, I want to remain positive about what we can gain from AI if we use it properly, instead of figuring out how to squeeze out every dollar from people like AR/VR did (I'm looking at you metaverse).

AI has already made significant contributions to medical technology. It's being used to identify potential cancer before it develops. For example, in Hungary, AI was able to spot breast cancer up to 4 years before it developed. Imagine AI being trained on data sets to detect anomalous marks in scans throughout the years.

AI can also be used in environmental technology to manufacture better materials, improve supply chain efficiencies, identify areas of material or byproduct waste, and map pollution and its effects, improving living situations around polluted areas.

AI has the potential to improve our lives significantly. The CEO of Google has stated that AI could be more groundbreaking than electricity or fire, and this may be true, provided we don't use it to further widen the gap between the ultra-rich and everyone else, thereby turning our potential for utopia into a dystopia.

I still use Day One, syncing across my Apple devices every night. To date, I have a 1,123 day streak of writing in my journal. Its even a goal of mine to write in my journal daily. I still write a lot about the things that are happening around me, but I have switched up the format a little bit to make my writing feel less like a chore.

Templates

In Day One, and in other journaling apps or your notebook, there is a concept of templates. You can add templates from a gallery, edit them, and even create your own. I’ve done a bit of both. Lately, I have been using a template that I call the 5 Minute PM template. This template gives me three sections. The first is to write down the top 3 things that happened today in a numbered list. Some days this is a challenge, do I write down the mundane meetings and boring work I did all day? Yes, I do. I write about the movies, or tv shows I watched while being lazy on a Sunday. Future Tyler may find it interesting how I spent this day in history.

The second section of this template is a single question: How Could I Have Made Today Better? Its a hard question to answer some days. When things are going really well, I had a lot of fun or really enjoyed the day, how do you answer? I’m not too hard on my self if I answer “nothing”. Other days, its about sleep, or work issues, or things going on in my life that I can react better to.

The last section in this template is where I usually add photos. I try to snap a photo or two per day to show what I am doing during the day. They can be pretty boring.

Photos

I have been trying to add as many photos to my daily journal entries as I can. A snap of a cloud from my evening walk against the sunset, or a selfie. Maybe a food dish I made, or something else. I try to add notes about what the photos are, especially if they aren’t referenced in my daily top 3.

I like to think about these in the future, when you are going through an old photo book and you see a bunch of photos and people you haven’t thought about in a long time. Only inside my journal, I have a lot of context about what was happening that day, that week and even extra metadata about the environment I was in.

Metadata

Another aspect of Day One I try to keep up to date as much as possible is the location, my steps, weather and more. This helps provide context that could be interesting when I look back at the entries. Did I go for a longer walk than normal, I can see the weather was 66 degrees and sunny.

I like the map feature of the app, it will show all the locations I have created a journal entry from. My goal is to keep entries in each place I go with pictures and memories so I can remember them for a long time.

Reflection

If it isn’t clear about the theme of my recent journaling its to preserve my memories, to write down the things that are happening in my life so an older Tyler can look back on these things in my life. I love the On This Day feature on Day One, where I can see all the entries I wrote on that day, throughout history. I think my earliest entry at this point is over 8 years old. With daily journaling, sometimes multiple entries, this feature becomes more useful.

Every night as I write in my journal, I reflect on the day. The things that seem so large and problematic right now, will inevitably be so small in my rear view mirror next year. After I finish my entry, I look at the past entries for the day. I see what I was thinking, what was most important to me at that time in history and think about how far I’ve come since then. I feel like it helps me regulate my mental health to see where I am and where I am going - but also where I’ve been.

Survey

I saw this graph on Day One’s blog some time back and it made me really interested in how others journal. I feel like I fit into each of these categories at different times. Which one are you?

Posts

• Recharge

• Team Castles

• How I Use Notion For OnCall Rotations

• AI isnt ready to run the business…yet

Books

• Its OK to Be Angry About Capitalism, by Bernie Sanders - A book that is essentially the playbook Senator Sanders used during his 2016 and 2020 presidential bids. Some was usable and actionable, some was more of a rehashing of the campaign he ran.

• What If? 2, by Randall Munroe - Interesting questions answered in a scientific and humorous way from the creator of xkcd. Listed to the audible version which was great while I walked around.

• Different Mangas and graphic novels and some novels in the same universe as the manga. Nothing remarkable.

Links

• Push Notification Best Practices: 7 Questions Designers Should Ask - If you are thinking about adding push notifications to your app, give this a read. I am increasingly frustrated by random notifications that aren’t actionable, this is a good guide for the state of why use a push notification.

• Numbers To Know For Managing (Software Teams) - A pretty interesting in key numbers for managing a software team. I found the 500 number of employees where the CEO becomes a political figure in the company interesting. Especially thinking down the chain, your one over or two over joining a meeting changes the dynamic at a larger organization.

• Usage as the Moat in AI - a good through on AI today and how it’ll continue to gain traction. Innovation = Innovation + Distribution.

• Privacy UX: Privacy-Aware Design Framework - an older post, but essential in how designers and engineers should be thinking about privacy across our products we build. The whole series is great, but the framework laid out here is something to aspire for when building software.

• Traffic Safety Declining in U.S., Bucking Global Trend - From 2022, but the trend continues to worsen in 2023. In the article, it suggests the easiest solutions are the simplest. I’ve seen where changing the shape of the drivable road and protected bike lanes have dramatically reduced speed and distracted driving.

Other

• I've been making some really good old fashioned cocktails after visiting the Violet Hour here in Chicago. I’ve been cutting a hunk of orange and stirring the cocktail with that before straining which imparts just a hint of orange to the drink.

Just a year ago, we were laughing at the funny responses we got from AI answering questions. Recently, we're seeing realistic-looking answers, but they respond with confidently false claims. AI is as dumb as it will ever be; it will continue to improve and be a great disruptor of work we currently spend a lot of time calculating or doing creative and critical thinking.

For now, let's use AI as it's meant to be used; as a tool in our toolbox to help create better, more refined things. It's the electric screwdriver in the toolbox, something that helps us build faster.

My company has a concept of incident coordinator and the job is to coordinate (shocking). If some system is down and we need to page in a site reliability engineer or a database engineer, you need to bring them up to speed with the details quickly. Here is the system I have developed in Notion to help me keep track of the notes, the people and the links needed later for retrospectives.

Keep It Simple

As I have done with other things, such as my dossier, I want to keep things as simple as possible when dealing with an incident. I don't want to waste mental energy on a complex system; I just want a button and a series of prompts that I can fill in at a later time.

Not only is the system I built simple, but I also try to keep my notes simple by using bullet lists. I don't mind if there are typos, as I use them to feed into my official review later. These are my personal notes, so they may not look polished.

Templates & Template Buttons

Within my notes database in Notion, I have created a template to collect all my on-call notes for the current rotation. This template includes a pre-flight checklist that I must complete before starting my rotation. The checklist consists of reviewing documentation, attending the hand-off meeting, and completing other administrative tasks, such as checking the PagerDuty app on my work phone to ensure it is up to date. Additionally, the template adds various fields, tags, and other data to the note, which further distinguishes it as an on-call note.

I added a template button to the template. When clicked, it will add a new toggle entry with a pre-populated list of items to fill out, such as who is involved in the incident, when it started, when I was paged, and more. At the bottom, there is a section for me to start adding my notes in a bullet list.

Data & Notes

When adding data to toggle entries, I strive for accuracy as I may need to reference them later in reviews or leadership meetings. I ensure that all timezones are consistent when logging notes, so reporting is clear. These sections often require multiple updates throughout an incident.

There are areas for relevant links to Slack threads, Datadog dashboards, and, of course, the PagerDuty incident, where I will post official updates on the incident until it is resolved.

The notes are a running list of things that are being said, leads that are being tracked, and things that have been ruled out. If necessary, I can read a list of things we have tried and our current leading theories. Sometimes, it feels like I am a court stenographer.

Final Result

The final result is a note with a template button with lots of pre-populated data that I can use to quickly get people up to speed on the ongoing incident as well as report on details at a later time. This template will be included in my upcoming Engineering Management Notion template collection.

When walls are built around teams, the culture of collaboration can quickly die. Sending a "knight" to fight a battle on behalf of another team, can create tension and a lack of trust. Often times, when things don't go as planned, it's easy to bring in higher-ups to try and get things moving in the right direction. However, this approach can be counterproductive for many reasons.

Instead, it is important to break down these walls and foster a culture of collaboration and teamwork. While many companies claim to value a cohesive team, my experience suggests that this is rarely the case. Managers are often allowed to build castles around their teams and moats around their domains. You may need to enter a ticket to talk to someone on the team, and the lead time can be up to 90 days. This can be frustrating and unproductive.

One way to break down organizational walls is to promote cross-functional teams. By bringing together individuals from different teams and departments, collaboration is encouraged and silos are broken down. This can help streamline processes and improve communication, ultimately resulting in better technology outcomes.

Another way to break down barriers is to focus on understanding the needs of your end-users. By prioritizing user feedback, collecting usage data, and finding a good product-market fit, you can ensure that your software development efforts are aligned with the goals of the company and its customers. This, in turn, leads to greater satisfaction among all teams involved.

Quiet Time

After reflecting on my daily routine, I realized that spending a lot of time in meetings is draining for me. The act of being present - talking, absorbing information, and organizing thoughts - leaves me feeling exhausted. It's important to recognize this aspect of yourself, especially when you have plans with people outside of work. To recharge, I prefer to sit in a quiet room with dim lighting and decompress. Sometimes, I listen to light meditation music from the Calm app or YouTube. This helps me transition out of my drained mood and become more engaged in conversations with friends and family.

Cooking

When I'm doing unstructured work such as pulling together data for project timelines or chasing down leads on how to get things done with partner teams, I usually want to have a very rigid task list and feel organized. This is where cooking comes in for me. I love to put on some Spanish guitar music and go through a new recipe. I've even made it a goal to cook more new recipes. Cooking is my current way to relieve stress and also enjoy a great meal.

Walking

I walk a lot. So far this year, I've walked about 100 miles. I try to take a couple miles walk during lunchtime, and after work, I walk another 4-5 miles. Walking provides dual benefits for me; physical activity for overall health and mental stimulation. Walking also helps me detach from work and other stressful things, giving me time to contemplate and contextualize things that are stressing me out. I find that I have most of my revelations about my current stressors while on a walk.

Sleep

It's no surprise that sleep is one of the best things you can do to recharge your energy. Not only does it help you mentally, allowing your brain to work out problems as you dream, but it also helps you physically. I can't tell you how many times a good 9-hour sleep has boosted me up when I was feeling physically drained after long work hours and on the brink of getting sick. When life gets stressful, it's important to prioritize sleep. Find ways to get more quality sleep, such as keeping your room colder, wearing an eye mask, or drinking sleepy time tea before bed. Also, make sure to avoid screen time for at least an hour before sleeping.

Posts

• January 2023 Review

• Goals

• How I Use Notion to Manage My Work Week

• How I Use Notion to Manage People

Books

• You’ve Been Played, by Adrian Hon - A fascinating dive into gamification of everything, the science behind it and some of the good and bad ways its being used today.

• Endurance, by Scott Kelly - I’ve always been fascinated by space and astronauts, and remember following the Kelly brothers when they were active at NASA. This is a great book to see insights into what its like to be an astronaut. I am usually enamored by the systems and checks that NASA enforces for their work - everything is documented, cross referenced and redundancies to fall back on.

Links

• The Use/Reuse Paradox - Usability vs. reusability is a design trade-off. Increasing one reduces the other. Great musings on something that has been on my mind lately.

• How to spend your first 30 days in a new senior-level role - Addressing the first 30, 60, 90 days in a new senior leadership role and what to avoid doing while building trust.

• Val.town - I saw this over on Tom MacWright’s blog where he is building a new tiny api without the servers and fuss type service. I am looking forward see what this evolves into.

• From Overwhelming to Intuitive: Effective Data Table Design - I’m a sucker for good data design, and over on Muzli they posted a whole write up on do’s and dont’s for displaying data in tables. Worth a read to challenge yourself if you can improve your own designs.

Other

• Took a quick trip to Washington D.C. this month and visited a couple breweries. Had a great time exploring the city since the last time I was there in 2007.

• A couple months ago, I got this cocktail smoking kit, and I have been having a lot of fun making some smoked old fashioned at home.

Today, I am going to focus on the bottom 2 boxes for People and Projects. I’ve grayed out the areas talked about in the previous post - but they are still important to the overall structure I set up for using Notion for Engineering management.

People

As someone who manages people, I find it helpful to maintain a database of the individuals I work with on a frequent basis. This way, I can easily associate tasks, notes, and projects with each individual, ensuring that my work with them is well-organized and tracked.

Basic Information

I input essential information into certain fields that I may need to refer to at various times. This information includes the person’s username, employee ID, work discipline, team, and other relevant data that can aid me in cross-referencing with other systems. This data remains relatively static and serves as a reference point.

TODOs, Notes

Next, I add sections for TODOs and Notes as linked databases within the person entry. I filter these sections based on the Who field of a note or task, which will automatically display all relevant items. This allows me to easily view all tasks and notes associated with a specific person in my people database, including my TODOs and notes regarding that person. Examples of such notes could include "Move 1-1 with Homer Simpson to Wednesday" or notes containing my thoughts from a meeting attended by the person.

Having this view on the data provides a comprehensive view of the progress made with an individual over time. After completing a task or note on my weekly dossier, I don't usually revisit the notes unless I need to find a particular piece of information. Additional ways to view the data and more data points on the notes and tasks can expedite the search process.

Special Details

When creating entries for people, I like to include significant milestones or life events that help me remember them better. Examples include their or their child's birthday, or a memorable vacation they took that I can ask about in the future. During each meeting, I actively listen for such details and jot them down in a bullet list for easy reference. This way, I don't worry about forgetting important information about someone.

Projects

Similar to the people database, I maintain a database for projects, both active and completed. A comprehensive project entry should include its start and end date, a section where you can attach people who are involved, and a regular check-in feature to monitor the project's progress. However, this database is not meant to replace a proper project management suite such as Jira or Trello. Instead, it serves as a tool for me to keep track of people, tasks, and notes related to a specific project, as well as any relevant artifacts that are associated with it.

Description

As you close out projects and move away from the work, it's important to have a clear understanding of what the project was, its goals, and the work that was done. This ensures that you can easily revisit the project in the future and understand its context. To make this process easier, it's helpful to include links to relevant wiki pages, dashboards, or other resources that provide additional information.

TODOs, Notes

Each project should have sections for your linked databases to notes and TODOs filtered by the project field, similar to the process used for the people database. This view is particularly useful for short-lived projects since it allows you to access all the artifacts related to the project in one convenient location. All your notes and tasks are listed in one place, along with links to the resources you added in the previous section.

Final Result

With People and Projects we are rounding out the databases I use to manage a staff of software engineers. In the next part of the series, I'll discuss an important way to organize being on call and your building a process to make it less stressful. Once I finish this series, I'll provide the full range of templates for how I use Notion as an engineering manager.

In part one, I'm going to discuss how I organize my weekly tasks, notes, and create a database of rich content that I can refer back to with dates, tags, and more. As this series progresses, I'll demonstrate additional aspects of this system, such as people management and project management.

The Dossier

The name is cooler than the actual database. The Dossier is the object I create every week when I start on Monday morning. Moving over my TODOs from the previous week, adding new tasks from the slacks and emails I got over the weekend and things I need to do to set up my week.

I keep this dossier open on its own window all week. Typically on the right side of my screen where it remains visible through all my meetings, slack conversations and easily accessible if need to add new Notes, or TODOs.

When I began laying out the dossier, I wanted to ensure it was as minimal as possible. I strongly believe in simplicity and avoiding unnecessary complexity. Too much process makes things more difficult, and when you need to switch direction quickly, you'll want something lightweight to move around with.

Fields

I wanted to make the fields in each dossier meaningful and impactful. To achieve this, I included the date range and tags for future sorting. I also incorporated the Rose, Thorn, Bud (RTB) method of reflection, which allows for examination of highlights and challenges from the week, as well as excitement for the upcoming weeks. Additionally, I added a field to quantify my energy at the end of the week on a scale of 0-5. These fields can be used for quarterly or year-end reviews.

Body

The body of the dossier is where I spend most of my time. I add references to my to-do list and note lists, and include a small section with bullet points for jotting down thoughts that don't require an action item or full note. In the past, I referred to this section as "Follow Ups," but it doesn't always contain items to follow up on; it's simply a place for my thoughts.

I use this section of the dossier to add more sections when I need to frequently reference another database. It's especially helpful when I'm on call and need to take notes over multiple weeks, including weekends. It's also been very useful during year-end review season when I'm writing reviews for weeks at a time. Having an entry point into these work stations has been invaluable. It also serves as a record of my work for that week, demonstrating that I was working on reviews during those weeks.

TODOs

I maintain a primary list of all my tasks, which are filtered by date, project, and tags. This database is used for tasks ranging from painting my home to sending out an email reminder about an upcoming meeting at work.

I link these tasks to my dossier by using the date field. If the target completion date falls within the date range of the dossier, the task will appear in the dossier. If I complete the task during the week, it will be moved to the "done" tab in the same database view. I strive to achieve Inbox Zero on my tasks each week, but it doesn’t always work out.

I use various sorts and filters on the task view to prioritize the most important tasks. Additionally, I add tasks to the list as I complete them, as a way of documenting that I got the job done. For instance, if I receive an email with a 3-minute task, I'll complete it, add a task to the list, and then close it out. Later, if I can't remember if I updated a certain spreadsheet as requested in an email, I can refer to my dossier for completed tasks.

Notes

Similar to the TODO database, I keep a primary note database and use a series of filters to attach the note to this dossier. These notes are searchable both inside and outside the dossier. A note doesn't need to be significant; it could be a few words, some paragraphs, or a structured document with tables, toggles, and more.

As I have created notes over the months with this system, I have found ways to automate some of the common notes I need every week by adding templates to the note creation. If I need a 1-1 document or an on-call incident report, I simply click the template on the note and it populates a bunch of fields and adds content to the body that I use to start filling in.

While these notes are not direct children of the dossier, they act like they are in many ways. These notes I create on the dossier stay on this dossier unless unlinked. They share a relationship and can be toggled back and forth if I am on a note and want to see the context of the dossier it came from.

Final Result

The final result is a dossier with attached notes and to-do tasks that are drawn from a primary source. It includes templates, fields for projects, people, and more. In the next part of the series, I'll discuss the people management side of my Notion setup. If you followed along, your dossier might look something like the screenshot below. Once I finish this series, I'll provide the full range of templates for how I use Notion as an engineering manager.

I use this process to set attainable work and personal goals every year, and I think it could be helpful for you too. I'll explain some of the principles and provide an example of how I set it up in Notion for my regular check-ins.

Scratch Pad

The first step in creating goals is to get your ideas out of your head and onto paper. I use Notion for this, creating a page with a bullet list and jotting down ideas of what I want to achieve this year, how I can improve on last year, and any aspirational goals I have. Not all of these items make it into my yearly goals, but I find it useful to write down everything on my mind, similar to how I journal. Once you have your ideas written down, it's time to refine, combine, and categorize them.

Refine & Categorize

The next thing I do is take my list and identify any common themes, such as health, mindfulness, or cooking. I then group these items into categories. With the categories and grouped items set, I start to assess if the goals are achievable. "Lose Weight" is not a good goal, as it is not actionable and lacks a clear endpoint. To refine the goal list into smaller, actionable objectives, I follow a naming convention: [Verb] [Number] [Goal Item] [Timeframe], e.g. [Walk] [60k] [steps] [per week].

Objectives

Now that I have a list of refined and categorized goals, I add them to my objectives database in Notion. This database collects all my goals I want to work on this year. For example, I add the objective "Walk 60k steps per week" to the database. This goal is specific, achievable, with a measurable objective and a realistic timeline.

Objectives should follow the SMART criteria: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Read more about SMART objectives.

Metrics & Measurements

After you have spent time defining, refining, categorizing, and setting clear objectives for your goals, it's time to understand how you will actually achieve them. One of the most important parts of your goals is how you measure success by determining the metrics for each objective.

Metrics and measurements are often used interchangeably when setting goals, but I make a distinction in my system. Metrics are the type of measurement, and the measurement is the actual data and where to collect it.

For example, for the goal "Walk 60k steps per week", my metric is steps. So when I look at this objective, I know my metric is measured in steps. The measurement is where I collect my data from, and for me, it's in Gyroscope. On a specific week report, I count the steps and add them to the results for each week in the objective.

For each objective, I have a measurement where I outline where to find and read the data for the metric. I add details about what the data is and what it is not. I also add screenshots of examples of the data from the places I collect them. This level of detail has been extremely helpful when writing my results, especially for goals with longer cadences.

Results

As I mentioned previously, a result in my system is associated with an objective. In Notion, I have a Results Database that is linked to the Objectives Database. For each objective, I list out the results in a table, where I can edit the measurements and add new entries as required by the cadence.

For example, for the objective Walk 60k steps per week, I add a new result entry each week and update the current week with the actual data from that week. So if I walk 90k steps in a week, I would see my result for that week as 150% complete. These results are aggregated to show the overall progress of the objective, displaying a percentage over time.

Cadence

It's important to set up a cadence for each of your goals. For some, it's daily or weekly; for others, you might want to check in on a monthly or quarterly basis. In Notion, each objective has a cadence field that I use to filter in different views for weekly and monthly check-ins. Doing regular reviews of your objectives, metrics, and measurements can help identify if the goal is still relevant or if you need to make adjustments to your behavior to achieve it.

Most of my goals have weekly or monthly cadence checks, which helps me stay on track and hit my goals by the end of the year.

Celebrate Wins

This is a new addition to my goal system this year. Studies show that having something to look forward to when you complete a goal can be beneficial. For example, when you were a kid, you may have been incentivized to eat your vegetables by the promise of a reward, such as ice cream. The same concept should apply to your goals.

Take time to think of something you can do to celebrate your goals being met in 2023. Each objective may have an obvious reward. In my earlier example of walking 60k steps a week, a good way to celebrate that goal might be to buy a nice pair of running shoes.

Example: Write Daily In My Journal

Here is a screenshot of my objective to write in my journal every day. To date, I have a 1060-day streak of writing in DayOne. My goal is to continue this mindful habit and not miss a day. To help me achieve this, I created templates to prompt me when I have nothing to write.

The screenshot shows a category, year selection (2023), cadence, progress and results fields. The body includes the measurement and metric detail, my celebration blurb and a definition of the objective.

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.

I looked into Literal, but it wasn't what I was looking for; it was too similar to Goodreads as a social network. Then, I found Book Tracker by Simone Montalto - a simple iOS and Mac app that uses iCloud to store your library. It's fast, simple, and no-frills. It allows me to get my library organized and to actually track books I own and my ever-growing wish list.

Things I love about it is it syncs through iCloud, so I can use it on my iPhone, iPad and Mac seamlessly, where I might add some details about a book on one, or update progress on another. It also keeps detailed stats about the books I’ve read including pages, read streak and purchases by month.

I use the tagging system to track different collections of books, like a Spotify playlist. I also use the series feature to link related titles, such as my A Book Apart collection, so I can easily view the full collection from a single book title.

A note about Privacy from their website:

Book Tracker is an app for tracking books that doesn’t collect any of your personal data and doesn’t track you in any way. Books should be fun, not another reason to worry about your data privacy.

I absolutely love that as a privacy statement.

This was a great first step to get my notifications under control and limit my screen time, since I was no longer constantly checking for the latest alert. Next, I started to adjust more settings on the Focus Modes I had set up on iOS. I had a couple of automations, such as my Night automation, which turns on Do Not Disturb at 10pm and silences all notifications, calls and apps from appearing on my home screen. Of course, there are exceptions for people on my favorite list, whose calls come directly to my screen. I have other automated Focus Modes set up for when I am working out, running or out for a walk. Again the exceptions are applied here too. You can even set up focus filters now, which will configure some applications when you’re in a certain focus mode like toggling a specific inbox in your mail app, or set a tab group on safari.

The final tip for getting the most out of Focus Mode is to set up screens for each mode. This is now easily configurable in iOS 16. For my bedtime mode, I use a screen with only two apps: my phone and my alarm. That way, if I pick up my phone when I should be asleep, I can only access two apps without putting in some effort. I do the same with my workout Focus Mode, which only displays a screen with specific health-related apps.

Deleting unused or unwanted apps and setting time limits on others using the Screen Time > App Limit feature has been a critical feature for me to reduce mindless scrolling on my phone. You can set a time limit per day by app, multiple apps, or even by app category (like social apps). For example, I limit my Instagram usage to 2 hours a day, since I was spending way too much time scrolling through reels.

Since you can share your Focus Mode across all devices, you are also able to set screens for your iPhone and Apple Watch during a Focus Mode. This helps you stay in the zone and reduce distractions. I have been tweaking some of these screens and app settings to give me the optimal level of control and focus. Setting up Focus Modes for Work, Bed, Dinner, and Workouts has been a huge help in keeping my screen time lower.

I’ve had a bad habit of giving out my real email address to any company that was asking. Every order I made on a shop, forgetting to click the opt-in for email newsletters. But its not just me - companies have been really aggressive lately in their email campaigns, emailing several times a day and dozens of times per week. The checkout forms that don’t tell you you’re subscribing to their email newsletter.

So in November I set off to unsubscribe to EVERY email I got in my inbox for the month. Started off simple, couple old newsletters I liked once, but never opened anymore. Apple Mail has an unsubscribe feature built into the mail client that surfaces the often times hard to find link in the email footer.

Next came the pre-shopping holiday sales emails. And it was great to unsubscribe from these before the onslaught of emails daily. My daily email count went from around 40 to 20. Progress! There were two companies that were nearly impossible to get rid of from my inbox. Ticketmaster, I am convinced add you to so many slightly different lists that when you unsubscribe from one, it doesn’t give you an option to unsubscribe from all. This took time, but I think I am fully unsubscribed from that hell company’s emails.

Duluth was particularly challenging, after going through the complicated form about 25 times, I still kept receiving emails from this company. I am happy to say, since Thanksgiving weekend, I haven’t received any emails from them, but it was getting to a point where I was about to look up email rules and violations. My best guess is they added me to a bunch of campaigns at the beginning of the month and the primary email list wasn’t consulted before the campaigns are sent out. Really annoying, Duluth.

My conclusion here is that waking up to only 2-4 transactional emails feels like what email is suppose to be. I say it a lot, but for us in tech, we need to be better about how we use the technologies deployed. I’m more than happy to see a reboot on email and newsletters. Oh, and while we’re at it, lets stop putting newsletter sign up form pop ups on every damn website, especially in e-commerce. It’s especially painful on mobile.

In October 2022 wanting to rapidly produce some new reports I felt constrained by the code I had mindlessly wrote over the last couple of years. So with a glass of whiskey in hand, I spent a few hours digging deep into my code and began to refactor large chunks of the application.

I had recently installed the performance monitoring from OhDear and having just switched to a fresh server on DigitalOcean, I was seeing an average of 700ms to load the site on a cached data layer. This was crazy since its a relatively simple website that pulls data from its own MySQL database, it can probably be faster.

After a few hours, I had improved the performance more than 90% and the site was now loading in about 100ms. The page weight from 8k+ models and thousands of queries to just dozens. The site is now blazing fast due to a few refactors and relying a lot more on the framework for things that its good at, like relationships.

Laravel Debugbar

I was introduced to the Laravel Debugbar by Barry in 2013 building some applications for a digital marketing agency and needing to see data on a page as I was learning Laravel. Over time this tool has become such a powerful item in the development of many of the sites I work on.

Im not going to get into the full gamut of things you can do with this tool, there are many many blogs that have gone in depth here. But I will talk about the tabs I kept checking for the performance improvements.

Using the Queries tab will show what your queries are in SQL. You can also click on a query to see a backtrace of where the query was executed in a file. It also tracks the time it took to execute the full load of queries. In the screenshot you can see the 8 queries loaded in 152ms from a cold load.

Models is a great tab to check what models you are loading underneath the view. Before the refactor I would see thousands of Result, Hospitals and Vaccine models being loaded leading to bloated page weight and load times.

On the right side of the bar, you can see the memory usage, here it’s 2MB - before the refactor memory usage was up to 49MB at times. Request Duration was a good metric to watch as I reduced queries and models the request time dropped from 17 seconds to 100 milliseconds.

WebController

This is where most of the performance gains came from. As the months went on, I kept stuffing more and more into the primary controller that fed all the views on the site. Adding a banner for delayed results required me to pass that data on each view from the controller. Without eager loading, I was making multiple trips to the database to get data and transform it into the contract for the screen.

Deciding to rip up the WebController and only let it handle the things a controller should handle made it really simple. Now, I just want to grab statements (formally reports, another overloaded model) and split them into this week and last week sets. Thats it.

Data Transforms and relational data is handled elsewhere. This simplifies the controller and only has it handle the data needed to pass to the views. Here on the index, it reduced the queries made from nearly 3k to just 15 and the request duration from 17 seconds to 100 milliseconds. There were almost 8k models being loaded on this one page - that was reduced significantly to just 82.

Statement Model

Before the refactor, I had created a massive model called Report that combined all the data models I used for the site data including daily results, hospital data, vaccine data, variant data, demographic data.

I had many methods in that Report model that had even more arguments for each. A strategy I followed during this refactor was to keep it simple and fall back on more framework methods where possible. Here is a clip from the Statement Model where I wrote a simple from method where you give it s date and it returns a transformed statement to you in the format expected for the web views.

I also wrote some clear documentation for later Tyler, even though the code is pretty clean and readable now - When you spend months away from the code, this is a much faster way to onboard.

StatementsTransformer

Believe it or not, a lot of the transforming of data was repeated in various methods within the WebController. I spent some time months ago to write some transformers for when I import the data from the IDPH API to map to my database but still had a lot of repeated code to transform for web views.

I spent a considerable amount of time cleaning up this code and taking care to not repeat too much of the work, building some helper functions in the Transformer for percent calculation and color selector indicators. This screenshot shows the primary method called after initializing a new StatementsTransformer. The return will be the array full of the data for web views in the correct format, so I didn’t have to change any contracts on the front end after this refactor.

Relations

After the rewrite of the WebController, clean up of the Transformer and the new streamlined Statement Model, cleaning up the relationships between the main results and the secondary data used on every page like hospital and vaccine data helped speed up the page time by allowing me to eager load the data using built in Laravel functions.

Now with the relationship solidified eager loading is super simple.

Result::with(['hospital', 'vaccine'])->get();

Conclusion

Spend a little time to refactor your code. Don’t be too tied to concepts or architectures and take small steps to break apart the application. Try to refactor a chunk til it works again, then work the next chunk. Using tools like Debugbar can help identify areas you can focus on, like too many queries or models being loaded. I think refactoring has been more fun than actually building the site itself.

I have the Amazon app installed, and I use it rarely. But when I do, I use the smile variant of amazon which donates some tiny fraction of the order to a local non profit. I figure, if I’m going to feed the beast, I might was well have a morsel go to something good.

I have been deleting apps, disabling notifications for some time, so I went into the Amazon app settings to stop these advertisements from popping up on my screen. Guess what happened? They block you from participating in AmazonSmile if you try to disable “Personalized Notifications” in the app settings. Disgusting.

Looking back on my notifications in Apple’s screen time tool, I found that the amount of notifications have ramped up dramatically. 49 notifications over Thanksgiving, 128 during the week after Thanksgiving, and 57 following that. The week I’m writing this, its on pace for about 8 per day. 

I’ve since uninstalled the app. Shame on you Amazon, and the product people who made this decision.

Touch Design For Mobile Interfaces by Steven Hoober

This book was a great breakdown on mobile interfaces and how to improve them. I’ve written about how Mobile Interfaces Are Shit and Touch Design For Mobile Interfaces gives a lot of ways to think about building for smaller screens. There was also a bit about the history of touch screens I found nerdy and fun.

Design for Safety by Eva PenzeyMoog

Design for safety came out late last year and I quickly snapped it up. I love a good A Book Apart volume, and this one was right up my alley as I was working on planning a new product at work. A lot of the insights in the book are good reminders of how not thinking through how a product might be used to hurt someone could impact the user experience.

The 99% Invisible City by Roman Mars & Kurt Kohlstedt

Look around you as you walk through your neighborhood, or drive to get groceries. There are things all around you with deliberate designs and for good reasons that you might not think about. From dividers on the interstate to the reason streets are designed the way they are. Its a great read for the curious minded. Pop this in as an audible while you walk around the city, it might change your perspective.

The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi

This was a fun scifi book where a delivery driver finds himself in a dinosaur like world working with a preservation society. I was impressed by the story, quick read and gripping. One of the first books I’ve read that has used COVID as a plot point.

Farm (and Other F Words) by Sarah K Mock

Another area I began to read more into this year was farming, agriculture and food production. Sarah Mock has a lot couple great books about finding what a great farm is, and what makes it great. She also explores the ups and downs of owning a farm, producing crops and why its more lucrative to grow commodity crops even if they get blown away in a storm.

Disrupting the Game by Reggie Fils-Aimé

Being a Nintendo fan of the early 2000s, Reggie was constantly in the game magazines I bought at the store. I remember seeing this large dude in a suit holding the tiniest gameboy micro on stage and thinking he was abnormal for the industry. In this memoir, I learned so much more about his upbringing and came to appreciate even more his leadership style and commitment to the nerdy stuff. He was also a meme and leaned into it.

How to Prevent the Next Pandemic by Bill Gates

Following up 2021’s book on preventing a climate disaster, Gates has another attainable and actionable book on how to prevent the next pandemic. In this book he outlines the steps we should take and fund as a global health system, reporting and developing better mitigation efforts. Plans like this arent perfect, but a great start to build toward a future where the next COVID would be identified and squashed in the first 100 days.

Confessions of a Recovering Engineer by Charles L. Marohn, Jr.

I read several books in the Strong Towns realm this year, Confessions might be one of the better ones. A lot of great details about road safety, street design and why stroads (street+roads) are dangerous and bad for communities. If you are remotely interested in the design of your neighborhood, city or community, I highly recommend this book and the other Strong Town content.

Empire of Imagination by Michael Witwer

Only in the last year or so I’ve been really getting into board games and love the idea of world building and creativity that comes from games like Dungeons & Dragons. Empire of Imagination is a biography of the creator Gary Gygax and really I really enjoyed the journey to D&D.

The Carbon Almanac by The Carbon Almanac Network

The Carbon Almanac is the definitive source for facts and the basis for a global movement to fight climate change. I really liked the detail that went into the data and research for this book. It’s an attainable and approachable way to dive into the climate issue that needs our attention.

Tangled Vines by Frances Dinkelspiel

I picked up this book not really knowing what to expect. At first, I thought it was a fictional novel about a wine heist and sabotage. It’s a true crime story about multi-million dollar wine loss in an arson and the underworld of rare wines. A world I never through of and with such detail about the way rare wines were traded and auctioned, and the lack of regulation that led to the theft and greed and eventual capture of the con man.

The Light We Carry by Michelle Obama

A great follow up to the 2018 book Becoming. The Light We Carry is a bunch of lessons wrapped in the stories of the former First Lady. A great read to learn more about Michelle and insights into their parenting style.

In 2020 I rebuilt my blog and started to post regularly. I wrote about technology I was working on with using Laravel and Tailwind. I wrote tips on how I stay organized and manage stress through hard times and shared a bunch of links to books, articles and other fun stuff over the year. Work got really hectic and I stopped posting weekly, then fell off completely.

So I spent the last couple months rewriting the blog using Statamic and building up a list of articles to write. I spent some time to refresh the design a little bit, add categories so its easier to find similar content and then made the content more readable with better fonts, sizes and color contrasts. I even built a fun background selector so I can have some posts stand out if you’re reading them on my site, and not a feed reader.

2023

In 2023, my commitment is to share a post per week for the entire year. I may miss a week or two, but thats the goal I have for myself. I have a list of topics I am going to write about including a new version of staying organized, journaling and a host of new posts about people management. I also have some new stuff planned for how I use Notion in my work and personal life, more monthly reviews with links on things I find interesting and some deeper dives on topics like tech productivity, privacy and more.

RSS

The best way to keep up to date with me is to subscribe to the RSS on your favorite tool. I use Feedly to keep up with everyone since the destruction of Twitter. At this time, I do not plan on joining any other social network - so this is the best place to find me.

Next Up

Starting January 4 you will start to see weekly content posted here, starting with a write up on how I made my Covid tracking website 90% more performant by refactoring some code. See you then!

Google has started to roll out a new way to track people across the web, even if you’re not using the immensely popular Google Analytics with a program they call Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLoC. 

What that means to you is google can and will collect information about you as you browse around the web, details about the types of stuff you are looking at and what you like. They will use this data to build a better profile for ad delivery.

This feature is already shipped on Chrome, and is an opt-out toggle. Firefox, Edge and Safari will not allow this at the browser level. The EFF, Electronic Frontier Foundation thinks FLoC is a bad idea and has written up a post with much more elegant information that I spread out here.

I am a huge advocate for privacy and hate when companies over reach and put your data above your privacy. That’s why starting today all the sites I manage will be opting out of FLoC by null-ing out the header information google uses to track data. I already don't use Google Analytics, or any social / advertising or cookie collection on any of my sites, and this is just another thing I will do to continue to fight back on the privacy decay we are seeing today.

As a developer, you have many options to block FLoC. For laravel, I have installed a package by spatie. Further, Plausible has a blog post with a lot more information on tactics to use to disable FLoC tracking on your sites.

Sometimes it happens slowly at work, you start with a plan and more tasks come up with varying priorities, each seems to be more important than the next one. Are you expecting to give 100% of your effort on each of those tasks and get everything done on time?

I think the most important thing to consider when getting multiple competing priorities competing for your time is to understand what is being asked of you and how it ranks amongst the other work you have on deck.

On my team lately there have been many disruptions to our primary feature delivery for other important work and our resolve is to ask the requester to provide a priority and to know what doing this work will do to other priorities.

To take it a step further, these discussions should be happening at a program level - trading A for B will delay A by 2 weeks - and have sign off from all parties impacted by the decisions.

We’ve all tried to deliver everything being asked and quickly learned we either burn out from working too many hours and taking on many change requests, or we flat out fail at delivering anything. So when it comes to competing priorities, go simple - Don’t half-ass two things, whole-ass one thing.

As I reflect on the year and the things I accomplished, I cant help but feel like some things came short due to scrolling on Twitter or Instagram for hours without purpose.

As I did with Facebook years ago, I am deleting Twitter and Instagram from my phone for 2021. I will still tweet here and there, but will likely be list engaged in the community I follow. When I deleted these apps from my phone in early November, I didn’t have a shred of remorse, I didn’t miss it.

I will be focusing on reading, writing and diving deeper into topics I find interesting. I will be continuing this blog, although it might not be on a weekly basis, I will still write articles about technology, management, and the future I want to see.

I am focusing on my health, fitness and mental well being this year. Part of that is going outside, being active (even in the snow). Working out and feeling better about my health. Sleeping better, eating better, drinking a lot of water. But it also means, staying away from twitter and instagram on my phone to give my mind some space to think and grow.

I want to be more mindful and live the moment as it happens. I want to write about it in my journal to cherish the feelings and details I recall. I find myself not able to enjoy things like that when I am constantly on Twitter reading about what the president is doing, or about awful things happening around us.

As I said last month, I was going to dive deeper into topics and write larger studies on them. I began this month diving deeper into software development performance, measurements, merits, and downfalls. More to come of this.

Posts

Each week on Wednesday I posted a new blog. This month I wrote a couple ranting pieces.

• The Value of Keeping Your Phone Off

• October 2020 Updates

• Ongoing Feedback

• Mobile Experiences Are Shit

Books

• I read the memoirs of Edie Olczyk and I was inspired, and made me fall deeper for hockey. Check it out on Goodreads.

• I read the memoir from former president Barak Obama A Promised Land which was just fascinating, especially in today’s political climate.

• I also finished a book that is part of a larger study I am working on about software engineering productivity called Rethinking Productivity in Software Engineering by Caitlin Sadowski. More on this in the coming weeks.

Links

• Stop Counting Clicks.. The Myth is Busted. | by Robert Goesch - I don’t think its a selling point, but UX should reduce complexity as much as possible, and if that means adding a click to have the user make an informed decision, I am all in.

• Tailwind 2 came out this month and there are so many great improvements. I might upgrade the blog with it soon and write about the process.

• 5 communication best practices for remote teams No doubt this year has been tough with all thats going on, but many people got their first dose of working remotely over a long period of time, too. The once normal and traditional way people interact with and grow as a team has also had to change. This post is a great collection of tips to try on your team to improve overall communication.

• Working in fintech, I think about people’s financial well-being a lot. This article was posted on entrepreneur aboutcompanies offering well-being as a requirement over a perk.

• 2020 has been a lot of bummers, but there have been a lot of upsides. Popsci listed 13 science stories that aren’t so bad

I think about this frequently, how the design of these apps make my experience good or bad. How many times do I have to tap through screens just to find the thing I wanted?

I think we have gotten too far away from the experience side of what makes apps and websites great and have focused a lot more on the cold hard truth of money ruling the industry.

Banners, Pop overs and notices

It frustrates me to no end to see all the banners on a website, doubled or tripped up. Your cookie notifications, the “download the app for a better experience banner”, the pop over telling you to subscribe, and the scrollable ads that appear and interrupt the experience.

I will not download your app, I will not sign up for your content (which I haven’t even read yet). You haven’t earned my trust and you have damaged my perception of your brand. I am likely clicking away to read a similar article somewhere else.

Challenges with App Experiences

On my Feedly I subscribe to Muzli for design inspiration and to keep sharp on trends in the industry. These elegantly crafted videos show amazing mobile experiences, rich with interaction and perfect data to expertly fill the space of the screen, with the right splash of color and fonts so crisp you could cut your amazon box open with them.

When those designs become apps and make it to users hands things often change … a lot. Screen sizes vary, accessibility options vary, different versions of operating systems, different hardware capabilities. Your app has to compromise, and if done right, the user won’t notice at all.

Translating a design to a useable experience can be challenging when it comes to the things listed above. Working with your design team to think through these items before hand will ensure the best possible solution and not retrofitting accessibility or adjusting for font size differences.

Back to Basics

If you don’t mind losing images and rich media, many browsers now include a reader mode which takes the content into a distraction free mode and you can read like you were meant to read.

This isn’t exclusive to mobile, but that’s what I want to focus on here - if you take a look at the page size for adding all those images, javascript ads and extra content, you’re adding a ton of extra weight to the site that is ruining the experience.

Phones have limited screen real estate , and people don’t want to feel crammed into a box when they read content on the web. But its also annoying to have to scroll for 10 minutes to get to the end of the content. People are kind of picky.

Action

Lets take back the experience on mobile. No one wants a shitty app, or screen overloaded with junk and doesn’t work well when you have certain settings applied. Lets start from the beginning and design functional and flexible screens that focus on the content and the tasks you are completing, instead of the notices, banners and ads.

Too often we compromise on this, and I think we should take it back. Lets fold in the crap into nice functional designs.

Feedback and reviews shouldn’t be a one time a year ordeal, and feedback should never be a surprise to folks at the end of the year when they are hearing about their overall performance for the year.

Feedback should be given as soon as possible to the good or bad thing that has happened. If the person has done an incredible job on something, they’ve gone above and beyond the expectations, then tell them how they did!

Take it a step further, how did their actions directly impact the project, the team or themselves? Give them feedback about what they did, how it affected the project, who it touched and if you can, how it ties to the career ladder and progression toward their promotion.

This can and should also be done for coaching moments. Sometimes an individual caused more churn, caused a blocker with other teams, or their attitude might make the team feel uncomfortable. These are moments where you should be as direct as possible, again telling the person how their actions are affecting themselves, the team and the delivery of the product or feature.

If I have feedback for someone and we don’t have a regular one-on-one coming up, I will request a time to provide new feedback to them.

Hey, I had some feedback about that last meeting I wanted to give you. Can we meet for 15 minutes?

Being busy

I am guilty of this, too. When you are busy, its sometimes not easy to give meaningful feedback. Maybe you haven’t collected it from others, or maybe you haven’t been as focused on things that can be improved. But its still important to give feedback, so try to find the time.

I feel like a failure when teammates are asking me for feedback. I should be providing them with feedback more often.

My Framework

I think the biggest thing I can do for people is to listen, ask pointed questions about how they are doing. Dig a little deeper into their answers.

I try to collect feedback in a less formal way from peers. Typically everyone wants everyone else to succeed in their work and life. Asking about a project or a ticket on our board that a person is assigned to, might prompt a quick note about that person and how they are doing.

Some times, especially when a teammate is doing really well, I get unsolicited emails, slack messages and call outs in meetings about how someone is performing. This is amazing to hear - and I always pass it on as soon as I can.

I keep notes on each of my reports, with a bunch of things that make sense to me - but some of this might include notes about improvements, goals and other personal information.

I take all this data and use it to talk in one-on-ones weekly. If there are items to talk through, good or bad, I will bring them up. Otherwise I will ask questions and dig - find ways to help guide, instead of coach.

I picked back up my instruments and recording equipment and have been “in the studio” or finding an escape from the everyday nightmare that has become reality.

Posts

Each week on Wednesday I posted a new blog. This month I wrote a couple ranting pieces.

• September 2020 Updates

• Journaling

• Privacy

• Hard Things Are Hard, But That’s OK

• Focus on Depth

Books

I chose to watch more movies and TV shows this month than books. I read a couple, but nothing notable here. In November and through next year, I am planning on deep diving on a couple topics.

Since its the spookiest month, I tried to watch more horror movies.

• Hubie Halloween

• Greyhound

• Borat Subsequent Moviefilm

• The Social Dilemma

• Doctor Sleep

• Hearts Beat Loud

• Empire (maybe my favorite movie ever)

• Blast From the Past

• Hocus Pocus

• The Cabin with Bert Kreischer

Links

• 10 Tips to Make Apps More Human by Designing for Privacy

• Getting noticed as a remote engineer – and why it matters

• Less status updates, more coaching - The Engineering Manager

• 1-on-1 Meetings: More Important than Ever

In stressful times, I usually pour into my work, but lately I have been pouring into reading tweets and have lost the ability to identify the difference bots, trolls and ignorant people. I've seen my screen time on my phone go from just under 3 hours to well over 5 hours average per day. So I am taking a break from social media and writing this week.

But hey, NASA announced the discovery of water on the moon, so that's something? Anyway, see you all next week for the monthly update.

I wanted to build a blog network that people would want to read every day. I wanted to develop a Windows Vista widget to alert people when I published new articles.

Remember Windows Vista widgets?

But I never focused on PHP, the technology I was using daily to build solutions for the clients I worked with. I was good not great, and I was ok with that. There were so many other sparkly things to try out there.

Eventually this led to having many projects running at the same time. I wanted to build a phone app using phone gap, jQuery mobile and a PHP backend. I wanted to build a flash game for iPhone, and I quickly became burned out.

It took a couple iterations of this for me to learn to only dabble but not pressure myself to complete projects as long as I was learning more about PHP. The ins and outs, how to be more efficient with my code, how to deploy the code and maintain a smaller cleaner solution. I began to focus on depth of the tech I was using daily.

I stopped writing javascript, css, and any other new thing I wanted to learn and started diving deeper into PHP. I read more tutorials, books, blogs and YouTube videos to see how others would write things I wrote every day and began to learn more and more. I did this for Ruby when I started writing Ruby every day, I stopped coding PHP and everything else to focus on Ruby so I was confident in my ability to write, review and improve the codebases I touched.

I adhere to the learning model of see one, do one, teach one and it wasn’t until I focused on the depth of my knowledge did I feel confident in my ability to do and teach from my experience.

"A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor".

As I emerge from a mountain of work with my team and look back, I am feeling extra retrospective on how things could’ve be different and what outcomes we may have had. On the other hand, learning what we have may be the foundation to how the team grows in the future.

I have outlined a few things I think about and try to instill in my team and work ethic as I or my teams face challenges and difficult times.

Hard is relative

First thing I want to get out of the way is the definition of hard. This is relative to each individual, as well as entities like teams and organizations. Challenging tasks, projects and policies can all be hard in the eye of the beholder and over time, with experience doing those things, become easy.

Personally its pretty easy to assess if something is hard based on how well you understand it and if you can complete the task at hand. For me, learning Vue seemed like a tremendous goal, and over time I finally conquered that task. Jumping in was hard, going through many iterations of failed app builds was hard.

For a team, you have to get the pulse of the people that make up the team. You want some that feel like a job is impossible, others with a ton of ambition. You need a good balance to work together to accomplish the task. If you have a whole team who is questioning their ability to deliver, it may be an indicator that that project is hard.

What can you do as a manager when things are hard?

I say it a million times, but as a leader it’s important to listen. How are individual people affected by this hard project? Are they uncomfortable with the work they are producing, or not feeling like they are producing anything at all?

You and everyone in your team may be going through the same challenges at an organization level, but each person has a different perspective than everyone else. So it’s important to understand mindset of your team, feel rooted in the why and the how.

Things can be overwhelming. In projects that are demanding of time, give time off. Shift the workload around to lighten up the pressure on individuals.

When it feels like someone is fighting an up hill battle, give them space to slip. Build a strong support net behind them to let them slip and not miss the next move. Give them the space needed to learn what is working and what is not. If they have a bunch of tasks on their plate, help them redistribute so they can keep growing.

Looking for benefits in these hard times

Its easy to look at the wall in front of you and feel hopeless. Even with a support network and the promise of greener pastures on the other side. It’s also very important to acknowledge the hard time for being hard. If you ignore the challenge it doesn’t go away, it probably gets harder.

I tell myself and my team to focus on the upsides to the down times. With organizational challenges, it presents opportunities to change how things work. If the way we use to work isn’t working, then lets change it.

For conflicts with team communication, look at the opportunities to improve our process, look at tools and how we can all be on the same page earlier. Take this moment to reach out to the other leaders you are having a hard time communicating with and hit the reset button. Start over with a “I think we need to better align on this, because I think we are not working at our best here”.

If you take the opportunities to evaluate things when they are hard, and build up new processes and procedures now, when things are easy, it’ll feel like the smooth sea we dreamed of.

The smooth sea

Like the quote said, a smooth sea doesn’t make a skilled sailor. But without the stormy sea, we wouldn’t appreciate the smooth times and without the smooth times, we wouldn’t grow into the best ship captain on the ocean.

Keep an eye on when the storm is approaching, have a plan in place for when the boat is rocking, and come out the other side knowing you learned how to patch a couple holes in the ship as it splashed through the night.

While it’s important to not put ourselves in the hard path, we shouldn’t shy away from hard things. Difficult times help us grow, it can mean we are out of our comfort zone and trying new things. Risking our safety for the experience we need to grow.

I have worked in tech for many years, in the advertising, real estate, medical device, and financial sectors and I am lucky enough to have not had to implement creepy surveillance software into the code. Through logs and some form of analytics I was able to piece together how users interacted with our apps, but never had more motivation than that.

When you being to think about all the physical sensors you are attached to and couple that with the digital switches the picture of you becomes so vibrant that you would be shocked at how well companies know you, more than you even know yourself. In your iPhone you have:

• GPS

• accelerometer

• gyroscope

• barometer

• compass

• fingerprint or face scanner

• moisture

• proximity

• ambient light

• always listening microphone for Siri

• Near Field Comm (NFC)

Hell the new iPhone announced today has freaking LiDAR to scan your living room. On the Apple Watch there are even more sensors that can track your steps, your voice, your heart rate variability, blood oxygenation, pulse, body temperature, and your sleep patterns.

Digital sensors track your app usage, screen time, what you’re reading, what you like, the ads that work and the connections you make with friends and family. That data is fed into algorithms that generate models of who you are as a generic set of rules. Often this is used to sell you products via ads. But can also be used to predict if you are violent, if you’re susceptible to crackpot conspiracy theories and will spread them, or even if you were near a crime and are suspicious.

We really need to stop this as an industry. I realize data is used to feed applications, but they should not be used as means of currency to buy time with your friends online. The only way this can happen is through regulations.

The EU is already hitting back at these companies by putting users data in the hands of the users with GDPR. But the law is still kind of gray, and leaves open room for interpretation.

I have been following Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s new internet Inrupt Solid for a while and absolutely love the idea of users keeping their data and companies asking for permissions that users manage over time. Facebook wants to use your name and photo for registration, one day you decide you want to revoke privilege to that information, you do it from your own pod, not through the company that probably will never delete your data, anyway.

As startups and companies that give a damn, there needs to be a pledge or a seal of approval that can be used to show that you are not collecting any data that is not needed for the application you are using. Not selling data to third parties and have a written, reviewed data retention policy. You aren’t using third party vendors that collect your users data like google analytics, or Mailchimp.

Blackout is a tool built by The Markup that is the tip of the iceberg. We need more people that care about others privacy and to take action on their sites to stop the madness. We need people to log out of facebook, twitter and the like til they start respecting users privacy.

As designers and engineers, we can start by being up front about why we need certain data from our users. Tell them where we are collecting the data what it will be used for. Build that trust back up. This article on Muzli gives some tips on how to design for privacy - I joked on twitter that we should call it Privacy Driven Development

/rant

I use Day One to journal every day (at least I try to every day). Its easy to use, secure and private, its cross platform and it has great features. One of my favorites is the “on this day” memory of what you wrote about that day in history. You get to relive your journal day by day through time.

Memories

I love to write about things that are happening good, bad and indifferent. Before the pandemic, if I had gone out to dinner or met up with any friends, I would write a few lines about that. Maybe what we talked about, thoughts about them and what they are going through. I may add pictures, or quotes I am thinking of.

Through the day-to-day busyness I may lose track of these memories over the years. When was the last time I even spoke to Omer? And when I see the memory pop up in my journal it brings a smile to my face to recount the last time we had drinks. Sometimes that inspires me to reach out if it’s been a while.

I also feel a closure to the day when writing in my journal. I typically write at night, dumping my brain into the screen and trying to make sense of it. Some nights works better than others, but it always helps me sleep at night knowing I have drained my head of things I wanted to remember or people on my mind.

Thoughts and Ideas

You know when you wake up from a dream and can still remember everything about it including how you feel and what you were thinking during the dream. I don’t find myself in this scenario too often, but when I am, I reach for my phone and immediately jot down all my thoughts so its fresh and untampered. I add a tag of dream and go on with my morning routines.

Another way I use my journal other than notes is to log ideas and random thoughts I have. Things that pop in my head and stick with me for hours or days, I’ll end up writing down. I tag those with idea or random. If I am trying to process something about a problem I am seeing or having myself, I will write down the problem, I will write down some solutions or even what my ideal state is and try to bridge the gap.

I have even written down jokes I have thought of, but after looking back at them I don’t find them nearly as funny as I did when I wrote them down. But thats kind of the fun thing about a journal is to have the ability to look back and see how you evolve.

Journeys

A few times since I have been journaling I have thought it would be really useful to catalog certain events and decisions and details into a collection of pages. With Day One there are premium options that allow you to have multiple journals and I have created a few to track these journeys.

One such journal was about the time I worked as CTO of a startup part time. I wrote down our decisions, who I was talking to, our direction and milestones we were achieving. I also wrote a lot about the challenges we were facing and the conflict within the team. I do plan on blogging about some of this, eventually, as I learned a lot.

Another journal I separated out was for COVID. I wanted to keep throughs and news about the pandemic separate from the daily flow of writing.

COVID diaries

Shortly after I began to work from home, I started writing about coronavirus. This was around the same time it became a pandemic. There was a lot of information and a lot of things happening globally and I wanted to keep my head around it all. So I started to copy news headlines, my thoughts and what things I was personally seeing in the world.

Its been 204 consecutive days I have added entries to that journal. Some days its difficult to write about the things happening, others its therapeutic and hopeful, like when the positive vaccine new was breaking. I want to look back at this time and remember as much as I can when we are decades past this pandemic.

Why not start today?

I ask this question to everyone. Why not start journaling today? It boosts memory, reduces stress, helps solve problems and can resolve conflicts with others (like writing a letter to a loved one that you’re mad at).

This month was super busy, working late nights and long weekends as well. Not a pace I’d like to keep, luckily Q4 is looking much more sustainable, and I am looking forward to holidays even if I don’t know what that looks like this year.

Posts

Each week on Wednesday I posted a new blog. This month I deviated from the planned posts and wrote a couple reflecting pieces.

• August 2020 Updates

• Team Agreements

• Somehow I (Remotely) Manage

• Managing Stress

Books

I read a couple books I highly recommend this month as I found time to escape everything and just read alone.

• Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy - I really liked the way the author went over how data has already been a problem and warned how we might be on a path for more inequality.

• For the second time I read through Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking) - its such an interesting read. What people self-report, what they say in public is very different than what they act when they think no one is watching.

I also finally watched Parasite by Bong Joon-ho. I really loved the cinematography in this movie, the writing the characters. I wanted to watch another 2 hours of the movie.

Links

• What Are Geofence Warrants? – The Markup - “Police pegged McCoy as a potential suspect without security camera footage […] because his device had shown up as near the burglary site. The Gainesville Police Department had gotten something called a geofence warrant”

• The Hidden Costs of Constantly Shipping new Things - Mind the Product - A cautionary tale about building up a mountain of tech debt and a system that is a pile of code but not a concentrated software system.

• A really interesting UX case study on building the mars rover dashboard Designing a control panel for a Mars Rover by harsh vardhan singh

• Panic - Nova The successor to Coda is finally here. Through I have now switched to Visual Studio Code, this team is amazing and I will be testing it.

• Meeting everyone on a new team - Anna Shipman wrote a really great article on why you should take the time to meet everyone on the team you lead when you join a new company.

• How We Built a Real-time Privacy Inspector – The Markup - Blacklight creates a report on a given URL to show what kind of data might be taken from you by using the website. I am so excited to see this go so wide.

I wanted to share some things I have been doing to help manage stress during these times. This isn’t comprehensive and it varies day to day for me. If you need help, please reach out to someone.

Take a breath

This is probably the easiest thing to do. When you feel a lot of things piling up and your heart starts racing, pause. Take a step back for a minute and just breathe.

There are a lot of apps out there that can help you with this. My advice is to get away from your screen and breathe in for 4 seconds, hold for 4 and out for 4. Do this a few times, 5-6 times in a row. I find it helps to close my eyes doing this.

This will lower your heart rate, replenishes your body with oxygen and gets begins to calm you down physically.

Take a Walk

I wrote about getting out for a walk a while back and mentioned how it can hep to clear your head and de-stress.

This is another low effort task for most. For me, I find getting out helps me organize my thoughts and come back with a clearer mind to address the things stressing me out.

The sun gives you energy, walking and physical activity help move blood through your body and get your cardio going.

Play some music

I’m doing that now as I write this. I love music and try to listen to different things every day, I enjoy finding new music to vibe to. Its not always calming music like the new Mike Shinoda album. It might be hard rock, rap or some blues.

This is an exercise I try to do when I can get away from the computer and close my eyes and really get lost in the music.

Talk to your friends

Especially during this pandemic, I have found it so recharging and helpful to talk to my fiends and family. Doing so through a myriad of video chatting services has been a big help to reduce stress.

Sometimes you just need to vent, sometimes you want to hear about what others are up to. Sharing your life and thoughts and experiences gets your mind off your problems and helps you contextualize your thoughts and things you are going through in a wider world.

Quote

A quote I like to think about when I am feeling the pressure of the day comes from YouTube personality Philip DeFranco when he was starting his new business.

"Everyone should feel the way they are feeling, but just know that soon, this is going to feel a million miles away."

Today might suck, but it’s just a small part of your life and tomorrow can be better. Bit by bit, things are going to get better and in a few months you will look back at this time and think about the mountain you climbed as a memory.

I am in no way breaking new ground in this post, but I thought it might be useful to get share some things I do with my team during this time where we are all remotely working that can also help you lead a team.

Being Present

I can’t stress this enough, but as the manager, you need to be present. You need to show up and be in the conversation. Don’t just jump into a video call and sit like a fly on the wall. Interact, ask questions, ask for more opinions of those who aren’t speaking to get involved. Be the facilitator, but don’t steamroll the collaboration.

Your team is going to look to you for answers, for direction and for guidance when things are difficult. Since our view of body language has shifted to your upper torso and face, make sure you are showing your interest, that you are listening and that you are engaged. Ask questions and audibly confirm what you are hearing to show you are involved.

Every Voice Matters

We’ve all been in those meetings where two people dominate the conversation. They might be the most knowledgeable about the area of work, but that doesn’t mean that no one else has thoughts or experience to bring to the table. Make room for everyone. If you notice some of your team staying quiet in the meeting, call out by name and ask if they had any thoughts on the topic.

This is especially important for teammates who are underrepresented on your team or in the company. I have witnessed a female engineer being talked over and the conversation moved on. This is unacceptable, stop the conversation and bring the floor back to her.

"Monica, you were saying something about X, can you share more?"

This is a gentle nudge to the rest of the team to stop and listen to others in the room. It’s a way to amplify the voices of folks who are less likely to fight their way into a conversation.

Pay attention to this happening in your teams. It’s probably happening.

Extra Time In Meetings

This is especially important in 1-1s, but equally for any other meeting that we have as a team. Try to give a few minutes of extra time at the end of the meeting to allow for anyone to chime in about their thoughts. Again, without being able to read body language, you might not realize that someone on your team might be thinking of how to bring up a topic.

Don’t dismiss the team from a meeting abruptly. That just feels weird. It might be difficult if you are running over time, but have a clear action to continue the conversation on slack, or to set up a follow up meeting later that day.

Over communicate

I love having a running meeting doc with my team. Adding a header for the day of the meeting, and having topics in bullet points to go over. Adding sub points when we discuss specifics. This is a living documentation of the information being said.

When making announcements to the team or changes to how the team operates, or updates on goals for a project, its good to do so verbally. Follow up in a written form - through slack and/or email - then bring it up again the next day in the daily stand. Give room for questions and conversation. If there is time during your 1-1s, ask about the changes, reiterate some of the ways it might affect that team member.

Notes

I recently wrote about Staying Organized and this is one of those things that can help you manage your team remotely, too. Take a lot of notes so you can refer back to them later. As I mentioned above, I am a big fan of running docs. Add the touch points of things you talked about in that doc, or better yet, add a plan of topics before the meeting. You will want to reference these later.

If you are attending a meeting where there are things happening outside of your team and it might impact their work, take notes and share with them. Or if your team breaks off in small groups to swarm on how to solve a problem, having notes about what the decision was can save a lot of time for the whole team. Have you ever had to follow up on a 30+ post slack thread only to reach the end and have no conclusion. Add a TLDR with the path forward.

Small Things

This falls under the active listening category. Listen for things that your team is saying, what are they not saying? Listen to how they interact, is there conflict, or is someone shutting out others?

If you have a person who seems to be having a bad day and is being defensive in a meeting, ask to talk with them 1-1. Don’t let that slip through the cracks. It might be nothing, but it could be a fracture in the team and without intervention it could lead to a toxic partnership.

Listen for fun things, too. Like a person’s birthday, or their pet’s name. Maybe they are going on a road trip (hopefully socially distancing), or they share their adventures in making something new in the kitchen.

It can be tough when we aren’t sharing physical space to notice things about each other that make us human. Listen for these things and write them down.

One of the first things I did when I met my new team was to ask about their experience, what they liked to do, and what made them grumpy.

This is no way meant to be a guide to how to manage people remotely, there are numerous books out there to help with that. There are also so many blog posts out there to illustrate how folks manage people remotely and in person, but this is my small list of things I do and you can also do on your team to better support and foster growth for teammates.

I've used these in many teams over the years and it can make a huge difference, especially when things get hard. I wrote about leaning on a process when things get stressful, and Team Agreements are no different. I will outline some things I like to add and the guidelines I set up during the inception, but each team is going to be different and the more you learn about each other, the better the conversation is going to be. Not everything in this post will work for you. That's OK.

Set the tone

Sometimes teammates don't want to open up with each other about things that bother them. This is especially true if it’s a new team with a mix of new and old employees to the company.

Set the tone by explaining what the agreement is and what it is not. As a team, we want to work better without stepping on each other. We want to be productive and efficient and we want to give and receive feedback in a manner that doesn’t feel like a pile on.

This isn't meant to be a checklist, a document to consult to get someone in trouble or a rule of law to consult in a high court of the agile tribunal. We are all human with our own feelings, experiences and bad days. Lets make it easy and open to be able to talk to each other about what kind of environment we want to work in.

Its good to add this to the meeting agenda and lead with at the top of the meeting. I’ve learned how it’s refreshing to see this type of meeting especially for those who have never worked in a setting where their voice matters, or the voices of their teammates.

Pause a moment and ask for questions. Let people feel it out, poke at the goal and make sure everyone is on the same page for the task at hand.

Notes

A theme in a lot of my blog posts, take notes. Take a lot of notes. It's alright to distill down the working agreement after the meeting. But take a bunch of notes and add names to them as much as you can. You might find it useful to revisit what someone has said.

I usually keep a shared doc open on the screen for the whole team to see what I’m writing down and to ask if I captured the essence of what they are talking through.

Once you are done with the meeting, its also important to share this document out with the team and allow everyone to read and comment on the notes. Maybe someone had a specific example they wanted to add, or a clarification to an item logged during the meeting they thought of later.

Team Rules

I break down the session into two primary sections. The first is about the team rules. This is how individuals want to be treated, things they bother them and actions they hate and love to see working in a team. This might be difficult for some, especially if some of you’re team hasn't worked in a larger team before.

I usually keep a couple things in my pocket for if this part starts a bit rough. My number one thing Assume Good Intent in all interactions, always. It’s very rare to have someone work with you that is intentionally trying to sabotage your progress.

These team rules can literally be anything and I hope you write them all down, too. You might gain some insights into people you didn’t already know.

I've had teams making rules about bringing smelly food into the enclosed team rooms, being on time to all meetings (this will come up in the next section), how we close out standup every morning and how to address difficult feedback.

This is going to be very unique to your team at the time you write these down. Its also going to evolve and you should hold sync ups about these agreements when major changes happen to your team.

Expectations

The next section I focus on is exceptions. This is for the individuals on the team to ensure a happy team for the individual. :confused-face:

Here again I have a few items in my pocket to throw out if things are slow to start. Being on time to meetings is something I try very hard to do. I want us to start on time, and end on time. I want everyone to have their voice heard and to not rush to end the meeting because we’re over time. So I task everyone to try to be on time to all meetings, not for them, but for the team.

I again address the respecting each other and the pillar of assuming good intent. This is super important for me and for the team. It also shines outward in the interactions with other teams. Everyone has a different way of working and that’s great. As long as we know and respect each others boundaries.

Here we also try to define the meetings, the time frames and the expectations of work as a team we agree to. In some cases that is swarming on the testable column to get tickets out the door, other times it might be how and when to call out a risk, how to bring feedback to a process and the process of changing our processes.

I have found this section to be driven a little closer by the manager of the team. Setting a clear guard rail for the team to self regulate and to be on time for each other.

Documentation

Once you have all this great information and its distilled down into a clear and readable list of rules and items we all agree on, its time to document this in a highly visible area. Most companies have a wiki or intranet where you can have your own team pages. This is the perfect place to put it.

It's public for your team to see, to watch and monitor for edits. Other teams can see it and know how to best interact with you and your team. It also isn’t chiseled into stone and can be revised along the way.

When you document the agreement and put it up in a public space, make sure you pass that link to every nook and cranny of the team. We have our team wiki as a fast link on our Jira sidebar, in the team slack channel and I routinely post it for the team to view. Get the message out, this is how our team is working and how we treat each other.

Conclusion

I highly recommend setting up a team working agreement no matter the situation you find yourself in. This can be the difference between a team that is good and a team that is great. A team that knows where each others boundaries are and a team that is transparent and open to talk about the things that work well and not so well.

It was also my birth month and I did a lot of reflecting on the last several years of my life. The ups and downs. The work I’ve done and the work I wanted to do but haven’t been able to.

Posts

Each week on Wednesday I posted a new blog. I focused on a couple things I do during one-on-ones this month. Here is a recap

• July 2020 Updates

• What Makes You Grumpy?

• Anything You Need From Me?

• Going Above and Beyond

Books

I read a few books, but nothing stood out as worth of a review for this section. I did read a book that really turned me off of startup culture, being overly aggressive and relentless in the pursuit of making some derivative software to address a non-problem all in the name of making millions for sacrificing hours and years of your life.

I did watch a bunch of movies this month. Again, nothing that stood out as worthy of a review.

Links

• Literal looks like its going to be a nice clone to Goodreads, but focused more on the books and bookstores and less on the forced social experiences.

• Don’t Create Chaos - I loved this article, and it is something I am continuously thinking about. Strive for measurable outcomes, Insist all meetings have agendas, confirm complicated verbal communication in writing to solidify it, avoid using power to sidestep team decisions. Fantastic!

• Why Write ADRs A great write up from GitHub on why and when to use Architecture Decision Records.

• A clean start for the web I agree, we need a reboot. Not just in the platform of the web with a primary focus on privacy, but as Tom puts it here a separation of document and application web. Very thought provoking and inspiring to see what things are happening right now.

In 2016 I was in the process of evaluating my hosting and domain companies to allow for better management on pricing, privacy and ease of use. I was fed up with the poor customer support I was receiving from a once customer service centric company. Slow, no real answers and unexpected downtime left a bad taste in my mouth. And wondered if I’d ever find trust again.

So I was at a conference in Toronto learning about the future of web. I even watched someone demo a Bluetooth controlled robot through the web (wild). But it was after the conference was over that I got a lot of value. I walked up to a booth that was relatively empty.

The booth was Hover, a local to Toronto company that hosted domains and kept them private by default with no extra charge! At the time, I want to say Godaddy was charging 50 to 100 bucks per year to make a domain private and secure, now it looks like its around $8 to $15 a month. If you don’t know any better, you’ll just skip this step because its an added cost on top of your monthly bill.

The crew working the booth were tired after a long day of pitching the service. They had swag, but were out of a lot of what they allowed for in the first day of the conference. They gave me the pitch, and I loved it. Your domain is yours, we wont get in your way. We stick to what were good at, which is domains and my favorite, if you have a question you should get the answer.

So I told them I loved the service and I was thinking of switching. They told me how easy migrating domains was. Then I asked them about the swag I saw someone have. A pretty cool notebook that I was jealous of. They reached into the box of ”tomorrow’s” swag and gave me a notebook.

I switched that night when I went back to my hotel room.

The lesson for me here is that you should strive to go above and beyond, not just for the customers you have bet for the customers you see coming by too. These nice employees could’ve just as easily shrugged me off at the end of the day and told me tough luck on the notebook. But instead they answered all my questions and got me a notebook even though “they were out”.

Going above and beyond doesn’t stop will sales. Your customer service team has to go above and beyond in every interaction with your consumers. Your product team should strive to go above and beyond with every new addition made to your service. And developers should go above and beyond to ensure high uptime and a seamless experience on the service.

To this day, Hover remains one of those companies that goes above and beyond for their customers and its something I take to my teams and project I work on. How do I make a service that elevates the customers experiences.

• Is there anything you need from me?

• Anything I can do for you?

• Or anything I can help you with?

Then I listen. Its not just about the direct answers, but also the uncertainty in the answers I want to hear. Is someone struggling with a particular task? Can I have someone pair with you to help get a better understanding? Have you asked me something in passing and I completely forgot? Do you need approval on something, or does someone need poked to push something through?

Sometimes it can be about expense reports, which I try to get to as soon as they come across my email but can certainly slip to the bottom of the pile. But a reminder always helps me keep it top of mind. Or maybe its about a weird CI/CD issue that needs multiple teams to be involved, and I can help get the right people involved to get the issue resolved.

I want to be explicit in allowing for direct write access to my TODO list. If I can’t answer you right away, I am going to log this item in my todo list and get an answer for you as soon as possible. I don’t want to be the bottleneck preventing you from producing the best work you can, in the most comfortable way you can.

I encourage you to ask the same in your next 1-1s and see how you can start being an empathetic leader through listening.

There is a lot of value that can come from the conversation, and it’s wrapped in a sort of ice breaker. We don’t often think of ourselves as being grumpy too often, but can recognize when others seem a bit off.

"Tyler seems like he’s in a bad mood today."

It’s important to be able to reflect on yourself and your emotions, especially when interacting with people. When you are working closely with others every day, you might notice something that really gets under your skin. If its something I am doing or if its something I see unfolding in front of me in a meeting, I might be able to step in and steer the conversation away from someone getting grumpy and toward a productive solution.

I use this question and follow up questions to get to know the person, what makes them tick, how I can help when I notice they are grumpy, and how we can work best together as a team.

This is personal, and I leave it open and vague to let the conversation unfold naturally. I take notes on key points I hear and keep these in mind when I interact with everyone.

Asking questions like this is an example of being an empathetic leader. Leading by keeping people first, learning about their challenges, their families and their aspirations. Try it out in your next 1-1 conversation and see how you can be a more thoughtful leader when you listen to their answers.

The twitter hack was really interesting to me, the reaction was maybe more interesting through. With people calling for twitter to be better, that critical infrastructure depends on this website and the accountability of a public company. It’s especially troubling when we have a president that uses the platform to inform the public on policy changes and to call other world leaders names.

I redesigned the illinoiscovid.com website to be much smaller and simpler. It now includes hospital data and rate of infection based on positive test results by number of tests given.

Posts

I posted 1 blog a week this month, each Wednesday, here is a recap.

• June 2020 Updates

• Code Reviews: Don’t Be A Jerk

• Staying Organized

• Enable Dark Mode in Tailwindcss

• Getting Out for a Walk To Clear Your Head

Books

I read a few great books this month, mostly focusing on design

• I read Design for Real Life, and really enjoyed the personal stories on how starting with stress cases (read: edge cases) will prove to be better for the entire population on your experiences.

• I re-read Remote by Jason Fried and DHH, which I remember being pretty insightful. After reading it while everyone has been forced to adopt a remote style of working, it has some areas where I think it’s too narrowly focused on their size and working style. It’s one of those “your mileage may vary” type books.

• Off-centered Leadership is by the founder of Dogfish Head Brewery and his approach to management and building his company. It has a few pieces of good advice, but largely it is kind of a weird format for a book, with interviews at the end of each chapter.

• A book I really enjoyed was Insanely Simple by Ken Segall, the creative director of the ad agency Apple used through many of its major products and branding campaigns. The message is simple, Keep it simple, if its not simple, its not good enough. The phrase “Steve was polishing his simple stick” when referring to a new product that wasn’t up the the Steve Jobs simplicity test.

Links

Here are some links from around the web I found this month and made me think, inspired me or that I thought were just awesome

• A beautifully designed luxury bunker definitely something I would think more about now living through this pandemic.

• Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews great advice on interviewing.

• Improving American Express’s App Payment Process Tom Kenny has a lot of great content on their blog. I love the break down of UI/UX improvements.

• Software disenchantment an interesting piece on software being bad in comparison to other systems, like cars, planes and buildings.

• How to get executive buy-in for your design system approach design systems are good, but why should your CEO care?

• UX Case Study: How to Create a Super App another great article on how to design an app that people want to use, and thinking about experience over just plain function.

• Making RSS Prominent Again - I am all for this and thinking about how to make my RSS more discoverable. For now - Tyler's Blog RSS.

• When your coworker does great work, tell their manager

A few months ago, I bought two Awair air quality monitors. Since I'm working at home, I wanted to see the quality of air throughout the day and make adjustments if needed. In the spring it was great, I was able to have the windows in my office open and have a cool breeze come in, and let the stale carbon dioxide escape.

Now the summer is in full swing (its 98f tonight as I write this) opening the window would likely fill my office with hot and humid air, and that would probably distract me more.

But with the Awair system I get alerts when the humidity is too high, or there are a dangerous amount of chemicals in the air. That is usually my queue to get up and start walking around my house, grab some water, or take the dogs out for a quick walk around the courtyard.

That doesn’t compare to when I have an uninterrupted hour where I can take a walk and wander around the neighborhood. I put in an audio book, or some mellow music, strap on a mask and get walking.

While I’m out, I try not to think about work, or the immediate next meeting I will be in. But I do find myself thinking about the people in the neighborhood, the lives they live. The buildings and the infrastructure, the hospitals and the fire departments. How its all laid out, the nature and creatures roaming, and where they live.

I am particularly keen on saying hi to my neighbors. With a mask it can be hard to show your friendliness without the use of a smile. So I wave, I say hello, I ask how they are and keep on my way. Its important to me to be connected to the people here, and not just the roads and sidewalks that make up the neighborhood.

Walking with the sun shining on my helps me de-stress, to de-clutter my mind and when I arrive back to my desk, I feel refreshed and clear. When I take a lunch walk, I don’t feel as tired at the end of the day, I can keep up with the flow and changes during the day.

I would encourage everyone to at least walk for 30 minutes a day, especially if you are feeling beat by the time you sign off for the evening. I have found while working from home, I get to control the times I am in and out of the office, when I can take a break and when I need a nice long walk.

Dark Mode?

Like it or not, dark mode is here to stay (for now), and I was resistant to the change until about a year ago. Now I cannot bare looking at a screen not in dark mode. Its like acid to the corneas.

A lot of sites are now offering an experience in both light and dark mode, but it doesn’t have to be as hard as it is to make a print, screen and mobile stylesheets. All we will need is a plugin for Tailwind and a new directive on the unity of an element.

Update Config Themes

We need to do a couple things to allow your tailwind to accept the dark utility. You can alternatively install a plugin to achieve this, too. For the sake of simplicity, we will just modify the tailwind configuration to allow for basic dark mode.

First, we need to extend the theme to define light and dark modes. This uses the css property prefers-color-scheme which can have light or dark values. It’s a CSS media feature used to detect if the user has requested the system use a light or dark color theme.

Lastly, we have to update the plugins to define the attribute dark: and what rule to do with that attribute.

Your tailwind.config.js should now look like this:

Now compile your styles and you are able to use dark mode now.

npm run dev

Dark Mode!

You now have the dark: utility you can use in your HTML classes now.

If you have a light background and want to offer a dark alternative, your body class might look like this:

<body class="bg-yellow-300 text-gray-900 
             dark:bg-gray-900 dark:text-white">

You can clone the repo where I have installed tailwind and the dark mode treatment here as a starting point. Feel free to fork and it your own. I have separated the commits into 3 steps. Installing Laravel, Installing Tailwindcss and enabling dark mode. Check out the commits here.

Here are my thoughts, tools and processes to stay organized and productive, especially during tough times.

Tools

My goal is to keep things as simple as possible. I don’t need a whole lot of bells and whistles or complicated IFTTT routines to keep in mind when I just want to jot something down, or remember a teammates favorite ice cream.

I use Things 3 for TODOs. Its a very powerful todo app with projects, headings and checklists within tasks. You can set up recurring tasks, tags and set deadlines. I use things for EVERYTHING. Work, personal, remembering to follow up on an email, or conversation. A birthday I want to remember to send a gift out for.

I use the quick add feature with a stroke of a keyboard short cut a window pops over and allows me to jot down an action item, assign it to a project and tag it. I can move it to my inbox or set it for a later date. In 1-1 meetings, or planning meetings when I need to follow up on something, I will always pop this open and add a task for me to do.

For notes, I use Bear App, a super easy mark down note app with a very smart nested tagging system to keep me organized. I use Bear to store all my notes. I sync them across devices and set up a tagging system that is simple and works for me. Since tags act like hashtags in twitter, and nesting is as easy as appending a slash before the next level, this was super straight forward for me to organize so many different things.

I usually start with a project at the top level, or, a company then a project. #Secret then I will add notes and if I start seeing a division that can be made, or I want to collect and review only a subset, I start adding nested tags. #Secret/review You can add any number of tags and its probably the most personal thing that works for you. So I won’t spend much time explaining that.

For calendars, I use Fantastical. I really like the clean layout, the ease of use. I like the natural language processing for adding a new event.

Tasks & TODOs

As I mentioned above, I use Things 3 to organize my TODOs. This is easily one of the most important tools I do to keep myself organized on a daily basis.

I set up recurring meeting todos on Things to help me quantify the work I have to do in a day. Weekly 1-1s, sync ups, and agile ceremonies are all set for auto recurring after completion of the task.

Every morning, I will look over my calendar and add any one off meetings to Things for Today. Now I should have an accurate snapshot of my meetings for the day.

Next I have action items in a project I call Intake. These are items I get from meetings or that I think about throughout the day and need my attention. Email the team bi-weekly report might be one of those tasks.

I use the When feature to add dates to as many things as I can. If a task doesn’t need my immediate attention today, I will kick it for a couple days. I tend to work in the Today tab, so when I schedule a task for a few days in the future, it will show up on the Today tab eventually.

Deadlines are different, and will alert you when you need to do something. It also adds a visual element to show you you have n number of days til the task is due. I don’t use this very frequently, but when I do its for tasks that have a hard date/time to complete. Like submit expense report.

Notes

Write down anything, write down everything but be sure to add context to the things you write down. I can’t tell you how often I have a note fragment that says something like Look at ticket 1234 — but what am I looking at the ticket for?

A couple things I do when taking notes is provide more context around the conversation. Who is in the meeting, what are we talking about? If I can, ill add a heading for a topic and add notes under that.

Bullet points are better than paragraphs for me. I want quick consumable content not verbatim conversation logs. What’s the minimum amount of information I can write and understand in 3 weeks when I review this note looking form anything I missed?

A very, very important task when note taking is log who is doing what, decisions that are made and who made them. This will be super helpful when you are reviewing your progress and need to check on who is making the updates to the website. In your notes you should have added a distinct area on that topic to signify who is doing what.

Tyler is making the updates to the website by Aug 1.

Context Switching Whiplash

For me, going from task to task can be jarring. If you start the day working on a production readiness plan for a new feature; move into agile ceremonies, then to bug triage; to code reviews; to a 1-1; finally a sync about a new technology proposal all before lunch, that is a lot of different tasks that use very different parts of your skill set and brain. If this repeats after lunch, then by the end of the day you are probably exhausted.

I try to be very intentional with my calendar and tasks to suit my personality. I am very talkative and collaborative first thing in the morning, so I schedule all my 1-1 conversations from 9am til about 1030. If I don’t have have any one on one conversations that morning, I take a stroll through some of the slack channels that are more conversational, like #cats or #dadjokes or I will collect feedback and work on team building things.

Next, I am in planning mode, planning sprints, projects, features, work streams and timelines. After my coffee kicks in, I start to get more analytical and planning is the best task for me to jump into.

After lunch I am ready to do some long tasks. Usually sitting on long meetings, discussing bugs triaging, production readiness, reporting on progress, features, and syncing up with other teams on work streams.

This is usually the rest of the day, but when meetings pop up that are a little more ad-hoc, I get restless and can start to drop some important context.

Try to plan your tasks to match your personality. It takes some thought and understanding on how you work best at certain parts of the day, but it will make a huge difference when you are designing your day to maximize your productivity.

Do Not Disturb

Notifications are the bane of my existence. There aren’t very many enabled on my devices, but they are a major productivity killer. How many times have you been in a meeting and got a notification in the top corner of your screen and you trailed off thinking about that instead of the task at hand? Probably a lot, which was my problem too.

In 1-1s I try to disable notification on my Mac using the Do Not Disturb feature. I want to give my full attention to my teammates, I want to be involved in the conversation and not come across as half ass-ing the meeting.

On slack, when I need some time to get a task done, I will disable the notifications for a period of time, set my status with a big red dot to “HEADS DOWN TIME”. When I come across this in slack for someone I am wanting to message, I will wait, set a reminder, and message later.

DND is a powerful tool in your toolbox, and often under utilized. Notifications are a big reason for context switching whiplash and can be managed by taking a break to get some heads down time. Work with your teammates on an agreement for undisturbed time and build boundaries for when it is acceptable to break these rules. Like, the production database is blowing up and you are the expert in that domain.

Conclusion

Organization and productivity tips are very personal and take a lot of your time to hone in on what woks best for you. Don’t take these words as the defecto way to make yourself a more organized and productive person, but do take the tips here as ways you can think about improving your own process.

I’d love to hear from you over on Twitter. What works for you, what have you found to be a nightmare tool? @tjefford and let me know

Code reviews are vitally important for many reasons, and for me one of the most underrated, or under utilized tools in an engineer’s toolbox. Reviews can catch bugs before they hit production, it can encourage better test coverage, and it can ensure the code is actually doing what is required for the feature.

Often reviews only focus on the naming and code style aspects. Which is great and a necessary component of a review, but this is also where people have the most opinions. Here I would recommend you and your team, or better yet, your organization adopt a code style that can eliminate some of the opinions and peacocking on naming and style.

For engineers reviewing code, there are several benefits to being thorough and detailed. You provide mentorship to more junior folks, or new engineers to the team. These people joining a new team may feel like they are behind and anxious that they are not providing code to the level perceived by the team. Especially if they get a review with the comment "This thing is broken". That's not very helpful.

It helps with learning. I cant tell you how often I was reviewing something and didn't understand the syntax used. After researching it, I found a new way to do the thing. I also subscribe to the learning method in the medical field: See one, Do one, Teach one. Where reviews are on the third pillar of that system.

It’s been quite a month. It’s been a pretty jarring couple of months, actually.

The fight for equality and justice are at the forefront. With incredible protests over the last several weeks, all across the world, after a police officer in Minneapolis murdered George Floyd on camera, with no remorse. This injustice happens every single day and now is the time it stops. Black Lives Matter, full stop.

Please donate to organizations that are helping eliminate this injustice and inequality. If you work in a larger organization, chances are they have a donation matching program. Utilize it! There are so many places worth donating to. Where to Donate for Black Lives Matter: 137 Places and Funds | The Strategist | New York Magazine

Some donations I’ve made have gone to the following:

• Association for enterprise opportunity

• Rising Tide Capital

• Chicago Neighborhood Initiatives Micro Finance Group

• Women’s Opportunities Resource Center

• National Urban League

• NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund

• Equal Justice Initiative

• Repairers of the Breach

• BYP100 Education Fund

• Black Vision Collective

• Black Lives Matter Global Network

• My Block My Hood My City

If you can’t donate money or time, uplift Black voices on twitter, instagram and facebook. Retweet makers, shine a light on those doing great work in the world who might not otherwise get the opportunity. Raise awareness of Black owned businesses. Raise awareness about the injustices and inequality by boosting the voices of our Black communities.

Posts

I wrote 3 posts this month, as I relaunched my blog.

• Look Ma,I’m Blogging Again

• Breakdown of Stack Overflow’s 2020 Developer Survey Results

• Adding Tailwindcss to Laravel 7

Books

I have found it really hard to focus on books lately. I did manage to finish Cross-Cultural Design and learned a lot about the importance of research before putting pen to paper.

I also picked up another book from A Book Apart, Expressive Design Systems which is a great introduction into why taking the time to develop a design system can speed up your work and drive consistency with your brand and across teams.

Links

• I’ve been really enjoying the Chicago Techies Podcast which features folks from around Chicago sharing their stories in tech.

• A no-frills way to see the spread of COVID-19 in the US broken down by state with details of shelter in place and reopening dates Rt: Effective Reproduction Number

Other

I have been craving bacon jam since my favorite pizza shop shut down in March, and I happened upon a YouTube show for grilling and they were making bacon jam. So I followed the recipe and damn it tuned out good. It’s not difficult to make but it does take a little bit of time to sweat down the bacon and onions, but it is worth it.

What is Tailwindcss?

Tailwind is a utility-first CSS framework for rapidly building custom designs. Which means any element you can add utilities to change the style with minimal cognitive load. If you want add some padding to an element, add a class of p-4 p is for padding, 4 is the units of padding you want to add. If you specifically want to add padding to the top of an element you would use the class pt-4 which signifies padding on the top with 4 units.

I freaking love Tailwind. Its such an easy to use css framework that allows me to focus more on the content and content than worry about how my grid system is working. Combining it with Laravel has made so much sense for me and I want to share the steps I use to install Tailwind on a fresh laravel app.

Install Laravel

Im not going to spend too much time here - there are many, many articles and great documentation on how to install a fresh Laravel app.

The way I do it is using the Laravel installer.

laravel new tailwind

We’ll call this project tailwind for the sake of the tutorial, but you can name your project whatever you want.

Install Tailwind

Now lets install tailwind via NPM to the project.

npm install tailwindcss --save-dev

Once installed we need to initiate the config file for tailwind. This is used if we want to add plugins or overrides to the framework.

./node_modules/.bin/tailwind init tailwind.config.js

This should drop the file on the root of your project.

Next lets install the new dependencies. I have found explicitly installing cross-env has solved some occasional errors that pop up with NPM. Your milage may vary.

npm install
npm install cross-env
npm run dev

Now we need to update the webpack config file to bundle up tailwind when we compile our assets. For this, we need to tell web pack what Tailwind is and then how to process it using the config file we made earlier.

Last step I do is I create a new file in resources/sass directory called styles.pcss. You can call your file anything you want, but this is where we will be placing the tailwind directives to load and will be available for us to use when writing our frontends.

There are 3 that you will want to use, and many times, I don’t add any extra css to this file other than these three lines. For a more custom site, or if you want to define different colors, you can do that here too. If you want to add your own styles, you can do so by adding them between the components include and the utilities include. Since this is a PostCSS file, you can certainly use includes the way you’d expect in sass.

resources/sass/styles.pcss

The last step you need to do is to re-run npm to pick up the changes we made to the webpack and you should now have tailwind baked into your laravel app.

npm run dev

Testing Tailwind

The quickest way to test your new tailwind utilities is to link to the css file in your welcome template. Then place a class on the body and give it a background color and change the text to white. If you see the changes, you are now rolling with Tailwind.

Optimize Tailwind for Production

Now, Tailwind is pretty big because of all the variations it has on every element. This might not be desirable to deploy in its full form. Especially on mobile where a large css file could make the experience kind of bad.

Luckily, the folks at tailwind and the community have solved this by trimming excess classes and utilities that you are not using in your html code! That sounds like magic, and it kind of is.

When I am in development, I want full access to all tailwind gives me, but when I deploy to production, I want it to be slimmed down. So there is a tool called purgeCSS that the great people at Spaite have made an npm package for.

npm install laravel-mix-purgecss --save-dev

Then define that in your webpack.config.js file

const purgeCss = require('laravel-mix-purgecss');

Then at the bottom of our webpack mix command we add a purgeCss function where we specify what environment, which directories and what extensions you want to target the purge on.

Now anytime you run npm to compile for production, purgeCss will go through the directories you specified and pick out only the classes you are using to compile into a much much smaller file.

One thing to note if you are using a CMS, though. If you purge the classes and try to use them in your CMS, they will not be available. For example, if you are not using font-bold and you try to add it later in your CMS, the text will not change on the frontend. You may want to create a elements page that have all the things you want to use so its easily deployable and scannable by the purgeCss plugin.

Diversity

Of the 38K professional developers that reported race, 70.7% are white. If I look around the companies I’ve worked at, this number actually seems pretty low.

Age is often overlooked in diversity numbers, I am really glad Stack Overflow took the time to ask this question. Often times older developers get judged by their age in the interview process. With 38K responders 82% report being between the age of 20 to 40.

The gender disparity is even worse. Of the 41K professional developers that responded, 91.7% report being a man. Only 7.7% Woman and 1.2% being non-binary, genderqueer or gender non-conforming. Less than 10% of the population of professional developers are non male.

An interesting stat I saw on the experience by gender section was that the population of Women responders report higher from 0-10 years, which might indicate a surge in the effort to hire Women engineers.

Overwhelmingly the story this data tells, is what we see with our own eyes in the offices we inhabit. The majority is young, white, straight men with less than 10 years of experience in their fields.

We must do better at making tech an equal field for all people to contribute. Study after study show the benefits to having a diverse workforce. Expand the backgrounds your ideas come from, incorporate design adjustments that affect a group that isn’t a main population. Reduce employee turnover and inspire creativity.

Technology Trends

The average age of writing your first line of code, broken down by country is pretty interesting to me. It shows that the majority of responders start around 15/16 years of age. Where in Germany its actually younger at 14 and India, it higher toward 17.

I think this trend is moving younger as STEM programs are being introduced into schools as a standard part of the curriculum. I don’t think the kids writing and solving coding problems in school have quite reached the age where they are filling out anonymous forms online yet. I would imagine this metric to skew lower in the coming years.

Javascript and jQuery continue to be the most used languages and frameworks. MySQL and Linux round out the database and platform side of most used. To me this isn’t surprising due to the fact of how attainable these technologies are, the documentation and the community support round each of these.

AWS is growing in popularity on the platform side, with more than a quarter of respondents reporting using it.

Python is still the most wanted language, but Rust maintains the top spot for most loved. I feel like it was only a few years ago when I first heard of rust, so this stat is somewhat surprising to me. With 86.1% of respondents reporting writing in the language they love.

Frameworks, React and Vue round out the second and third place spots. I think these will continue to gain traction and eventually overthrow ASP.NET as the top loved framework as we move more toward SPA and web based applications.

Education, Years Programming

One area I found pretty fascinating is the Years Coding Professionally section. With over 57k responses of people who are on Stack Overflow, 39.6% show less than 5 years.

Combined, engineers responding to this survey, about two thirds (66.4%) have been coding less than 10 years. This is amazing to me, and a testament to more and more material being available online. Such resources as Stack Overflow, or personal blogs, udemy and others that have courses anyone can take and become a software engineer.

10 years ago, the iPad was released. Snapchat wasn’t born. Instagram was an infant. Lyft was 2 years away from becoming a company. Even slack launched in 2012.

Only 3% of responders reported to have 30 to 50 years of experience. Thats about 2k people. In the late 70s Microsoft and Apple were just getting started. The mid 80s brought the NES, and Adobe Illustrator 1.0 was released in 1887.

Education is another really interesting area where nearly 70% of the 57K responders report having a Bachelors or Masters degree. Less then 1% report having no degree or formal education. Overwhelmingly these responders report their major in computer science, computer engineering and software engineering.

I think the people who complete a bootcamp instead of school might fall into the secondary school and some college with no degree classes, which makes up about 21% of the response.

These stats combined with the question of is formal education important show that respondents mostly believe a school is important for the roles they have. But 16% think its not at all important and not necessary. This pretty closely matches the number of folks who make up the high school and some college/no degree group.

Extra Work

When it comes to continued education, 72% of the 46K professional developers reported they learn a new technology at least once a year, up to every few months. Given the age an experience level we’ve gone over above, this doesn’t surprise me. Early career engineers are going to learn many new platforms and technologies as they begin and continue as they hop to new teams and companies.

A number I was kind of shocked by was the number of people who reported working overtime somewhat frequently. Overtime is anything over the formal time expectation of the role. In the US that’s commonly 40 hours a week.

About 11% say they never work overtime. Good for them! 15% say they work 1-2 days a year over their normal hours and the rest report more than a few times a month to a few times a week. Thats a hard pill to swallow, as it leads to burnout much quicker.

This is the first year Stack Overflow has tracked this question, and I would love to keep an eye on this stat over time. I believe work can be done in the hours allotted in the day. You must find your work-life balance.

If you are an engineer that wants to promote change in the culture and the industry, please fill out these surveys. Your company may have a similar survey and by providing agencies data points to make changes, changes can happen much sooner.

You can find the entire report from Stack Overflow here and the previous years reports are also available online too. You can also find some information about how big tech companies are doing on diversity numbers here, spoiler alert, it’s not great.

That is still true, but what I realized is writing blog posts about technical and non-technical topics will help me better understand the things I know and the things I'm learning. Hopefully I can help others who may be in a similar situation as I was when I was going through that thing.

I will write about many different topics here, it won't always fall into technology, or PHP, it may not even fall into soft skills, or leadership. I may talk about a book I've read and liked, or an article I've read that has some great information I want to talk about. I hope you enjoy the journey of my blog as much as I will.

For the rest of 2020, I will publish at least 1 new post per week. As a prerequisite to me relaunching my personal site with a blog, I required that I have a backlog of posts to write. The topics I have on deck include Tailwind tricks I've learned, neat Laravel tips, being a leader in tough times, how I stay organized, the tools I use and more. My journey is to learn as much as I can, and part of that means to teach what I learn to solidify that knowledge in myself.

I do not plan on having comments on my posts. This was another big reason I stayed away from blogging for so long. I hate how toxic comments can be and I don't check comments every hour, so if there are people asking legitimate questions, I don't get to them quick enough.

So instead, I encourage anyone who wants to discuss a post, or to ask questions about something they want clarified to connect with me on Twitter. I would be thrilled to hear from you and I would very much like to help where I can.

Anyway, I am happy be setting off on this journey, to learn, teach and to hopefully help others along the way.

Tyler Jefford

I was in awe when I watched the Falcon Heavy Side Boosters Land Simultaneously at Kennedy Space Center. This is one of those moments where you are struck by the advancement in technology and precision of the science and math needed to achieve such a thing.

On May 30th SpaceX who have partnered with NASA has launched DEMO-2, sending to space the first astronauts from US soil since 2011. The NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley have launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida and arrived at the ISS as part of this new venture for NASA and SpaceX to allow the private sector to launch humans to space.

It was a success.

The accomplishment is a result of many people’s time and effort. The rocket engineers, the software developers, project managers, the people who made the uniforms, the people who monitor heath and train the astronauts. The math, science and technology that was used to achieve liftoff and orbit. Congrats to those folks who are all behind the scenes.

I remember back in grade school, when a local of my town became an astronaut and launched into space on the Columbia Space Shuttle for STS-90. The school wheeled the AV cart out with a massive 20ish inch CRT TV on top. We watched live as the shuttle counted down and reached space. I remember being assembled in the cafeteria/rec room watching this, not knowing how much I would think about it as an adult.

Space has always piqued my interest. I hope there were kids at home watching this new endeavor and sparking interest in STEM, like it did me.

Using the Laravel Form Validations, I wanted to collect the name input and TOS agreement fields and validate they are filled to my specifications.

If the input "signature" doesn't match the auth users name, then it will fail. Its really that simple.

Let the admin set a password for each user they add

Allowing the admin to set a password for each user they create has so many downsides. Easy to guess, duplicated passwords, not forcing the user to change the password. Not to mention that only you should know your password. Unless your system forces a password reset upon first login, this should never be done.

Randomly generate a password and send it in an email

"What is this security amateur hour" I thought to myself when this popped into my head. It is never, ever, EVER acceptable to send a plain-text password in an email. But the random password is a good start. If you must send an email in plain text to someone consider using some kind of tool like 1Password to share in a secure way.

Solution: Randomly generate a password, then send a password reset email to the user.

Generating a password and encrypting it to be put into the database is easy with Laravel. Using the built in bcrypt function, it does all the work for you. So, here you will see I am checking to see if email and name are valid based on my criteria specified, then if it passes I’ll generate a new random password from my User model. Then I will add the user to the database and then send an email, passing in the user object we just made.

When it comes to the email configuration, I recommend reading the docs, since they are super rich with details. Not that it matters in this tutorial, but I am using Mailgun to test my emails out locally.

Here is the User model, there is much more to this file generally, but I am only showing the two methods that we need for this tutorial as to not be confusing. The first method it pretty straight forward, generate a random string and encrypt it using the bcrypt() function. Done.

The second method has a couple things worth pointing out. The first thing we are doing here is generating a token. This is to add a new record in the database under 'password_resets' and that token will be used in the email to associate with that record. For this to work, we need to add an alias to the config/app.

After that, we need to make sure the token is passed into the email, since it will be used in the reset link on the email. Here I am also passing in the user object, so we can get the users email and name too.

Conclusion

When creating a new user as an admin, an email will be generated after the user is added to the database. The email will have a password reset link and allow the newly created user to not only add their own password, but also have a nice welcome email letting them know they have been added to your account on the app.

Happy New Years, everyone!

Once I had Guzzle up and running making my first call was super simple. But I just wasn't getting the deep data that I was getting from the cURL request like port number, transfer time and redirects.

Response from below code

After digging through the documentation and many different stackoverflow discussions I came across using on_stats in my request. This allows me to dump all the header data that I wanted. But it can’t just be called through the request like you can with statusCode. So I had to come up with a clever way to retain the data so I can use it later.

Since this is a standard Laravel Model, it is a traditional OOP class. So I created a protected array at the class level that I will push into from a custom method that will take input and merge into that array.

Here is the code I used to collect and reuse domain header data from a Guzzle request in Laravel.

With cyber threats, cyber terrorism, data breaches and identity theft on the rise, it is no wonder so many people are concerned about protecting your data. It's an expectation that a company keep you safe in the likelihood of a hack. But what are you doing to help yourself?

Below I've outlined some very basic steps and tools you can use to keep your data secure. It only takes a few minutes to set up and it will save you a future headache making it harder to have your identity or personal data stolen.

Tools

Let’s start with a few tools and services that can enhance your personal digital security. There are alternatives to the tools listed, but these are the ones I use on a regular basis.

1Password - 1Password is my preferred tool for storing passwords, secure notes and more sensitive data you use daily.

LifeLock - LifeLock not only detects a wide range of threats to your identity and backs you with a team that works to resolve issues, if you lose money due to identity theft, we'll replace it.

Additionally, any service worth their weight will offer "two-factor authentication". You should enable this on EVERYTHING This will force all logins to use a second method rather than just using a simple username/password combination.

Lastly: PLEASE USE A PASSWORD ON YOUR PHONE!

Change Your Password...Often

Most companies you work for suggest you should change your passwords every 90 days. Some articles suggest as soon as 30 days, and some as far as 180 days. But I typically suggest and follow the 90 day rule.

"That seems like a lot of trouble" - Everyone

Nonsense, this is a small investment in your personal security. Taking a few minutes to update all your passwords across the web is well worth your time.

This process has also been made even easier with tools like 1Password and LastPass. Not only will it tell you when you have old passwords, they will tell you about weak passwords and if a site you frequent has been breached. They also offer an "auto update" feature that will update old passwords all by itself.

Passwords Should Be Snowflakes

You should never use the same password for more than one website / app / service. Other than having your password as "password" This might be the worst thing you can do for your digital security. If I get access to your Facebook password, and you use that password for your bank account, and your Amazon, and PizzaHut and Netflix. I am going to have a really awesome weekend on your dime.

With a little bit of social hacking, Mat Honan's life was completely ruined. Apple, Amazon and other industry leaders have now tightened their processes for account recovery, but this is a scary reality. Mat appeared to have an adequately secure digital presence, which is where using two-factor and having a monitoring service can help prevent or alert you to an account take over.

A Good Looking Password

It can seem quite annoying when signing up for a new account and they ask you for a password with a minimum of 8 characters, 1 uppercase, 1 number, and a special character. But that is for your own safety.

"Cool, I'll just use P4ssw@rd"

Unacceptable! Look at this chart below. With 8 characters, all lowercase there are only 209 million possible combinations. What is this amateur hour?!

With upper and lowercase you increase that to 53.5 billion. But adding special characters to the mix you increase it to 6.1 trillion combinations. That’s just the minimums too! You should consider having passwords in the 20-30 character range.

Imagine that! 94 characters ^ 30 character length. DAMN!

Conclusion

Are you taking the right steps in protecting your digital information? With these simple tips and tools, you can decrease the chances of being stuck in the middle of a battle for your own personal data. Don't get caught up in a messy digital intrusion, take action today, to protect for tomorrow.

As it turns out, the public facing API Wordpress included by default was getting nailed with a brute force attack. It's not as noticeable if you don’t check your logs regularly, but the short story is that someone pointed a script to ping the API of public WordPress sites multiple times per second, causing the server to become overloaded with requests.

vi var/log/apache2/access.log

Hundreds of lines of POST requests to xmlrpc.php

Using DigitalOcean (referral link), it is pretty easy for anyone on the team to go in and do a power cycle when they see a site is down. But this would continue to happen multiple times per day. So that's not a solution, but a bandaid.

The best way for the team I was on was to just block access to the API. Which will work for you too, unless you absolutely need access to the API, then you will want to look into whitelisting your IP addresses. Restricting the API will remove access to this site via a mobile app, but will also increase security

Using .htaccess

In your .htaccess file add the following snippet.

# Block WordPress xmlrpc.php requests
<Files xmlrpc.php>order deny,allowdeny from all</Files>

Using functions.php

In your theme folder, you can add a line in functions.php to block access to the API.

addfilter("xmlrpcenabled", "_returnfalse");

Using a plugin

There are a bunch of plugins that claim to block access to the API, but its really up to your discretion on installing them to test the functionality and if they pass muster. The WordPress Plugin Directory that may prevent access to the API.

Alternate Route

Instead of blocking access to the file, you can also just block an IP from Apache. This is not really fixing the problem, but maybe its helpful to know its an option. It’s a good way to stop the bleeding to explore a longer term solution.

In your server terminal you can use the following snippet to block an IP from your iptables.

iptables -I INPUT -s <IP ADDRESS> -j DROP
service iptables save

In conclusion, you should always check your logs first and look for odd patterns, such as a ton of traffic to a single file in a short period of time. Research the common security threats that are being used for the platform you are working with (in this case WordPress). Finally, learn the actions you can take based on these threats, so you can hopefully prevent a website from going down for these reasons.