I’ve said before that I enjoy thinking about organizations, continuously optimizing them to give the highest probability of the desired outcomes. Organizational ergonomics, if you will. I’m also a mathematician by training and a nerd, which is what made Applying the Universal Scalability Law to organizations such a fascinating read, because it puts statistical weight behind its arguments.
In the same vein, I thoroughly enjoyed the following two articles that take a mathematical approach to understanding variability in project estimation (a perniciously difficult problem in all technical work):
Yesterday I got to integrate one of my favorite idioms into a conversation: hoist on his own petard. I was discussing ways in which less technical folks can still evaluate an interview candidate’s technical competency.
Not the world’s safest weapon, to be sure
Look, if you’re going to try to impress someone with your vast knowledge of all things computing, you better be able to back it up. Because it’s easier than you think to detect BS. One of the simplest ways that an evaluator of any level of technical depth can detect a fraud is to ask them to explain their solution as if their audience was a smart fifth grader. If they can’t map the details to metaphors in a comprehendible way, it’s unlikely they truly understand them either.
Because I’m a LeBron fan, when it comes to Wordle, I care more about longevity of sustained greatness (i.e. my perfect streak of winning games) than I do about having epic individual performances (i.e. having a lot games where I’ve won in 2 or 3 guesses). That means I need a way to keep my statistics even if I move between devices or need to replace one.
Almost to quadruple 100!
It turns out (at least as of this writing, who knows if the NYT will change it) that statistics are stored in a simple JSON object in browser local storage. On a laptop this storage is easily manipulated using DevTools, and on mobile it’s a bit tougher but still not too bad, at least on Android.
Both of the above, however, rely on GUIs. It got me thinking if there was a scriptable approach. First, I found a Python library (natch) that can speak the Chrome DevTools protocol. Then I had to figure out how to use it to read and write to local storage. That wasn’t too hard (even though the example here is in Node, the technique was portable). Finally I needed to make the library connect to both a laptop-based browser (easy), and my Android phone via adb (not so easy). Luckily I stumbled on the correct magical incantation in this post. Put it all together, and boom, I can now backup my Wordle streak, and easily transfer it between devices, using a script:
Want to see how I did it? Well, you’re in luck, because I packaged up my implementation and published it on PyPI. The source code is also on Github. Enjoy!
Given my occupation and its dependence on typing, I’m terrified of hand injuries (one episode of Game of Thrones I’ll never rewatch is Walk of Punishment, it creeped me out for weeks, even though I knew what was coming; and ugh, now I just read the wiki, and I shouldn’t have).
But it turns out there exist reasonably powerful solutions, such as one that Josh Comeau described in a post on Hands-Free Coding. Not so bad, and a useful reminder that assistive technology isn’t just for “the other”. It’s hard to get right, but it’s worth the effort.
On a related note, mid-last year Amazon added two new leadership principles. They’re slowly being integrated into our culture, and I’ve been hesitant to add them to my post tagging scheme. But today felt the right time to apply one.
Back in 2014, I read The End of Men; having just been hired by a startup run by a woman, it felt like a good time to explore ideas about why men have traditionally dominated positions of power, and how and when that might change. I don’t remember many details about the book itself (and apparently it’s somewhat controversial in conservative and progressive circles alike), but I do remember coming away challenged to do my part in centering women as I moved forward in my career.
Fast-forward to this past week, during which I happened to have many interactions with female colleagues:
Two women presented a dashboard on team performance metrics to our team
I got career advice from the female founder of a major cloud consulting company
Three times I met with various female peers to discuss leadership transition opportunities
I provided coaching to a woman just beginning her career in technology
I partnered with a woman to conduct four back-to-back interview sessions
While there’s still more work to do to undo historic inertia, realizing that I’m surrounded by so many capable women from whom I can learn is an opportunity I hope only gets less rare.
I’ll be the first to say that UX is hard, but honestly now, do I really need to specify a dinner reservation time-of-arrival down to the second?
If I had to speculate, the implementor probably just copied an existing time input widget without consideration of the use case. Situations like this are a reminder of a downside of code reuse; yes it might save some development time, but is it best for the customer?
Earlier this week I got an email from a recruiter. In itself, that’s not a remarkable occurrence, I’ve gotten 263 such emails since I started tracking them back in 2015. What made this one funny is that it was from my current employer.
I’m regularly asked about the corporate culture at AWS, and a common way I’ve described it is being like a large collection of small startups. This decentralization has a number of benefits, not least of which it only rarely feels like I’m working for a curmudgeonly big business (especially when compared to my last large company gig). But every once in a while the disadvantages show.
Last week I recorded a Q&A video session with a colleague for an upcoming team all-hands meeting. Ostensibly we were there to speak on the benefits of a recently-deployed internal tool that’s become quite popular. But the value comes not from the tool itself, but from those whom it empowers to easily share their work.
Maybe it’s just the self-reflection inherent to middle age (I turned 43 a month ago), or the heartfelt email my team received this weekend from a recent customer, but in some small way I hope that when I’ve gone I’ll have contributed my portion to the ongoing corpus of human knowledge, and further, that I was able to utilize said knowledge for the greater good. The only way for that to happen is to maximally share what I build whenever possible, whether through open source code repositories, high-quality documentation, or even this blog (modest though it may be). It takes extra work, but the work is worth it.
