Tag: Bias For Action

Life Imitating Art

Life Imitating Art

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While it’s not all been fun and games, my career has still given me a number of cool opportunities: spending a summer flying around in the back of a C-130, cobbling together election equipment from off-the-shelf printers and scanners, and traveling over most of the US and a handful of other countries (Australia and Mexico).

But one of the most unique experiences was getting to twice attend the Emmys, first in 2015 and again in 2018 (roughly around this time of year, as my phone has recently reminded me). It was at the latter event that I was able to capture a particularly funny moment.

Just a month before, I’d been shopping for new furniture and, in a moment of levity, snapped a photo of myself between cardboard cutouts of the Property Brothers:

Now, I’m not really a fan of the Property Brothers (or HGTV type shows in general); I couldn’t tell you their names even now. But when they were hanging out just a few tables down at the 2018 after-party, I couldn’t resist asking them to help me recreate the above IRL:

Not exactly the kind of thing you tell a budding computer scientist to expect from their career, but fun nonetheless. I wonder what craziness the future has in store…

Made Along The Way

Made Along The Way

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For reasons not worth getting into here, I’ve been waxing nostalgic (a phenomenon to which I’m apparently rather vulnerable; I mean, seriously). In particular, I took a brief mental stroll down memory lane to think of key leaders who influenced my career trajectory in a positive way. People who took a chance on giving me more responsibility than I’d had previously.

This is far from an exhaustive list, but thank you to the following folks:

  • Greg, who hired me to my first full-time coding gig despite me not even having yet graduated from my undergraduate computer science program.
  • Rick, who got me internal funding to implement an idea I had, giving me my first taste of leading a project completely my own.
  • Cathy, who brought me to San Diego without having seen me in action, only my reputation with a particular set of skills, which her project desperately needed.
  • Lori, who first promoted me to a management position when my prior boss left the company, and trusted me to scale an engineering organization to meet the company’s big goals.
  • James, who gave me my first singleton leadership position, and helped me think beyond my team and begin operating at a broad organizational level.
  • Taj, who twice helped me step up into broader responsibilities, and who first challenged me to consider business implications of technical decisions.
  • Abby, who recruited me into my current role, and has taught me much about how to be a true partner at the executive level.

In all these cases, the individuals didn’t just give me advice. They made opportunities happen and put me in places that caused growth. That’s what makes a mentor a mentor.

If you’re on the other side of a mentoring relationship now, don’t just pontificate. Open doors. Delegate. Trust. Support. Praise. Endeavor to be on someone else’s list.

Ticking Away The Moments

Ticking Away The Moments

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Nine years ago today I started this blog with a post that laid out my intentions in creating it. It’s cliché, but true, that a lot has changed in the intervening (near) decade, but for the most part, I think I’ve hewn pretty closely to the original idea, even if my underlying motivations have shifted.

Like many things worth doing, it took some time to find a good rhythm. After two initial posts I went almost 2 years without writing anything. Had a great streak going in 2017, but sputtered out in 2018 and didn’t get going again until early 2020. Since then, though, I’ve been on a roll. Maybe it was turning 40? Maybe it was COVID? Can’t say for sure, but I’ve been happy with my consistency since then (and a growing readership is nice too).

In other wistful, “how time flies!” type subject matter, my youngest kid left for college this past weekend and my oldest starts her junior year with a new location and major. They’re both gonna crush it, I have no doubt.

Time Traveling

Time Traveling

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A common rhythm of my career is to catch-up on emails over the weekend. I’ve been appreciative of scheduled send, so that folks don’t get an email from me during non-working hours and assume they need to respond immediately.

However, this might be a new record: 14 emails queued up to go out first thing Monday.

That total may go up depending on how much progress I make on one additional task, which subsequently depends on what Olympic events are on TV this afternoon.

I get that weekend work isn’t for everyone, but I don’t mind it. It’s quiet. Usually no new tasks come up, so I can meaningfully shorten the queue. And finally, it helps alleviate pressure during the week. I’m much more comfortable signing off for the day come Friday afternoon knowing I can knock out a few lingering tasks before Monday ramps up.

Easy Peasy

Easy Peasy

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Can’t focus on an important bit of work? Stressed out? Need some time to think?

Take a walk outside.

An afternoon walk has become a regular part of my routine, as important as any other daily task. I can’t recommend the habit highly enough.

Missing The Trees

Missing The Trees

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Are you the kind of person who, when you have a bunch of questions you need answered, dumps them all into either a single email or a series of Slack messages (optimizing for overall throughput)? Or do you dole them out serially, waiting on an answer for each time before moving on to the next one (optimizing for clarity and completeness)?

I’m not here to say either approach is right or wrong, but I tend to be the “spew all the questions at once” type. And I wonder how many times it’s bitten me.

I came across one obvious example over the weekend when writing my previous post. The discussion of recruiters got me nostalgic, and I went back and read the original email thread I had when going through the initial screening process at Amazon. This exchange jumped out:

You’ll notice I was addressing several things in one go: I was responding to a specific question, and asking a bunch more, somewhat unrelated questions. The recruiter did a decent job with a detailed response, but never answered the highlighted question in particular.

Now, that oversight may have been deliberate (or at least subconsciously skipped) because those roles likely weren’t in this recruiter’s purview. But looking back, I would have been considerably better suited for them vs the one I ended up initially taking.

I’m not complaining about how things played out, but I still have to wonder how differently my Amazon experience might have gone if I’d not made the blunder of burying a critical question, namely ensuring I was aligned to the best job for my skills. Yes, I was unemployed at the time and trying to move fast, but that’s no excuse.

Whether this anecdote means serial communication is better I’ll leave as an exercise for you, dear reader.

Mother Of Invention

Mother Of Invention

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More often than not, the tool you need to solve a particular programming problem has already been created and is easily discoverable via PyPI, npm, etc. I rejoice in these times.

Sometimes, however, the tool you need does not exist. Yet I still rejoice in these times, because they present an opportunity to create a new thing and share it with the world.

I’m thus here to announce sql-to-odata, a Python package containing tools to facilitate adding an OData interface in front of a SQL database. It’s limited right now to my specific use case (creating static extracts from SQLite), but if there ends up being broader interest, who knows what it might become.

Little Things

Little Things

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One of my favorite tools is ngrok (pronounced en-grok, presumably referencing Stranger in a Strange Land, a book I read as a freshman in high school when I was far too young to appreciate it). If you need to get a locally-running service on the Internet, ngrok can do it in seconds with a single command. I use it all the time when experimenting with and debugging APIs, such as this weekend’s foray into LangChain.

Supposedly it can do a bang-up job of fronting production services also, but I’ve never tried it for that use case. Perhaps someday? In any case, I’m truly grateful it exists.

Godwin’s Law Redux

Godwin’s Law Redux

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As a tech discussion grows longer, the probability of a mention of Generative AI approaches one. It definitely happened at today’s 4S Tech meetup; we didn’t even make it all the way through the introductions.

Additional common topics: biometrics, productivity hacking, ways to get funding, something someone heard on a podcast.

Like Tears In Rain

Like Tears In Rain

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It was six months ago now, but I clearly remember the feeling of sitting with my AWS laptop on a Friday morning, knowing it was the last time I’d use it. There’s a surprisingly emotional bond that develops between a technologist and their equipment; I was genuinely sad about turning it in. But handing over the hardware wasn’t the worst part, it was knowing that every digital file I’d created on that laptop would be erased, thus anything I hadn’t transferred to someone else or otherwise handed off for preservation would be gone forever: every half-completed business idea one-pager, all my customer presentations, any little code utilities I’d built. Everything. Four years worth of accumulated artifacts is no small thing, and I didn’t want to see it disappear.

I was in this same situation back in 2014 when I left my first job, and at the time, for confidentiality and security reasons, I’d done nothing I could publish publicly or otherwise take with me. That was unfortunate, and I didn’t want to repeat that disorienting experience. Thankfully during my AWS tenure I’d taken steps to release whatever I could via open source mechanisms. And what I couldn’t directly publish, I’ve tried to capture after the fact on this blog, including this post on how to approach certifications (reconstructed from a talk I gave at an internal conference), my advice on brag documents (also from a talk), and a process for doing project estimation (rewritten by memory from a team wiki page).

Don’t make the mistake I did and wait until the 15 year point of my career to take these sort of steps. And don’t wait until you’re at the end of your time at a company either; like documenting your accomplishments, archival work is best done in real-time. Embracing open source development can help, even more so if your employer is onboard. Push them if you need to (you can find some talking points in this excellent article).

A final argument: continuous improvement is predicated on retention. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” applies not just to history, and the DRY principle applies across both spatial and temporal dimensions. Or even more simply: save your work!