Personal
“Do you expect too much from people?”
Last year, a coworker asked me if perhaps I expect too much from other people. I thought about it a moment and said: No. I do not accept the argument that I’m somehow inherently superior to most others. In fact it is because I know I am not superior that...
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Portland, here we come!
Tomorrow, my family leaves on a four day trip to begin a new life in Portland, OR, as the Engineering Manager at real-estate startup www.cozy.co. I am incredibly excited to join the company for all sorts of reasons (the role, product, team, founders, location, pretty much everything). It’ll also...
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Everyone should take vacation at the same time
Throughout my career I’ve always seen people struggle with taking vacation. People are too wrapped up in what they’re doing. Managers can’t allow critical people to go missing. There are weeks of trepidation and handover and “I don’t know how to fix that” emails. To a large extent, this...
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Should a team be able to abort a sprint?
After my second retrospective on a new project, I unloaded some pretty harsh criticism about what we were building. I felt it was a “solution in search of a problem” and “not high value.” After proposing an alternative and convincing everyone to change direction, our sort-of Product Owner blasted...
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Adjustable standing desks should be mandatory
At CCP’s Iceland office, everyone’s desk is able to adjust into a sitting or standing position. I don’t know who decided this perk. It must have been a huge expense. Adjustable sit/stand desks are already expensive in the USA, and in Iceland I’m sure they were three to five...
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Global Glob
I am cleaning out my drafts and found this two year old post titled “Globals Glob” with no content. The story is worth telling so here we go. There was a class the EVE client used to control how missiles behaved. We needed to start using it in our...
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Being amazed by software development
I am continually amazed by the state of software development. I am amazed at how broken things seem to be, and I’m amazed at what powerful tools we have to fix things. A few weeks ago, I struggled to find a documentation hosting solution. We have an internal version...
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What a powerful thing metaprogramming is!
While editing a chapter of my book, I was introducing the concept of metaprogramming using Python’s type function. It occurred to me that I had already introduced metaprogramming several chapters earlier when introducing decorators. Defining a function within another function is as important to my programming as bread is...
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Python Enrichment and PitP
When I was starting my job at CCP, I posted about some things I wanted to do as a lead. I've been through two releases with the Tech Art Group in Iceland (and for the past 6 months or so been the Tech Art Director here) and figured I'd...
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Taking your dog to Iceland
In late 2011, my wife and I imported our Boston Terrier, Shoni, to Iceland. Since importing pets commonly comes up on foreigner discussions, I thought I’d dedicate a post to our experiences (sorry, no tech writing today!). I’ll also mention, this is specifically for dogs, at the time we...
