Personal
“Professional services” for pre-revenue startups
Something I’m beginning to explore is what a services business providing programming and long-term technical guidance and mentorships for startups would look like. A business that takes the things I know I am good at — mentorship, programming, product management — and provide it to companies who need it...
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Let’s not fix venture capital. Let’s replace it.
There’s a lot of talk in Portland and other secondary markets about how difficult it is to raise early money compared to places like San Francisco and Seattle. I believe this is true. But I don’t think it really comes down to anything except, there are a lot of...
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18 months of wandering
In January 2018, I left as CTO of Cozy under difficult circumstances. Those of you that know me know the story. Those of you that don’t are free to buy me a coffee or beer to hear it. I joined Cozy in 2014 as Engineering Manager, and rebuilt and...
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Diffusing religious arguments
I called arguments between assemble-your-own vs. kitchen-sink framework approaches a religious one akin to tabs vs. spaces in my previous post. All of my leadership positions have been on brownfield products, usually turnarounds, so I’ve walked into minefields of religion that I’ve had to diffuse in order to focus...
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How to turn a team around in one easy step
My last four roles have all been “turn-around” scenarios. At CCP Games I had three: as Technical Art Director, I turned around a group that was struggling on executing basic tooling; as Technical Director I had to turn an entire engineering department that was writing an order of magnitude...
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The most important piece of advice I’ve ever gotten
In May 2010, I had been at BioWare for about 2 years, and was ready to quit. Actually, I had quit. My Art Director at the time set up a meeting between myself and Gordon Walton, a the General Manager for BioWare Austin. Despite of being at BioWare for...
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Kauai vacation tips
My family (wife, 3 year old, 1 year old) completed a 2 week vacation to Kauai, Hawaii in April, but I never published this post… I figured I’d write up a few things we learned, hopefully it’ll help others planning a family vacation. First some random thoughts, then some...
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Questions to ask before you make that hire
When I was at CCP, I blogged a lot. I was able to try out many new ideas, and my disagreement with certain decisions sparked a lot of good writing. I’ll get to why that matters in a minute. At one point, one of the American executives hired by...
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Automated testing shows a respect for employees
In the tech-artists.org G+ community page there was a comment on a thread about unit testing: A key factor in TA tools is the speed at which we need to deliver them, and our audience is considerably smaller than, say, engine tools code. Therefor it becomes somewhat hard to...
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How do you estimate that which you’ve never done?
Have you heard about #noestimates? No? Well I’m sure you can guess what it is anyway. But reading the debates reminded me of a story. While at Game Developer’s Conference a few years ago, I was arguing about estimation with a certain project manager, who, despite having no actual...
