Prince’s unfinished memoir, The Beautiful Ones is a quick, but awkward, read. The preface is the most coherent, the story of how the editor, Dan Piepenbring, ended up being chosen by Prince to realize his autobiography. It shines an interesting light onto what it was like to be in Prince’s orbit, if only briefly. Of … Continue reading The Beautiful Ones →

I just finished reading the Watchmen graphic novel and it is amazing. I was drawn in by the HBO series last year, which amplified my enjoyment of the original story. It might end up in my top five works of fiction. The story is of its time: the Cold War, superheroes as saviors. Even better, … Continue reading I watched the various Watchmen →

Highly recommend: get a BB-8 or similarly lovely icon from your favorite mythology on the credit/debit card you most frequently use. I have a couple lovely bonus conversations with folks per week because of it. Sometimes it's "like your card" but sometimes it's full "did you see the latest thing?" and it's nice to talk … Continue reading Get a cute credit card and overtip →

An insightful thing my pal Brandon Hays observed is that teams introduce little bits of waterfall into their agile processes when they get burned by scope expansion, bugs, infrastrucure, and such. It’s tempting to try to eliminate potential sources of surprise and drama. Paradoxically, adding waterfall-style checkpoints seems to introduce more drama and surprise than … Continue reading Keep waterfall out of your agile →

Succeeding and thriving at remote work is largely about getting very good at asynchronous (Slack, discussion threads, email, etc.) and nearly-asynchronous (phone calls, video meetings, screen sharing) communication. Productivity in remote work is often bottlenecked by the availability of teammates for near-asynchronous collaboration. Therefore: boost your productivity as a remote team member by writing up … Continue reading Unblocking oneself →

A nice guide on code reviews (unfortunately no author is attributed on the Notion doc) is making the rounds. If you do code reviews, you should read it. If you don’t, you should start, and then read it. I do have a personal quibble with this particular guide. I find code review most valuable for … Continue reading Sharing context in code review →

I’m drawn to expansive views on a subject. Sprawling narratives are irresistible. Giant books are my weakness. It’s rewarding to finish a chunky, 500-page book but getting there is quite the chore. The more pressing problem is, there are far more tomes out there than I can ever read. Previously, my strategy for reading large … Continue reading Reading massive tomes: less slog, more joy →

As a manager, I hear about things that are interesting and things that probably need changing. “We want to do three projects but only have two teams.”“The next production release is held up by this one task that needs seven people to agree on a minor but complicated detail.”“The backend team has to spend the … Continue reading When management clicks →

As unreleased material trickles out of the Prince estate, some fantastic stories have emerged. I haven’t yet read The Beautiful Ones, but even the stories that aren’t part of his incomplete autobiography are top-notch Prince mythology. Prince hired a DJ to play music for just him and his date: “And then it hits me,” WallyWaves … Continue reading Three (increasingly wild) bits about Prince →