Adam Keys is typing

A lot of us are out here, amongst all the strangeness of the world, trying to figure out how to help our teams adjust to collaborating remotely. It’s long been my observation that nothing beats people in a room together communicating via ad-hoc scribbles on a whiteboard. Seems like a good time to survey the… Continue reading Whiteboard, even if you’re a distributed team

Remember secretaries and drinking at work? And land-line telephones? And smoking inside? Blech! And an even more unequal society with even more thumbs on the scales? My wife and I, when we first watched Mad Men: Oy, Makefiles! And weird preprocessor tricks! And file-scoped variables/memory ownership? And everything is an int, sometimes pretending to be… Continue reading Wherein the “good old days” are revisited

Rules won’t solve your problems, but thinking about them might. To paraphrase a couple well-known quotes: “Rules are useless, but thinking about rules is indispensable” Dwight Eisenhower “No rules survive first contact with a toddler” Helmuth von Moltke the Elder 😉 It’s folly to think we can generate the exact outcomes we want with rules.… Continue reading Use as few rules as possible, mostly guidelines

This year, I’m trying to better keep in touch with friends, family, and former co-workers. It came to my attention that this is, in many ways, a thing for which you would use a customer-relationship management application. This could work, but seems like a lot to me. Most software starts life as a) a document/spreadsheet… Continue reading Keep in touch with friends, the littlest CRM that could

(…continuing a Twitter thread) io-ts caught my attention a while back and I finally had the chance to read through it. I’m glad folks are experimenting in this area, particularly with the potential reach into multiple communities and ecosystems that TypeScript affords. We use dry-rb extensively at work and I was curious how a TypeScript… Continue reading Enforce system consistency at the boundaries & meditations on run-time type systems

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.

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