Being in close quarters, away from your own bed, pillow, clothes, shower, pots and pans – everything that gives you a sense of home and comfort – can be an extremely stressful time that exposes everyone to each other’s worst behavior. Kind of like a normal project getting close to release. There’s so much to do […]
Category Archives: Management
So you start your own company, you’re living the dream, struggling, eating canned soup and praying desperately for your big break. And it comes! Things work out, and your company thrives. Or perhaps you join somewhere along the way, learn the tech stack and culture, get enmeshed, make a contribution. But things that worked well […]
In traditional western musical composition, each score typically has a time signature that defines the overall tempo of the music. One number defines the length of the beat, the other the number of beats per measure. So, you might have three quarter notes ( 3 4 ), two half notes ( 2 2 ), seven eighth notes ( 7 8 […]
If you’re anything like me, you probably have one or more anti-science, anti-rationalist bêtes noires. Maybe you like to rage against the creationists and what they’re doing to our schools. Or gripe about the global warming deniers and what they’re doing to our planet. Or fume about the crazy anti-vaccination nuts and what they’re doing to […]
Pattern In the phenomenally successful 7 Habits of Highly Successful People, Steven Covey describes the time management matrix, in which work is classified as important / not-important, and urgent / not-urgent. This gives us the following set of four quadrants: In a nutshell, the point is that effective people spend their time in quadrants 1 and 2 – it can […]
There’s a power to rage. It’s honest, unselfconscious, and (for the most part) uncontrolled. It has no interest in anyone else’s opinion, has no ulterior motive, and is unguarded. It makes you uncomfortable, and triggers a fight or flight response. You might find it terrifying, inappropriate, sophomoric, ineffective, déclassé, distasteful, or factually incorrect, but you can’t deny its […]
[Trigger warning: though not in detail, this post mentions triggering situations] The Matrix The answer is out there, Neo. It’s looking for you… and it will find you… if you want it to… – Trinity When you go to work, people act professionally toward you. If someone disagrees with you, you hash out your differences and figure out how to […]
Every day for the last five and a half years I’ve gotten into my car and driven the 40 miles from home to work. And though Boston is known for its bad traffic, the commute has clearly been getting better over time (five years ago, leaving the house after 6:15 AM was an invitation to a two hour commute – […]
Early on during my tenure at TripAdvisor, I had the good fortune to sit in on a talk by the VP of Engineering, in which he went through a lot of the nuts and bolts of technical recruiting. He talked a bit about the interview process, how to find candidates, and the kind of candidate […]
It seems like forever ago that I took on my first team at TripAdvisor – I was working with two junior engineers (both of whom had more experience with the codebase than I did), some tools and forum code, just muddling my way through. Almost five years later and I’m responsible for six teams, with […]
