There’s something simultaneously inspiring and incredibly disheartening about following the tweets of a professional writer like @nkjemison. Here’s a well-respected author with a half dozen books in print, and you’d like to believe that she just sits down whenever she likes, bangs out a couple of perfect pages, then goes off to whatever larger-than-life stuff authors do […]
Tag Archives: Personal
Well, it’s that time again – time to check in and see how monetizing failure in my diet and exercise regime has been working. June saw my five-and-a-half month streak of workouts come to an end, though for a good reason – we finally moved! Being within a half mile of work means getting two hours of my life back, every […]
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 […]
Well, it’s the end of the month, which means it’s time to check in on my experiment in monetizing failure. May was a bit rougher than prior months, with an injury and my first set of failures. The toughest part of the new rules turned out to be the daily sit-ups and push-ups. Not because they were difficult, […]
In the time since I started writing this blog, a couple of posts have gone viral, many have gotten a reasonable amount of traffic, and others have disappeared without a trace. It is, perhaps, unsurprising that the most popular of my posts have also been the most actionable – how to write an effective resume, how to ace a technical […]
Things have continued to go well through April, with the new rule (no work food, other than raw vegetables and fruit) improving my diet significantly. As expected, though, I’ve uncovered a number of ways to be bad without straying into financial consequence territory. For instance, though lunch now consists of a homemade PB&J and the occasional […]
It hit me while I was walking down the street in a chic Tokyo suburb, an honest-to-God bolt from the blue mindfreak of a satori. It hit me so hard I had to stop, find a place to sit, and think for a while. I had a good life in Japan – an amazing group of […]
My new exercise and dieting program has continued to go well through March. I was even able to get one day ahead in my workout schedule. I’ve started getting some random aches and pains, so we’ll see how the next couple weeks go, but overall the exercise schedule has been working out well. Diet continues to be the main […]
When I was a kid, we used to quote completely made up statistics to each other – “people spend two years of their lives at stop signs!” And if it wasn’t TRUE, then it was at least true, in that much of life was outside our control, spent waiting in line at the grocery store, […]
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 […]