Today I am thankful for the process, and the markers along the way.
The last few months I have been working towards getting healthier. I realize that it is not something that is never going to end, but it is nice to celebrate doing the things that I’ve never done before. Today that thing was being part of an organized 5k, the ubiqitious Thanksgiving morning Turkey Trot, and the 40 degree weather that came along with it.
Previously I talked about using command line tools for efficiency in Command Line Leadership. Since then I’ve changed my flow a bit. LaTex is a fantastic system, and Beamer is great but the templates didn’t have the right look. They were a bit too “academic” in feel. I’ve moved to using RevealJS instead. The included css has a bit more modern feel and is easier to customize than getting into a Beamer template.
Originally posted to LeadDev, duplicated here for archival purposes because Cool URIs don’t change.
It is unlikely that any other activity will have nearly the same amount of leverage as bringing a junior engineer up to speed so that they can successfully contribute. This is often more easily said than done. While team leads should be accountable for ensuring that this happens, many inexperienced leads often feel that this remit falls solely on them.
The current state of the web is poor… at best. Ads and tracking are out of control and have moved from just being a minor annoyance to being a real detriment to my user experience, whether in a browser or an app. Worse the tools to filter these things are getting worse. They’re woefully underpowered for mobile and on desktops it seems that the filtering tools that they did have is being scaled back. We’re not too far away from the bad old days when more trusting relatives would have dozens of spyware toolbars installed in their browsers.
Earlier this month I had the pleasure of being a guest on The Data Standard podcast. Catherine and I had a great conversation about data engineering vs application engineering and how they’re much more alike than different.