I wanted toast this morning. To get it, I unpacked 3 boxes and grouped a bunch of other things together, and it took me about 30 minutes. #refactoring We just moved house, after 9 years in one place. And we moved from a late-70s rambler to an Arts & Crafts foursquare. So right now, all...
I love impromptu speaking when I get to do it, and Write the Docs had open signups for lightning talks. I wanted to explain the thing I keep teaching founders and all the awesome people I keep coaching: No one cares. No one cares about the thing you want to tell them about as much...
What could I do for your organization as your consultant? Here's a partial list!
You should contract me to help with your developer experience
If you ask me what I’m scared of in life, I’ll tell you things like financial insecurity, poisonous snakes, and losing loved ones. Pretty typical. However, if you look at my behavior, the thing I work hardest to avoid is boredom. Until we had reliable books on our tiny pocket computers, I always had a...
Startup years are a little like dog years – 5 years at a startup is a lot of experience. When I started, I was employee 21, our office elevator was a bit dodgy, and we could all eat lunch together. Now LaunchDarkly is a globally-distributed organization with hundreds of employees. Over the years, I’ve gotten...
More than once yesterday, I ended up explaining value-stream mapping. Wikipedia says: Value-stream mapping, also known as “material- and information-flow mapping”,[1] is a lean-management method for analyzing the current state and designing a future state for the series of events that take a product or service from the beginning of the specific process until it reaches the...
Platform engineering is great -- but would it work on a desert island?
We have to change how we think about staffing and add in a lot of expensive redundancy. I thought about this originally in the context of in-person events, but it’s honestly true for every part of work and life. We have to change how we do planning and team coordination—not because we’re remote, but because we’re understaffed.
What have I learned from taking elocution lessons?