Author: Heidi Waterhouse
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Brand defense
Watching Elon Musk’s “go fuck yourself, advertisers” interview gave me full-body cringe. I couldn’t help but sympathize with Andrew Russ Sorkin, who was just trying to ask some reasonable questions and give this dude a chance to recover what is left of X’s brand. They weren’t softball questions, but they had answers that could have…
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It’s December Eve, are you ready?
You are probably familiar with the retail rhythms of the seasons. You can think of it as what kind of candy you can buy, when chocolate moves smoothly from ghosts to pumpkins to tree decorations to hearts. If you work in any kind of e-commerce, from November to mid-January is a code-freeze all-hands-on-deck experience. Software…
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The costs and benefits of incremental improvement
At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, I got budget to build out a home studio to give talks in. It was about three thousand dollars, with a nice digital camera, a mic, pre-amp, and lights, and some bits and bobs. I even painted a wall in my basement. I’ve given a lot of talks…
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What happens in Vegas… costs so much
A couple years ago, I was talking to our A/V consultants, and I asked about their Thanksgiving plans. Oh, he told me, he hadn’t had Thanksgiving in years, because they were already in Las Vegas, setting up and prepping for AWS re:Invent. It was the tentpole of their financial year. It’s the tentpole of a…
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Platform engineering is the tool library of the enterprise
Last year I did a very cute talk about platform engineering through the lens of Animal Crossing, and talked about hospitality, and infrastructure, and what it should feel like to use an internal platform. Today I adjusted the brakes on my bike and trike. It involved significantly less swearing and bleeding than the last time…
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Code standards and my roof
Two (2) months after buying our first house, a giant hailstorm rolled through South Minneapolis, and damaged practically everyone’s roof. This is what homeowner’s insurance is for, so we filed, like everyone within like 2 miles of us. This was the week that the roofers arrived to tear off the old shingles and replace them.…
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Options are not compensation
This is the last business day I could buy my stock options from LaunchDarkly. But I can’t, because I can’t afford to. Oh, I could maybe afford the stocks – my strike price is quite low – I was employee #21. But I would have to be able to afford to pay the taxes on…
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Lady Conference Speaker: AI and presentations
I just got back from 2 weeks across 3 events, and I have a lot of thoughts about how AI* is showing up in conference presentations. * [for these purposes, let’s define “AI” as the umbrella term for LLMs, generative tools, text-to-image generators, automatic prompts and suggestions from tools, and pretty much anything but “intelligence”.…
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Team-led growth and synthetic data
Last week, I talked about making a trial/demo environment that let people imagine how software would work for their team. Today I want to explore what kind of data is useful in a team-product demo. Consider setting Because I’m talking to developers and decision-makers in noisy, chaotic, and distracting environments, I prioritize showing the every…
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Team-Led Growth and Staging
Not that kind of staging. Team-based products are really hard to demo, because they’re hard to see the value of as a single person. If the point of the product is collaboration, standing up a single user account doesn’t really show any of the value. It’s like the difference between touring a completely empty house,…
