Author: Heidi Waterhouse
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Building codes and the price of progress
Safety codes are a pain in the butt. Here is my reflection on our electrical code.
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Refactoring, a reflection on unpacking
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…
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Write the Docs: No Pitch Hot
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…
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Consultant Offerings
What could I do for your organization as your consultant? Here’s a partial list!
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What are you afraid of?
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…
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Leaving LaunchDarkly
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…
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Value-Stream Baader-Meinhof Mapping
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…
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Deserted Island Devops: We Live in a Society
Platform engineering is great — but would it work on a desert island?
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The new normal of staffing, conferences, and work
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…
