I write about software development, tools, and people.
And how marketing makes it all better.
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Hey, friends! I, the person you know who cares quite a lot about stickers, am here to say that now is the correct time for you to be thinking about June, which is Pride Month in the US. If you design…
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Tinkertoys, Microservices, and Feature Management (ScaleConf 2019)
I got the video from my trip to ScaleConf in Capetown, South Africa. This talk is an interesting trick, because I don’t talk about testing anywhere in the title or summary, but it’s really all about how testing is a…
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Book Review: Academic Slide Design by Ann E. Fandrey
This book says “Academic”, but it’s also an excellent resource for the person writing technical/software presentations. We often face the problem of trying to convey really important concepts in a way that serves people who are primarily listening to us…
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Stateful Acres Home for the Chronically Unique
A No-Kill Shelter, Petting Zoo, and U-Fish Trout Pond Disclaimer: I am not a real sysadmin, but I do talk to many of them, and this humorous presentation is meant to highlight the problems of Going To The Cloud as…
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A Parable of the Polar Vortex
The best time to shovel your driveway is immediately after it snows, but failing that, any time before you have driven on it. Driving on fresh-fallen snow compacts it into something between “ice” and “pure evil”, depending on the temperature,…
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The Year That Was 2018
A wrap-up of my year’s travel, including links to conference talks, and photos of places I’ve been.
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Choose Your Own Deployment
I love the aha moment people get when they grasp a concept. It’s a lot of what gives me energy about this job. Being there to help people see how an abstract concept can make their concrete life better is amazingly…
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The Art of Booth
I originally wrote this up as an internal blog post, but I think it may be useful for other people, too, so I’ve cleaned it up a bit and taken out most of the proprietary stuff, and added some explanations.…
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Lady Conference Speaker Dress-up
Colored hair has never disrupted my ability to do my highly-visible, public job, either. Almost every form of dress code you can think of is about asymetrical respect – the less powerful person is forced to comply with power’s standards…
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My favorite talk of 2018
This is the talk that I saw this year that has changed my thinking the most, that I have referred to most often. Fixme, by David Heinemeier Hansson