Category: Personal
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Political: Whistle Work
What to do If you have a 3D printer, choose a design and print whistles. If you’re going to distribute yourself, add lanyards and flyers explaining them. If you hear a whistle and you are in the “slightly safer” demographic (middle-aged white lady, in my case), head for the sound and be ready to record…
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No useless knowledge
It started two years ago, on a street in Dublin. They have a cool program where notable historical figures get a little bio on walls. The key part was this: She invented a unique uncrushable linen fabric by backing handkerchief linen with taffeta. Jacqueline Kennedy wore a pleated skirt in this fabric for her portrait…
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New Phone Day
In many ways, the teams that have made it possible to port so much from one device to another have been doing excellent progressive delivery, as have the teams that have pushed out OS and security updates to our phones, and updated our apps, and made the whole thing something that I never have to…
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Do you want a newsletter?
Most of my favorite talks start with an excellent title. I have never been sure if the title drives a good talk, or if the talk thinking gels a good title. Some of both, probably. You have to admit, though, that you’re curious about a talk called “Taylorism Has Entered the ChatGPT” or “Y2k And…
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Pardon our dust: revamping a website
I am both intensely curious and a little lazy, and I am passionate about effective communication. It’s not such a bad thing to know about myself.
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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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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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When you stare into the blank page, it stares back at you
I didn’t write The Great American Novel during the pandemic. I’m good with that. Instead, I worked with an amazing team to write the best book we could on how to do technical writing when you are not a technical writer. I finally believe this book is really real, because look, there are pre-order buttons!…
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In which I am cranky about the urban/rural divide
I just came back from a weeks-long trip to the American West. It was amazing, gorgeous. You know what all this beauty has in common? Besides mostly being protected wild areas? Zero bars of cell phone signal. Or maybe like, two bars, depending on whether there was a mesa in the way. We drove almost…
