Posts

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

The naming of cats… or feature flag patterns
Eeee! I’m super excited to start this year because something I’ve been working on for a while is ready for all of you to look at! Feature Flag Glossary It’s hard to use a pattern, or even imagine it, if you don’t have a name for it, so we put together all the names for…

On the Origin of the Speciated Conference
I go to so many conferences! It’s an awesome and amazing part of my job. I speak at them, but I also attend them. I sit in the front row and live-tweet. I attend talks. I participate in unconference sessions. I talk to people in lines, and at lunch, and at the afterparty. I give…

Speaker’s Hierarchy of Needs
I’ve been thinking about what I need to be a happy speaker, and what I expect, and what I hope for, and it seems to me like it’s a a hierarchy of needs, like Maslow. This is absolutely not intended to “call out” any organizer or make anyone feel bad. The vast majority of my…

Help, I need somebody!
I may have mentioned that I have an executive function disorder. That is the category AD(H)D falls into. What that means for me is that it is often a lot of work for me to make decisions and organize tasks. All of the traits that make me an excellent systems thinker, like holistic views, consideration…

On a jet plane…
I’ve been in Europe for the better part of three weeks now, and I’ll be going home Saturday. As you can imagine, I thought long and hard about everything I brought with me. I never want to take more luggage than I can comfortably manage on my own, up and down subway stairs. This is…

Book Review: Accelerate
Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations by Nicole Forsgren My rating: 5 of 5 stars This book is an excellent summation of the overall findings of the State of DevOps reports and what the implications are for organizations trying to persuade themselves into DevOps transformation. When…

This job is all the best parts of going to college
I used to say that technical writing is an endless series of research papers, and if I had realized that when I started doing it, I might have studied harder at the Java class I flunked. But not really, because the thing I loved about research papers was reading the primary text, and a bunch…
Upcoming appearances
Velocity Berlin
Minneapolis DevOps Meetup
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