This year was my first year attending ChefConf. For episode 19 of The Ship Show, we did a joint podcast with the Food Fight Show Crew, and had a ton of fun; if you’re looking for a high level review of the conference, that’s a good place to get a high level overview1. Even though Read More
Today marks a somber event, which I started recording in a series of posts in my blog-of-the-time, ten years ago today. What follows is an excerpt from the first one: A family friend picked me up and we started the trek back towards Fort Collins. We heard one last update as we sped off from Read More
In some ways, tech is a much smaller and more incestuous scene than I ever imagined – and I grew up in the midwest. There are also people in it who are dishonest, manipulative, abusive, bullying, mean-spirited, harassing and destructive. Early in my career I was very paranoid about maintaining amicable relationships with these individuals Read More
My first experience with release engineering was almost fifteen years ago: I did a stint with Netscape’s release engineering team for a summer. I know I didn’t quite get why at the time, but I was hooked immediately. My professional focus has been on build/release engineering ever since. At various times, it’s been a difficult Read More
There’s been a lot of activity in the Mozilla community over the past 36 hours regarding community standards, free speech issues, and LGBTQ issues. It’s great to see these conversations happening; I believe this is precisely what should happen in a community when disagreement arises. One aspect continues to confuse me1: many of those discussing Read More
A colleague recently recommended Robert Glass’ The Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering1. Having recently finished Isaacson’s Jobs bio (finally!), I was able to start it today. The forward2 launches the book with a bang: The software industry is in the same state of affairs that the pharmaceutical industry was in during the late nineteenth Read More
One of my favorite tech writers, @rands, recently wrote up a year in review, and it inspired me to spend some time thinking about 2011 myself. One goal for the year was to write more consistently about release engineering, my experiences, and its evolving role in software development. I certainly did write more, and I’m Read More
A few weeks ago, I tweeted about a great blog post on a technique for managing the massive amounts of email many of us navigate daily. I’d become frustrated with the state of my own inbox1 and had been on the prowl for a new method to manage the email torrent. Having used it for Read More
I first saw Dr. Frank Luntz on a 2008 episode of Bill Maher’s Real Time1. Ever since the interview and the subsequent panel discussion, I’d been referring to the concepts in his book—Words That Work—despite having never having actually read it. I decided it was past time I corrected that2. Luntz’s message in Words That Read More
When Mindsight was recommended to me, I immediately bought it. It arrived a couple of days later, and promptly sat on my bookshelf—through a move—for months.