I had my annual review last week. Great Year This means I was consistently exceeding the expectations of my role at the company. My previous company was acquired. We were thrust into a quagmire of disorganization and confusion. That's how I felt anyway. Eventually the VP of the new company was replace by the CTO of my previous company....

I spent a couple weeks creating a new dashboard for our users last month. We launched to production behind a feature flag. At that point, the CEO weighed in with some strong opinions about how he wanted things changed. I'm currently in the process of re-working it. About half the code I wrote is going away completely. Maybe it will get...

Which type of people do I want to be around? The ones who are struggling or the ones we are succeeding? I tend to get weighed down when I spend more than a little time with people who are only struggling. With people who only talk about their successes, I quickly get bored. Or jealous. And a little angry. But mostly, I just lose intere...

I’m not sure when it started. I don’t remember being any other way. Maybe it was when I lost that spelling bee in fifth grade on a word I should have known. Maybe it was in seventh grade when I gave that girl a note asking her out and I overheard her making fun of it to her friends. Regardless, at some point, very early in my childhood...

Every so often, I'm tempted to put in extra hours at work beyond the 40 that are expected of me. Today is one of those times. We are over 6 months into a project that has been delayed numerous times. Because of being on-call this week, I didn't get my scheduled project work done which means I'm going to have to report to my product lea...

I think I'm held back my ideas. I have a 5 drafts of blog posts I'm currently writing on this platform, or that I want to write. I have many of them on other topics that I keep coming up with. I think I have to do them in order, or... something happens. I'm not sure what, but it's bad. Well, fuck that. This is meant to be fun. This is ...

This is the fourth in a series of posts on work culture and nonviolent communication. You can find the first post here. --- Acknowledging my needs was not something I was taught to do growing up. I knew them clearly when I was little. Then I learned to suppress them because I thought it would make people happy if I didn't need anything...

This is the third post in a series about building and protecting company culture. This is my vision for a work environment: A calm environment where people can get what they need to solve the problems they enjoy solving. Honestly, this felt like a pretty low bar when I first wrote it. There’s nothing about changing the world or making ...

In my last entry, I talked about how it has become important to me to not ignore the twinge - those moments when I feel something is off. The twinge means my needs are not being met. An unmet need always leads to conflict. If I'm not going to ignore it, what do I do instead? People fall into one of two buckets during conflict: fight or...

I am in my last days at my current job. I started as the tenth or eleventh employee, the third developer. Two years later, the company is now over seventy-five employees, with a team of twenty developers. I am the Director of Engineering. Since the beginning, I have worked to build a culture that welcomes questions, values differences,...

My first post to try out Hey World. This seems like a really neat idea and hopefully simple enough that I could keep up with it!