All Posts

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• On Interviewing and Hiring Software Engineers

  How to avoid the common traps when hiring engineers

  10 January 2025 · about a 7 minute read

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• Synology on Rails Part VI: An Improved Docker Registry

  Adding UI to the Docker Registry now running on the Synology.

  25 September 2024 · about a 1 minute read

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• Synology on Rails Part V: Automate the Rest

  Thanks to Luke Winikates, the rest of the deploy is now automated.

  6 September 2024 · about a 1 minute read

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• That Time I Interviewed Pat Gelsinger for a Bit

  How to make a proto-Fortune-500 CEO the butt of a joke.

  3 August 2024 · about a 4 minute read

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• Interestings for Iterators Vol I, #7

  Earn issue 7 by sleeving.

  14 June 2024 · about a 2 minute read

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• Interestings for Iterators Vol I, #6

  Issue No. 6 of interesting links I found over the past two weeks

  7 June 2024 · about a 2 minute read

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• Interestings for Iterators Vol I, #5

  Issue No. 5 of interesting links I found over the past two weeks

  31 May 2024 · about a 1 minute read

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• Interestings for Iterators Vol I, #4

  Issue No. 4 of interesting links I found over the past two weeks

  17 May 2024 · about a 2 minute read

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• Interestings for Iterators Vol I, #3

  Issue No. 3 of interesting links I found this week

  3 May 2024 · about a 1 minute read

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• Synology on Rails Part IV: Simplifying Deploys

  Moving an app to Synology Container Manager Projects, which uses Docker Compose, is a huge improvement.

  1 May 2024 · about a 3 minute read

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• Synology on Rails Part III: Improve Deploying with a Local Registry

  Manual deploy steps are maddening. Let's fix it.

  28 April 2024 · about a 3 minute read

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• Interestings for Iterators Vol I, #2

  Issue No. 2 of interesting links I found this week

  26 April 2024 · about a 2 minute read

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• Interestings for Iterators Vol I, #1

  Issue No. 1 of interesting links I found this week

  19 April 2024 · about a 3 minute read

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• Why Do We Miss Pivotal Tracker?

  These two key features made your project run more smoothly thanks to Pivotal Tracker.

  6 March 2024 · about a 6 minute read

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• Synology on Rails Part II: Deploying

  Digging deep in the terminal and figuring out how to use rake to deploy my containerized Rails app to my Synology NAS.

  15 December 2023 · about a 7 minute read

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• Synology on Rails Part I: Running

  How I finally learned containers and got my Rails Meal Planning app up on running on my Synology NAS.

  12 December 2023 · about a 5 minute read

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• Dynamic Polymorphic Forms in Rails 7

  Relearning Rails modeling, polymorphism, and dynamic forms.

  15 November 2023 · about a 5 minute read

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• Guest on Radio Free XP Podcast

  I guested on a podcast!

  28 October 2023 · under 1 minute to read

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• Balanced and Empowered

  How we got RelEng back on course, and I kept my job.

  5 October 2023 · about a 7 minute read

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• The Team is the Agent of Work

  That time that somebody wanted me fired.

  18 September 2023 · about a 4 minute read

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• Improved 1-1 Note Taking

  In which I adapt some of my note taking to Notion.

  13 September 2023 · about a 3 minute read

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• Three Cheers for Release Engineering

  Using beer brewing to talk about Release Engineering and software complexity.

  14 August 2023 · under 1 minute to read

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• Curiosity and Impatience

  Two under-valued behaviors that accelerate a team.

  18 July 2023 · about a 4 minute read

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• A Little More Yak Trimming

  I did a couple more small things.

  15 July 2023 · about a 2 minute read

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• Anchor's Away

  Saying goodbye to Anchor Brewing

  12 July 2023 · about a 3 minute read

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• Shaving The Blog Yak

  All the details about the update and clean up this blog's code.

  11 July 2023 · about a 4 minute read

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• GoGaRuCo 2013 Storytime

  A video from deep in the archives

  28 June 2023 · under 1 minute to read

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• 3X but It's People

  How I think about people when I think about 3X.

  19 June 2022 · about a 4 minute read

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• What Brown M&M's Taught Me About Software

  Not all software experience is programming.

  17 January 2022 · about a 4 minute read

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• Job Search Journaling with Obsidian - updated

  A small update to my Obsidian Notebook and templates for tracking a job search

  17 September 2021 · about a 2 minute read

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• What I Talk About When I Talk About Management

  Agile teams and "management" do not have to be mutually exclusive. Management is essential the long term success of agile teams.

  2 June 2021 · about a 9 minute read

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• On Pair Programming

  In which I talk about my experience and ideas on how to build a sustainable pairing environment for your team.

  26 May 2021 · about a 7 minute read

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• My Obsidian for a Job Search

  How to use an Obsidian vault that tracks all of the research, interview notes, and status during a job search.

  1 May 2021 · about a 1 minute read

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• Cmd-O is My New and Old Friend

  One keystroke for Obsidian search-or-create. This. Is. Awesome.

  1 May 2021 · about a 1 minute read

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• History of The Big Pencil

  Whenever someone asks me about the bigpencil.net domain, I get to tell this story.

  21 March 2021 · under 1 minute to read

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• Don't Sleep on the Command Palette

  It takes me a while to learn new commands.

  21 March 2021 · under 1 minute to read

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• Obsidian URLs

  Linking to Obs from other apps is power.

  21 March 2021 · under 1 minute to read

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• Community Plugin: Calendar

  The calendar helps you build the daily journal habit.

  21 March 2021 · under 1 minute to read

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• Thoughts on Vaults

  When to Vault and when not to.

  21 March 2021 · under 1 minute to read

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• Note Taking in 1-1's

  1-1s are a special type of note.

  21 March 2021 · about a 1 minute read

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• Using Links

  Cross note linking that isn't Markdown is OK.

  21 March 2021 · under 1 minute to read

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• Using Tags

  Tag it for easier search.

  21 March 2021 · under 1 minute to read

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• Core Plugin: Templates

  DRY up your notes.

  21 March 2021 · under 1 minute to read

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• Core Plugin: Daily Journal

  The Daily Journal is key to remembering things.

  21 March 2021 · about a 1 minute read

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• Driven to Tests

  TDD all the things!

  2 February 2021 · about a 7 minute read

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• Start with Retrospectives

  Every team improvement journey starts with a retro.

  30 November 2020 · about a 6 minute read

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• The Name Game

  My contribution to this 'what you call me' meme from 2020.

  22 November 2020 · under 1 minute to read

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• Introducing The Continuous Delivery Test

  5 November 2020 · about a 17 minute read

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• COVID-19-Inspired Meal Planning

  How I experimented to make weekly meal planning work well for our family.

  24 September 2020 · about a 5 minute read

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• Improving Standups

  One simple technique to tame your suddenly unwiedly daily standup meeting.

  22 September 2020 · about a 4 minute read

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• Foo Fighters 1995

  My Foo Fighters Tweets.

  15 September 2020 · about a 2 minute read

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• Drake Your Job

  In which I use math to evaluate if I should switch jobs and which job I should accept.

  3 August 2018 · about a 7 minute read

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• Goodbye Chris Cornell

  Remembering my Soundgarden encounter.

  18 May 2017 · about a 1 minute read

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• Goodbye Jonathan Demme

  Remembering how Jonathan Demme made me a Talking Heads fan.

  26 April 2017 · under 1 minute to read

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• How One Funny Email Almost Changed My Career

  How to write a goodbye email that people remember for years.

  6 October 2016 · about a 2 minute read

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• How We XP: Develop & Deploy

  A short summary of how I think about the path of features from development, through Continuous Integration, and into Production.

  1 November 2015 · about a 7 minute read

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• Bose Customer Service

  SPOILER ALERT: Sometimes big companies don't suck.

  21 April 2011 · about a 2 minute read

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• Kids & Teachable Moments

  In which my son learns about lost luggage.

  24 March 2011 · about a 2 minute read