Very awesome birthday present from my very awesome mother.

This week I learned…

Earlier this week I attended a women’s conference on presence and leadership. I anticipated a lot of talk on down inflection and vocal fry, but I learned a number of novel things as well. I’ll write a longer post on this later, but some quick thoughts for now:

• Powerful people take up time and space. Stand large and speak slowly.
• Wanna exude confidence and approachability? Sit asymmetrically.
• Using long, sustained, deliberate gestures helps get your point across AND use up excess adrenaline.
• Sentences are best served at 5–7 words long.

Reading:

• A post about the “most overlooked aspect of UX design.” The author conflates empty states and error states, but a good read nonetheless.
• A sorrowful piece in the Talia-Yelp vein about entry level startup jobs being a dead end.
• A glorious and thoughtful piece on hiring practices in engineering: We only hire the Trendiest.

Learning:

• Apple aficionados think very poorly of people with PCs more 5 years old.
• On this Bubble scale, most of my friends in SF rate around 10 and most of my friends back home around 50. (Lower is more isolated and privileged.)
• TuboTax is easy… but they pour millions of lobbying dollars into keeping the base state of taxes painfully difficult.
• At 28, birthdays aren’t that big a deal anymore.
• Star Wars legos: age 16 and up?! But still awesome.

Writing:

• What It Really Means to ‘Bring the Donuts.’