Early in my career as an engineering manager, my boss gave me some advice. He said that developers sometimes seem idle, just staring at the wall. In many cases, they were likely waiting for their code to compile and wouldn’t be able to do anything else. But, developers also need…

The Criticality of Adopting AI If you are reading this post, you may be looking for answers about why adopting AI is so hard or how to do it. Many people have written about these topics. Here are two articles that have been published recently — why it’s hard (Forbes) and how to do it…

Recently, I was talking with one of my developers and we came around to the subject of gender equity. He said that when he first started working in a tech company a few years ago, they joked that there were “more Daves than women” in the company — literally twice…

This post is Inspired by a recent blog post on GlowForge, “Strong Opinions Loosely Held Might Be the Worst Idea in Tech” When I first started working in a tech company, one of the things I most liked about being there was the smart, strongly opinionated people who always had…

(Originally published on rifflearning.com, 4/30/18) Vera John-Steiner, emeritus linguistics professor, passed away earlier this month. Her obit caught my eye in a scan of the deeper recesses of my news feed, and as I read the notice, I knew why. She was a key editor and collaborator on Mind in…

(Originally published on rifflearning.com, 3/26/18) This Women’s History Month, I’ve learned a lot about the role of women in the workforce. Women were “welcomed” into the workforce during WWII as the male labor supply steeply declined and the war effort expanded and continued. …

(Originally published on rifflearning.com, 1/1/18) When my kids were in elementary school, I took an online course on Gamification — the application of game-design elements and game principles in non-game contexts. It was something we were thinking about implementing in one of our products, and I wanted to learn more…