[Maybe someday I’ll add some images here, but for now, I found this picture of white CAPs (Cauli, Apple, Parsnip) :) ].

I’ve noticed an artifact of some common usage around expressing excitement for several years now. I enjoy hearing the phrase “I’m super excited about…” When it’s used in speaking (and it’s almost always used in speaking, not writing), it essentially means “I’m actually excited” about whatever it’s referencing. This might be a person being hired, our shipping a product feature, and so on. This is all good.

I received one of those facebook messages from a friend that looked like spam and I wasn’t going to click on it. But I wasn’t fully sure what and maybe the video was interesting. So, I clicked on the video. Ugh. It bought me to a page asking me to…

Part of my job as a manager is to push forward in the face of uncertainty. At times this means I ask, “When?” I have a simple technique for getting an answer when the person I’m asking feels like they can’t. …

Recently a co-worker asked on an internal slack channel: “Hey managers, wondering if anyone could share some tips and advice for managing IC’s in a different office. Lessons learned, recurring problems etc. All help appreciated, thanks.” I didn’t exactly provide lessons learned or recurring problems, but here’s what I answered: …

I read thru Rands’ nice post on how to and liked it. I also figure the folks I work with have probably figured out most of that kind of stuff about me already. But, if you don’t know me well yet, or you’re just willing to sit through more about…

And how to do better — In the course of their work, technical folks often need to communicate a series of ideas, problems, issues, solutions, tasks, or the like. At first, you simply get the details down, focusing purely on technical concerns, raising them, describing them, and the like. Having done that, you might stop and…

This is a pretty short note — but if you want to stop here, you can just read this quote: If you want to herd cats, you’re going to be a lot better off having been a cat, being able to think like a cat, and really understanding cats. On…

From an engineer who didn’t like to write. — Like some of you reading this, years ago I chose my college major, at least in part, because I really didn’t like to write papers. I preferred more well-defined problems. To succeed in writing, you learn some general practices and guidelines — some do’s and don’ts and some qualitative interpretations…