1. SCOBY — Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria & Yeast. The Mother! This is what makes Kombucha Kombucha. Usually you can find a friend who brews to give you one of theirs. I have found friend SCOBY to be healthier than the ones you can buy.
2. A One Gallon glass fermenting jar (or two if you want to continuously brew). (example on Amazon These are nice because they come with cheese cloth and rubber bands)
3. Cheese Cloth and a giant rubber band.
4. Tea — Black Tea works best. I use 4 bags of green tea and 4 bags of oolong tea per one gallon batch.
5. Cane Sugar. None of that refined crap. SCOBY loves nommin’ on that Cane goodness.
6. Distilled Water. You can use filtered. I have killed a SCOBY by using well water from the artesian well near Liberty Park. Sadness. I just buy a gallon of Distilled water for every batch now. 99 cents at Smiths.
7. Apple Cider Vinegar — This is used to clean all surfaces that the SCOBY will touch. Don’t forget to rinse.
8. Four 32oz swivel-top (example on Amazon). I like 32oz because it is less work to fill than eight 16oz bottles.
9. A plastic funnel.

Nice to have items:

1. Thermometer strip for your fermenting jar(s)
2. Heating Wrap. I like this one because it comes with a temperature gauge strip and it works great during the winter when the temp is too low for fermentation.
3. Syringe for cooking. I use this to sample the brew before bottling for secondary fermentation. Remember to wash with Apple Cider Vinegar and rinse with hot water before dipping in to your booch.

Important things to remember:

1. Your SCOBY hates metal. Avoid metal in all parts of this process except the boil.
2. Any and all bacteria can mess up your brew. Keep the apple cider vinegar close by during the brew and between fermentations. Wash your hands in apple cider vinegar and rinse before handling the SCOBY.
3. The SCOBY shouldn’t go in the fermenting jar until the temperature is below 90 degrees F. I usually wait until it’s below 85. A safe bet is “room temperature”.

Brewing Process (assuming you have a gallon brewed already… don’t worry if you don’t. it will all make sense later):

1. Dump 1/3 of a gallon of distilled water into your pot. Bring to a boil.
2. While your water is coming to a boil, rinse each secondary ferment bottles with Apple Cider vinegar and rinse with piping hot water.
3. Use a food processor to break down the ingredients for your secondary ferment. You can leave it pretty chunky or blend it to a slurry. I have used the following combos with pretty good results: ginger and blueberries, just ginger, ginger and grapefruit, ginger and strawberries.
4. Your water should be boiling.
5. Add 1 cup of Cane Sugar to the boiling water and stir (I use a wooden spoon) until dissolved.
6. Add tea (8 bags or 2oz of loose leaf) and steep. I have experimented with different steep times and strategies. It can get pretty bitter, but I’ve found that the SCOBY works well no matter what.
7. While your tea steeps, wash a mason jar with Apple Cider Vinegar and rinse with piping hot water. Wash your hands with Apple Cider Vinegar (stinging fun!) and rinse. Remove your SCOBY from the top of your primary fermentation jar (there should be a new SCOBY or two or many) and place in the clean mason jar and add about 1 cup of Kombucha to it. Cover to prevent contamination of your precious alien mother.
8. Use a clean funnel (Apple Cider Vinegar and a rinse) to transfer your secondary fermentation ingredients to your bottles. I use a clean chopstick sometimes to force the pieces through the funnel.
9. Pour your Kombucha (which at this point is lighter than it started, drinkable and probably pretty tasty. It will probably not be fizzy at this point unless it has been going for more than 15ish days.) from the primary one gallon jar into each 32oz bottles, leaving about an inch of room at the top to help the secondary fermentation.
10. Seal the bottles and leave for 3 days in a warm and dark area. Some people say to burp them on the first day… some say every day. I say it doesn’t really matter. If a batch is going crazy I’ll burp it but if it looks normal I will just leave it and put it in the Fridge after 3 days. Once it is cooled down it is ready to enjoy!
11. Meanwhile on the stove! Your steep is done. Rinse the one gallon primary jar with Apple Cider Vinegar and hot water. Pour about 1/2 gallon of cold Distilled water into the jar followed by your beautifully steeped sugar/tea solution. Top it off with distilled water and leave room for about 1 cup of Kombucha from the last batch and your SCOBY that we set aside earlier.
12. Once the tea solution has returned to room temperature (at least below 90 F), add the SCOBY, cover with cheese cloth sealed down by a rubber band, and put somewhere warm and dark. I keep mine in the basement with a heating wrap around it at 82ish degrees F.
13. Start tasting your Kombucha around 10–12 days. If it is still sweet it needs more time. If it is vinegary then it might have gone too long. My sweet spot is around 15 days.

For two years I led a group trail run in the beautiful Wasatch mountains around Salt Lake City. The most important part of this post is to thank the hundreds of people that came out and made Wednesday nights special. You know who you are. Thank you! Now, some data!

Total Runs: 84
Total Mileage: 537.16 miles
Avg. Miles/Run: 6.4
Total Vert: 153,517 feet
Avg. Vert/Run: 1828
Facebook Group That Make It Possible: Wasatch Mountain Wranglers
Cropjustins: countless
Couples that met on WNW and later got married: 1 (so far)
Grillouts: 3
People Lost: 3–5 (but we found them)
Group size complaints: 2 (same lady)
Badly gashed knees: 1
Bathroom Gregorian Chant Sessions: +/- 3
Smiles Per Mile: ~23
Who Showed Up: All Paces & Faces
# of Times I Explained the Butler -> Mill B Route: 3–5
Mill B?: 1

Routes

Below is a list of trails that we ran categorized by the ideal season to run them. The most important part of these runs was that everyone was welcome, so these are mostly accessible to beginner and intermediate trail runners. Click on the name of each trail for a caltopo.com map.

Summer

These routes hold snow until around May/June/July most years. Upper Millcreek trails are open July 1 when the winter gate opens.

• Broads Fork to the Beaver Ponds
• Desolation Lake/Dog Lake
• Wolverine Cirque Loop (some exposure)
• Lake Blanche
• Maybird Gulch (holds snow into June)
• Red Pine Lake
• Alta/Brighton Loop (this one always draws a crowd. If you have more than 12 people, send two groups in opposite directions)
• Butler Fork Desolation Connector Loop
• Great Western Trail from Big Mtn Pass
• Reynold’s Peak from Upper Big Water
• Reynold’s Peak up Butler down Mill D
• Supreme Loop w/ Sunset Peak
• Old Red Pine to Crest down Little Water
• Elbow Fork to Lambs and Back
• Upper Millcreek Loops
• Olympic Park Loop
• Millcreek Historic Loop
• Mill B North (Mill B?)

Shoulder Seasons

Anything in this list can also be good during a mild winter and will be decent but hot in the summer.

• Mt. Wire
• Avenues Twins
• Foothills Loop
• Temple Quarry
• Bell’s Canyon
• Mormon Pioneer Trail from Little Dell to Big Mountain Pass
• Little Black (TED) (the end can be sketchy for large groups)
• Lookout Peak
• Neff’s Canyon
• Mt. Olympus (Big for an after-work activity. Headlamps needed!)

Winter

These routes are best saved for winter, but can be great year-round! Remember headlamps during the winter!

• Grandeur Peak
• Desolation Trail or Thayne’s to the SLC Overlook
• Park City Running Co. Loop
• Mueller Park
• Corner Canyon Loop
• Jeremy Ranch Road
• Heughs Canyon
• Pipeline
• Lambs Canyon to Bare Ass Pass
• Dimple Dell
• Mount Van Cott

Wednesday Night Wranglin’. A Retrospective. was originally published in Wasatch Mountain Runners on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In a few easy steps, you can create a map of every activity in your Strava account. I recently discovered this awesomeness after Strava’s Personal Heatmaps feature left a bit to be desired. I am using it to see which trails I have not been on in my glorious back yard, the Wasatch Mountains!

To create a map of your conquests you will need the following:

• An account on Strava.com chalk-full of activities.
• An account on CalTopo.com.

1. Let’s Download Our Activities From Strava!

NOTE: As of late 2018, the bulk export of data has moved to a different area under settings and some activities are exported in a strange file format of fit.gz. The following won’t likely work anymore.

First, log in to your account on Strava.com

Then, hover over your Profile Icon and press “Settings”

Click the “Download all your activities” button on the bottom right of the Settings page. It looks like this:

Obsessively check you email until Strava sends you the link to download all of your activities.

Download the file and unzip it. You should have a folder with .gpx files for every activity you’ve ever tracked on Strava!

2. Let’s Create a Map From Our Strava Activities!

Now, log in to CalTopo.com (I use my google.com account to log in).

Hover over the “Import” item on the top nav bar and click “Choose Files”.

In the folder full of your .gpx files, select all of them and click “Open”.
NOTE: This step will take a while, especially if you have a lot of activities in your Strava Account. My 350 activities took about 5 minutes. If you have more than 200, I would would recommend uploading them in batches. 100 at a time would be pretty manageable. Be patient and don’t reload the page! Eventually you will see this:

Press Import. You should see your activities on the map. If you want to hide the labels, just hover over the “config” menu item and change “Show Labels” to “None”.

Be sure to save your map!

You now have a great visual reference of where you have and have not been. Your data from Strava + the awesomeness and power of CalTopo = ❤.

I am a huge fan of CalTopo.com. Their free plan lets you save 5 private maps and unlimited public maps. If you upgrade you get more private maps and a lot of other cool features. Check it out here: https://caltopo.com/join.

Make a Map of All of Your Strava Activities with Caltopo. was originally published in Wasatch Mountain Runners on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Luckily I found a good therapist here in Salt Lake City and have been going at least twice a month, sometimes more. All of that said, yesterday my therapist gave me a really cool analogy after I expressed frustration about having a few weeks of “down”. Here it is:

When we decide to do work on ourselves (that can be counseling, yoga, meditation, exercise, anything) we start as a total goddam mess. Imagine that mess as a house… it’s dingy, the roof is caving in, and it’s an all around shitty place to be.

So one day you decide to build a new house for yourself. It’s hard and expensive to build a new house, so you take your time, but you do it right and over time you create a really comfortable, peaceful place to be. Big windows, open layout, plenty of room for parties, and a room full of awesome tools.

Then one day, BOOM, you find yourself in your old house again. Maybe you got drunk and stumbled in. Maybe a strong gust of wind.

But wait, your new house is still there! In fact, you built it just next door. You are no longer stuck in your old house, so you do what you can to open the door, step into the sunshine (or rain), and make your way back to your new house. I tend to get stuck when I return back to my “old house.” I get frustrated and think that now I’m stuck there forever. I forget that I have a cool new place that I’ve done a lot of work on.

If shit is whack in your life or if you’ve done work but find yourself in a shitty situation, take heart. Work that you do on yourself pays off. If you have been thinking about going to talk to someone, do it. It will pay off! Life will always throw us back into that old house sometimes, but when you have a new house built, new tools in your mental health arsenal, you can choose to leave that old nasty house and spend time in happiness and fullness. Holla if you have any questions or need to talk. I realize this is a big old brainfart. Love you beautiful folks.

We’ve all been there; surrounded by insanely talented people who can’t seem to make a wrong move. People building incredible products and experiences. People who make it look easy. The feeling of “what the hell am I doing here” begins to creep in. Imposter syndrome is real ya’ll! So how can teams and organizations prevent this soul and creativity-crushing phenomenon? It’s simple! Build a culture of visibility and recognition.

At my last job, engineers were encouraged to “be visible.” Having come from the marketing world and never working on a big dev team, I was not used to showing my work to other engineers. At first I was nervous. I thought the backend or mobile devs wouldn’t care about what I, a front-end engineer, was working on. The company provided a platform for visibility with twice-monthly demo sessions. I made it a goal to demo what I was working on as often as possible. I found that the more I showed my work, the more I was called upon to help solve problems with other devs. Visibility lead to more contribution and a bigger sense of “being a part of the team.”

Visibility plays well with another important practice: recognition. It’s simple. When someone does something great, recognize them for it! Awesome contributions often go unnoticed, leading to burnout or worse. A continuous flow of recognition can do wonders for the morale of an individual or team. Moreover, it feels genuinely good to give and receive recognition. Whenever I received recognition at my last job, it always lead to renewed energy to tackle the next challenge.

You may be wondering how you can implement these practices where you work. I’m a huge fan of 7Geese. We used 7Geese at my last job for OKRs (visibility!), recognitions, and 1-on-1s. Recognitions were posted on a TV in the main entrance to the office where everyone could see them. There were days when dozens of recognitions were flying all over the place, reminding us how badass our co-workers were. Setting aside an hour every couple of weeks for demos is a simple and effective way to start to promote visibility within your team.

People are amazing. We also tend to compare ourselves to others. Promoting visibility and recognition can keep workers rooted in their badassery, confident in their skills, and inspired to go forth and build the next great thing!

Check out my website for recognitions that former co-workers gave to me!

If you aren’t an engineer or developer, have no fear. Here is a quick reference of some of the terms I will use in this blog:

1. CSS — Code that tells a webpage how to look. Stands for “Cascading Stylesheets”.
2. Compiled CSS —A single CSS file where every line of code is put on a single line without spaces. This reduces file size and the time it takes for a browser to read the file and render the styles.
3. Stylesheet — A file that contains CSS code. The code that makes our apps/web pages pretty.
4. Hive — Teem’s collection of stylesheets that we use in our apps. Sometimes referred to as “our styles”.
5. Hive Guides — Teem’s living style guide. A reference to our styles.

Ok, let’s begin for real this time.

The Planting of Seeds

We are moving at 100 miles per hour (that’s 160 kilometers per hour for our friends around the world). #startuplyfe for real. We have grown a lot since the beginning and so have our stylesheets. Eventually we crept up over 18,000 lines of CSS (that’s a lot). It’s really hard to find time for maintenance when there are a gazillion other things going on. Building Hive Guides was the first step to addressing this issue. As we began to standardize our styles, time was freed up that was previously spent cleaning up new features. Eventually, Hive Guides freed up enough time to start a major operation that I like to call The Hive Harvest.

The Harvest Begins

The Hive Harvest process was pretty simple, it only took us about 3 weeks. Here’s how it went down:

1. Created an “app-map” (like a site-map) of our app ecosystem and created search queries to cover every line of styled code across our apps.
2. Created a spreadsheet with every stylesheet file with checkboxes for “keep”, “kill”, and “needs ❤” as well as a column for notes.
3. For every stylesheet, searched apps for style usage. Removed old styles and replaced with updated styles. Checked the appropriate box, left notes if the file needs ❤ and moved on to the next file.
4. Once the spreadsheet was filled out from top to bottom (a real thing of beauty) went through and removed stylesheets marked as “kill”.
5. Tested thoroughly across our entire app to make sure nothing was caddywhompus.
6. Released the harvested stylesheet into the wild!

The Fruits of the Harvest

When I began the Hive Harvest I didn’t know what it would yield. I knew there were some parts of our styles that could be removed, but I didn’t have a specific goal or guess as to how much could be removed. So, without further ado, I present to you the fruits of the harvest! DRUM ROLL PLEASE!

Boom! I was able to remove over 6,000 lines of code and shave 113 KB off of the production version of our styles. That’s a glorious 33% reduction in file size. If you are loading our app with a 56k modem (I really hope you aren’t, but no judging) this will save you a whopping 16 seconds of load time! The benefits aren’t quite as dramatic on our speedy connections nowadays, but 113 KB makes a difference!

Harvest Celebration

The Hive Harvest was a success; but it doesn’t end there. There’s a reason why we call Hive Guides a living style guide; it changes with us. Hive Guides made it possible to complete the Hive Harvest and will enable more harvests in the future. It provides accountability for our styles by giving us a place to quickly view, understand, and improve them. Most importantly, leaner styles are easier to maintain and free up more time to prototype and build new features for our amazing customers. At the end of the day in startup land, that is what matters most!

The Harvest. Notes on Maintaining a Living Style Guide. was originally published in WX Weekly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.