I’ve gone ahead and paid for Claude AI Pro and have been experimenting with it. I thought I’d share some interesting tidbits over the past couple of weeks I've been using it.

Make Your Voice Heard​

I was recently on a call where someone spoke up to challenge how we defined and used a single word in our burgeoning project.

One single word.

I just applied for any engineering management position. They asked in the application submission process, "Tell us about your biggest achievement or personal success in customer support".

Personally, I think it's nice to have a space just for that sort of question, pre-interview, that doesn't take up space in the resume or in the cover letter, so I appreciate the question. This is what I said:

I was looking over the DORA metrics, trying to think of a mnemonic for the four options that would roll of the tongue a little more easily than "Lead Time," "Deployment Frequency," "Failure Rate," and "Time to Recover." I mean, "DORA" itself isn't even helpful, since it stands for DevOps Research and Assessment, which is the name of the project, not a acronym for the metrics.

There’s no silver-bullet metric (or set of metrics) at the individual level that doesn’t either require extensive context or can’t be gamed by the developers, or worse, might be misused by the upper-echelon, looking for excuses to “clean house.”

I'm writing the code out of Crafting Interpreters and since it's been such a long time since I wrote Java, I'm creating this living document to help me remember some of the more specific details and quirks of the language. Depending on when you read this, it may be less complete than I'd like, but I post it here in any case to help those who might run across it.

Last updated: Aug 22, 2024

Every time we put a label on a concept, and idea, or a system with the best of intentions to describe it and that system or idea becomes popular, that label (and by extension the system itself) gets corrupted into a mockery of itself.

Without fail.

Every. 👏 Single. 👏 Time.

This list had been long brewing in my mind (for years), but the spark to enumerate my thoughts came after a business dinner where we were discussing the ins-and-outs of good communication practices in business. People forget, I feel, that "business" is a world away from our personal lives, at least in terms of how we interact with one another, yet all too often I find people taking things too personally when at work.

This concept comes up in conversation more often than I care to admit: "Project Management Office (PMO) is just another layer of bureaucracy". This is an overly simplistic point of view, so let's think about it in terms of the human body.

I wrote this originally a few years ago for teams whose members were new to each other; these suggestions acted as a guide to understanding my perspectives. I know that everyone has different points of view on how to run a project. By making myself the locus of attention, the idea was that the team could debate with me about the details and we could come to a consensus that worked for everyone.

Preamble aside, let's read on!