What is an Executive?

An executive is not a level - it's a unique role with its own types of challenges and requiring its own set of skills. Leaders ignore that to their own and everyone else's peril.

The "Until the Ice Cream Truck" Podcast

I almost forgot to mention...I have a podcast!

Management: Organization Size May Not Be As Important As You Think

I recently interviewed with a company who was looking for a senior engineering leader, and the conversation took a surprising turn, so I want to take a few minutes with you good folks and think about what makes a manager qualified to build or lead an organization of a certain size.

Engineering Values and Principles

In almost every engineering all-hands, the senior engineering leader has a slide where they present a set of core engineering values. I guess it shouldn't have come as too much of a surprise, then, when a colleague finally asked me what my core principles were. It's more than just a reasonable question - being clear about values and principles can provide a crucial north star when needing to make a decision in the face of ambiguity. After reflecting for a bit, I put together the following list...

Kicking the Tires with GitHub Actions

As components break down into smaller units, more dependencies between those components means I need more rigor in producing them. I've been following the progress of GitHub Actions since it was first announced, but hadn't actually tried using it until now.

The Right Tool, The Right Idiom

As more and more traditionally-trained developers have migrated into the Javascript space, I've seen quite a few attempts to bring across idioms, patterns, and even and tools commonly found in large OO code bases. Some of those things have made their way into the core language itself and some have caused the creation of new languages. Nearly all of these examples illustrate the application one tool chain's idioms onto another - and in many of the above examples, the result is unintentional and unnecessary complexity.

My Workflow v2

Some friends of mine recently released a podcast episode on the topics of attention management related tools, and it turned out that one of the resources they referenced was an old blog post of mine on the topic; so maybe that's a decent place to start and see what's worked out, what hasn't, and what new circumstances necessarily change strategy.

Changes

I'm going to break from the usual work-related topics to talk about a few major changes that are afoot with me and my family.

RDF Inferencing In Action

If you've been reading this blog for any period of time, you've probably heard me go on about linked data is magically awesome. In this post, I'll show you an example.

Functional Javascript Playground

I'm a big believer that the functional programming approach may be the only way to write Javascript code and stay sane. To continue building up my own skill as well as share some of those opportunities with you, I've created a repository to show and get feedback on examples.