the megaphone

Megaphones are amazing. For nearly as long as we have organized into large groups, we have rolled materials into tubes and spoken into them to help carry our voices to the back of the audience. Wit… [more]

Last Lectures

Way back in my year end review for 2021 I wrote,

As part of that effort I’ve worked to build a culture in engineerin… [more]

What Makes a Team Lead Great?

“Well, don’t you think that you as the commander have an obligation to create a vision for your command?” It was more of a statement than a question. “No, I feel that my job as the com… [more]

Lessons Learned From a Film Producer About Making Software

This last week, I had my leadership team in town for the first time in a while for some planning meetings, and some team building^more]

The infinite power of people

This afternoon I was reading a theological book (Jacob: a brief theological introduction by Deidre Nicole Green… [more]

Cultural Homogeneity

I've been thinking about France and French culture, and why it is that a country that only recently in the broad scheme of things adopted more equal policies around gender, is also a nation whe… [more]

Book Review-Road to Valor

Review of "The Road to Valor" by Aili McConnon & Andres McConnon

I have love cycling, a fact you should be aware of if you intend to stick around here. Coupled with my love for… [more]

Organizational Design Democracy And Ownership

There are moments where the lightbulb comes on for you and things that have been bouncing on the tip of your brain just drop into place. This week I had one of those. And it was about why people le… [more]

Human Communications Are Hard

Delays and technical issues bias us against others experiencing them.

This comes from more]

2021: Year in Review

It has been quite the year!

As the pandemic has been dragging on, ramping up, slowing down, generally continuing to drag on.

Thoughts

I am excited for 2022.

2022! How did … [more]

2020: A year

This has been a crazy year, but honestly an exciting one for me and my family. We've lived through multiple natural disasters, moved, changed jobs, survived a pandemic, had a new baby join us, and … [more]

Tech Things I read in 2018

This is going to be a pretty straightforward list of what tech related reading I did this year. It doesn’t include hundreds of blog posts and forum discussion. I’ll break it into two ca… [more]

Making the world more beautiful

Prompt: "You are tasked with making the world most beautiful. Where do you start?"

My first reaction is that I start with furniture. I believe that our perception of quality and beauty, whic… [more]

Jumping on the AMA bandwagon

Today I am at React Rally in SLC and after a particularly inspiring talk by Preethi Kasireddy I created an Ask Me … [more]

So I got Scammed on Amazon

A couple of weeks ago I fell for scam in the amazon marketplace. Yep me. It was a clever one and not one I have seen written about so I am writing about it.

The Setup

I was in … [more]

Let's talk about Boot camps

So the giant article I’ve been planning to write from what I learned prepping for that talk I gave on being senior<… [more]

ambition. life's work.

Ambition, I have come to believe, is the most primal and sacred fundament of our being. To feel ambition and to act upon it is to embrace the unique calling of our souls. Not … [more]

Being Senior Part 1- the books and data

This is just a quick post to throw up the books I quoted from and a link to the data for anyone who attended my presentation at Utah JS Conference 2016 today. I am putting down my thoughts in a lon… [more]

ambition. life's work.

Ambition, I have come to believe, is the most primal and sacred fundament of our being. To feel ambition and to act upon it is to embrace the unique calling of our souls. Not to act up… [more]

Io: the language, not the moon

This is the first in the Seven Languages series of posts and covers the Io language, a small prototypal language.

Let’s get this out of the way righ… [more]

Seven Languages

A few weeks ago we started a book club at work and we are running through more]

2015: in review

It is said that change is the only constant and that certainly proved true this year around here in 2015. I started the year working as a Front End Stack team (core team) member for the LDS Church … [more]

Learning the Trade

I thought I would throw together a list of resources I have found interesting and useful when it comes to building the internet. This is by no means exhaustive and will be updated over time as I fi… [more]

Details. Details. Details.

A few days ago my wife and I had dinner at a restaurant in Salt Lake City. The food is d… [more]

Short Circuit and the Javascript IF Statement

A quick javascript tip that lets you eliminate small IF statements

Ok so it’s not really that kind of Short Circuit, though it is almost as cool. In javascript, as in many programming l… [more]

Setting up Speed: Cherokee, Railo and CouchDB on AWS

I am working on a little side project (ansble.com) which is going to require scalability, and a layered architecture that I just couldn't reasonably build in a physical environment. So I started to… [more]

Setting up Speed: Cherokee, Railo and CouchDB on AWS

I am working on a little side project (ansble.com) which is going to require scalability, and a layered architecture that I just couldn't reasonably build in a physical environment. So I started to… [more]

Now Serving: Obsolescence

This article is part of a series, “Now Serving,” that takes a look at the changes in design, and consumer culture, that are happening right now.

“We have advanced technologi… [more]

Trust and the Box

Last Friday I was in Historic Mission Control at NASA’s Johnson Space Center(jsc) listening to Milt Heflin, one of jsc’s Associate Directors, describe some of the history that happened … [more]