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]

Team! A Module For Teams!

Recently I found myself with some time on my hands... so I wrote a simple module for managing engineering team member information in automation projects.

Basically I was working on some auto… [more]

The Hunt Begins

Today my hunt for a new role begins in earnest. So I am dropping some thoughts and links here.

Why am I looking for a new role?

The company that I was at (Lumio) has ended in bankru… [more]

Some Thoughts on Engineering Leaderhip

So this article started as a thread of tweets. I want to expand on it, so I am going to quote all the tweets here and the… [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]

Today is going to be a great day, and other mindset shifts

This covers a bit more than a week, but it’s been wild over here. Onboarding into the company that acquired us, the whole family getting COVID (we’re all doing better thanks), and the associates qu… [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]

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]

Why weird team names make sense

I've managed teams named, among other things, Python-Brug, and Banpo. Named for bridges in different cities, while we worked on a product named Bridge. A lot of people look at those names and t… [more]

Some thoughts inspired by "Toward peer review as a group engagement"

These are rough thoughts and should be taken as such. Think of them more as the interesting points that deserve thought in a context that the author of the paper (Andrea Bonaccorsi) was not specifi… [more]

Lumio UtahJS Conf 2022

Welcome!

I've been at Lumio for a few months now (ok fine 8 months) and I am looking for more people to join our rapidly expanding team. Check out the jobs, and more information about … [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]

Encourage teams to take risks

In any given moment we have two options: to step forward into growth or to step back into safety.

— Abraham Maslow

This last Sunday we went on a light hik… [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]

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]

Language Drift and finding code beautiful

I hate javascript Class. I like semicolons. This puts me in a specific group of developers who write js. It puts me at odds with many in the Eternal War of the Semicolon.

As I was driving int… [more]

estimations and theory building

My team lead at Instructure, 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]

On To New Horizons

"Good night, good night! parting is such sweet sorrow, That I shall say good night till it be morrow." - Juliet (William Shakespeare)

For the last three and a half years I’ve been work… [more]

Confidence Without Ego

When I was young I thought humility was placing yourself below other people. To believe that they were better than me. To subserviate myself to their opinions and requests. I thought of the stereot… [more]

There is a Right Way

I grew up working with power tools. I think I was 9 the first time I used a router. As a family we were making mancala boards for christmas presents for family and friends. The noise was intense, t… [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]