Reading Time: 14 minutes In March I published a piece called How do we evaluate people for their technical leadership? It demonstrates (I hope) why production line metrics shouldn’t be copied and pasted onto knowledge work. Then, in a cunning move I ripped from email marketers, I reach the titular question at the very end of the piece and […]
Reading Time: 23 minutes This post from a week ago talked about three decision-making traps that technical leaders fall into like flies into a honey jar: These traps wreak havoc in individual decision making. So, naturally, we’ve ported the assumptions underlying these traps to many of the structures we use to make decisions in teams. Then,...
Reading Time: 15 minutes Tech’s favorite party trick is promoting programmers into leadership roles with zero coaching on how to make the transition, or even a briefing on what the role entails. The programmer accepts the promotion because…I mean, of course you’d accept a promotion. Then, they quickly find themselves in over their heads. In my...
Reading Time: 20 minutes “Let’s start with cars.” My students break out into groups of four, each quartet gathered around a collection of pink and green post-it notes. For the first few minutes, the room remains quiet while each student jots down a personal story about one way that cars have impacted their lives. As the students finish and […]
Reading Time: 13 minutes By the way, you can listen to me read this post aloud on my Patreon, along with many other audio recordings. In December of 2021, an itinerant sci-fi and fantasy gathering called Worldcon came under scrutiny for accepting a sponsorship from an American defense company. Critics remarked that the conference had clearly...
Reading Time: 35 minutes This April, I gave a talk at ETE 2024 called “The Tools We Still Need to Build with AI.” I think people expected me to list my predictions for profitable shovels to sell in the AI gold rush. I’ve been accused of playing 4-D chess: baiting the audience who needs to hear this and switching […]
Reading Time: 14 minutes By the way, you can listen to me read this post aloud on my Patreon, along with many other audio recordings. Each quarter at the University of Chicago, I ask students what they would like our final session to cover. This spring, a third of my students submitted some version of the question: “How can […]
Reading Time: 17 minutes By the way, you can listen to me read this post aloud on my Patreon (for free), and you can access many other audio recordings starting at $1/month! In February some years ago, my then-manager surprised me with a damning performance review. He had just returned from parental leave, having departed in September. Before he...
Reading Time: 37 minutes By the way, you can listen to me read this post aloud on my Patreon! It’s long, so there are three parts to the reading, but I made the first part free to listen. I joined Twitter in college, over a decade ago. The microblogging site promised a lightweight alternative to Facebook with the added […]
Reading Time: 5 minutes A couple of months ago I wrote about my answer to the question “What’s the point of tech conferences?” That post touched on a misconception among veteran techies who apply to speak at conferences: I have a professional acquaintance who recently pitched a fit on Twitter over RailsConf not accepting his talk this year. This...
Reading Time: 21 minutes In the fall of 2022, I wanted to experiment with new teaching formats. I had been teaching at the University of Chicago for five school years, and I had been facilitating live online workshops for O’Reilly for a while too. Each of those formats has its own benefits and challenges, and I wanted to add […]
Reading Time: 5 minutes This is an adapted version of the text of the email that I sent to my blog subscribers on May 16, 2023. I placed it on my blog as an example of what you can expect to receive if you subscribe. In February of 2022, my mom got very sick. At the time I had […]
Reading Time: 15 minutes It’s con season in the tech world. Yesterday evening I flew from Pluralsight‘s Link/ unconference in New Orleans to Pycon US in Salt Lake City. New Orleanians are just as likely as not to offer you a drink within sixty seconds of greeting you. Eighteen hours after leaving there, I walked into the Salt Palace […]