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WWDC 2021 wish list
To an Apple nerd like me, the WWDC keynote day is kind of my Christmas. Pound for pound, the WWDC keynote contains the largest number of interesting announcements and since they have such a huge software focus, they have a tendency to be very surprising since there aren’t any supply chain leaks. I thought I’d…
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Reflections From the Void
When I moved to Portland, I developed a new hobby. Before the big move, Ben and I came up to visit our new empty house for a few days around the 4th of July to scope it out and just get a few preparation things done. I randomly encountered an ad for some chair that…
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Vacation
It’s early Friday afternoon and I have an entire weekend ahead of me as I write this but I already feel like I’m at the point where my vacation is winding down and the responsibilities of going back to work are already staring me in the face. Last week I celebrated two fun milestones: I…
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Standing for Something
I want to see more companies start to actually take a stand on issues. That’s one of the things I respected about Basecamp. Until their cofounders kind of revealed themselves to have some serious issues, they had a track record of striving to be good citizens. For the most part, companies love to seem like…
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April 28, 1995
Today marks 26 years since I said goodbye to my mom for the last time as I walked out the door to wait for the bus. Later that day, she and my brother Brandon died in a car accident on the way to go shopping. It’s so weird, too. With every year that passes, the…
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Basecamp and Leadership
So, Basecamp announced some internal changes this week for how they are going to run their company. Over the years, Basecamp has built up a reputation for resisting some of the hustle culture associated with so many startups, and for working smarter, not harder. Among other things, they invented Ruby on Rails, they have been…
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My Sweet Setup: Carbon Copy Cloner
Carbon Copy Cloner is one of those tools that focused on doing one particular thing, but it does it incredibly well. The thing: copying everything from one drive on a Mac to another, and copying it so well that if you boot your startup disk, you could boot up straight from the clone disk and…
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Constant naming and lookup in Ruby
I thought I had a pretty good understanding of how constant lookup worked in Ruby, but I encountered a surprising piece of behavior recently and I wanted to share it. We had a god model at work that contains thousands of lines of code, much of which is in methods that aren’t truly core to…
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Knowledge Work Is Different
Every now and then, I’ll be feeling out of it and I’ll step away from work. Maybe I’m feeling sick or fatigued, or maybe I heard a gutting piece of bad news going on in the world. Whatever it is, I know I don’t have it in me to keep doing my work, and I’ll…