Now

Thinking about:I spoke at an out-of-town conference, Connectaha in Omaha NE. My talk was A Hero's Journey: Manual Tester to Automation QA. I got accepted to speak at KCDC in July, that talk will be Building a QA practice from scratch. Stimuli and input:Several books have

Thinking aboutBack to recruiting, and also professional development. In a mostly flat organisation, how to you give people a career path? My company has more of a cargo net than a ladder. Stimuli and inputRead "Never Split The Difference" by Chris Voss, and "How Emotions Are Made&

Thinking aboutRecruiting, training, and how to propagate a good company culture across locations so you get siblings instead of clones. I would like to see offices  that incorporate the best of the local area and the home office culture. Stimuli and inputChewed through "The Rook" by Daniel O&

Thinking aboutPublic speaking, I have stuff to say! Co-presented a talk at the company internal conference, 'Free cookies and usability for all,' and baked nine dozen cookies for it. I never want to smell cinnamon and brown sugar again. Solo speaker on a lightening talk, 'Agile for

Thinking aboutStill noodling on distraction and focus, also considering the system one and system two thinking that Arthur Doler laid out in a useful and informative Lunch and Learn at work. Picked up a copy of Cal Newport's book "Deep Work," it seems to tie in

Thinking aboutDistraction. I turned off all the notifications on my phone except texts, it feels like I have less pressure to poke at my phone at all times. Also thinking a lot about how you lead a team across multiple cities, especially ones you can't just drive to.

Thinking aboutWhat habits do I want to install in my life? I'm learning the Elixir language with a tutorial and book from Big Machine, Taking Off With Elixir. It's the first functional programming tutorial that hasn't made me feel like I'm being

Thinking aboutMy lightening talk on Risk Analysis and RFC 1149 for the first Asynchrony Labs internal conference on Friday 15th July. This is the first talk I've done where I've been recorded. There was applause, I survived. Stimuli and inputPeter Drucker's article Managing Oneself

Thinking aboutScala. I'm new on a team doing a Scala project and learning how to write code and tests. It bothers me when training for Scala spends half the time saying how dumb and awful Java is, there's no need for that. I felt a lot

Thinking aboutWays to do my job that accommodate being a practitioner as well as a manager. I slid into a part-time gig on my old team, working under the guidance of my former apprentice and that feels fantastic. It took a couple of weeks of being there to feel back