While I’m not sure it’s original to them, I first heard this saying from the US Marine Corps:
Continue reading “The Best Leadership Advice I’ve Ever Received”Staying Hungry: Lessons from Josh Groban after 20 Years
In 2022, my wife and I had the privilege of seeing Josh Groban live in concert. This was actually the second of his concerts that we’ve been to, and both have been more than worth the price of admission.
What struck me as I sat there during this most-recent concert is that Josh has been doing this for over 20 years (“His self-titled debut album Josh Groban was released on November 20, 2001.” [source]), but he’s as passionate and dedicated as ever. As the concert progressed, I started asking myself, “How is this guy still so fired up after 20+ years of doing this? How has he been able to keep not only his dedication but his passion alive?”
I’m sure people could write entire books about this, but here are the observations I came away with about how to stay hungry 20+ years into your career.
Continue reading “Staying Hungry: Lessons from Josh Groban after 20 Years”New Year’s & the Power of Mindset
In some ways, New Year’s is nothing more than a collective fantasy – we flip the page on a calendar or the date displayed by our phones now reads “Jan 1” and we all agree that this means that it’s now a “new year” and time for a “new start”. Maybe all of this is a bit arbitrary, but I don’t think that it necessarily follows that it’s unhelpful or meaningless to frame one date vs. another as “new.”
Continue reading “New Year’s & the Power of Mindset”Social Media is Vaporware?
So Elon Musk recently bought Twitter for several billions, but I’m honestly lost on the supposed value of social networks. I’m easily able to keep up with all the important people in my life without needing big social media:
Continue reading “Social Media is Vaporware?”Rails 7: The Missing Instructions
Sadly, I had a lot of difficulty getting Rails 7 with Turbo and Stimulus up and running. The Rails docs feel like they’re missing a few steps, so I wanted to document the commands I needed to run to get Rails 7 with the hotwire.dev tooling up and running.
Continue reading “Rails 7: The Missing Instructions”Best Practice: Code Like No One’s Watching
When writing code, it’s often easy to trigger the “freeze” response from the “fight, flight, freeze, or fawn” list of trauma responses.
“I bet I could make this SQL query more performant…”
“It feels like I could use a design pattern here…”
“This variable needs a better name…”
There are multiple issues at play here:
Continue reading “Best Practice: Code Like No One’s Watching”The Single Best Piece of Productivity Advice I’ve Received
This advice came from a former employer who mentioned it during a team-wide productivity learning session. It’s not original to him, but it’s where I first heard it:
Continue reading “The Single Best Piece of Productivity Advice I’ve Received”Ruby Paper Cuts
I love programming in Ruby and (especially) the Ruby on Rails framework. That said, they both have some oddities and conventions that leave me scratching my head, making me wonder what such smart people are thinking, and questioning the very nature of reality…you know, much like an episode of a Disney+ or CW show.
Continue reading “Ruby Paper Cuts”Running Sidekiq Locally in Rails
Recently, I needed to debug some issues with a Sidekiq queue in a Ruby on Rails app and figured I’d take the time to figure out how to run Sidekiq locally. Thankfully, it’s really quite easy!
Continue reading “Running Sidekiq Locally in Rails”Execution is the 80% of Success
Continue reading “Execution is the 80% of Success”The Pareto principle states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes (the “vital few”).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
