I’ve been thinking recently about how to get more value of 1:1 meetings with my manager. Over time I got into the bad habit of treating 1:1s like a personalized status update; just talking about what I’m working on and any potential impediments. I’m giving a lot more thought now to what I want out of my career and how to improve my performance outside of the quality of my code, and the first thing I’m trying to fix is approaching 1:1s as a meeting for me, and not an extension of daily standups. Read more

Last Friday, a couple of my colleagues were cleaning up old issues in Github, and I decided to go through the issues I had filed and close out all of the ones that I didn’t think made sense to keep. I started with 178 open issues authored by me; at the end I had only 12. Of the issues I closed, some were outdated, no longer relevant, or superseded by other planned work. Read more

I’ve tried starting a blog a couple of times before, using platforms like Google Blogs or Wordpress. Every time before I would write maybe a couple of posts, then get bored or forget about it and stop writing. I’m trying again, using my own static site this time. The goal this time is to give myself a place to record thoughts while also hopefully also learning a little bit about making a static site (since I’ve always been strictly a backend developer). Read more