Not long ago I began writing code to remember what it was like to build things every day for users with the hope to build some empathy for my direct and indirect reports After a few months of doing close to 30 minutes in the morning of daily coding I want to share what I […]
First 90 day plan – AI sponsored post
The first 90 days of a new job are critical for success. In order to make the most of this time, it is important to have a plan. The following is a suggested plan for the first 90 days: Establish your goals and priorities. What do you hope to accomplish in your new role? What […]

What is a keystone habit According to The Power of Habit author Charles Duhigg, when there is a habit change, it can set off a chain reaction that has the ability to change your self-image. It sounds simple, powerful, and appealing, so I wanted to try it out for my team. The quality problem At […]

Recently, the subject of teams working across time zones has come up in three separate conversations, so it makes for an excellent topic to write about. Here are a few guidelines I’ve seen applied successfully that will help work across time zones a bit easier on your team. Default to public conversations in chat Doing […]
Working with contractors

Recently, we’re getting ready to engage with contractors to help us drive a major initiative forward. Behind the scenes at work, here is a view that happens before contractors write any code. Procurement It starts by figuring out what company you’ll be working with. Your company might already have a pre-vetted list of vendors, but […]
Unblocking yourself

I am recovering from a couple of weeks of COVID madness and trying to get back into my habits, including writing. To my surprise, I had no idea what to write about. I was effectively blocked. Thinking about being blocked reminded me of being blocked at work and what I did to get moving. In […]

Today felt productive, engaging, and like I finally made real progress. Here is how the day went. I created a new ProjectManager class to contain the logic for the project domain. Since I am exposing the most straightforward functionality, I only added create and read methods, with creation only having a title as a required […]
Day four was fun but short. I began by setting my Pomodoro timer to 25 minutes to work on the first milestone, creating and viewing projects. The project’s definition already has a lot of functionality, so I constrained the milestone only to include the title as part of the project. The framework I am using https://aspnetboilerplate.com is […]
Day 3 took me towards project management; here is what happened. I managed to get 30 minutes in before the end of my day, so I was determined to make the most out of them. Recently, someone shared an article on project management and the importance of setting milestones rather than features. Using the concept […]
Project empathy, day two
For day two of our project, I only got in 30 minutes of work. Here is how that went. Since I am in management, I am constantly in project management and productivity software such as Jira and Todoist. The idea is to build a project management tool that feels as simple as todoist. Doing so […]