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Showing posts from September, 2021

The Opposite of Play isn't Work. It's Depression.

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"The opposite of Play isn't Work. It's Depression." - Brian Sutton-Smith Unless your battling depression, when you're doing it right Work, Play, Life, are all the same thing. I don't get people talking about "work/life balance". If it were a Venn diagram, 'Work' would be entirely inside Life. You can't have Work without Life. I'm not obtuse here - there's plenty who try to make the work take up as much of life as possible, but by virtue of their relationship, Life is the priority. To hijack Brian's quote: the opposite of Life isn't Work, it's Death. Ultimately, I'm advocating for more Play. Play is what blurs the lines around Work. With enough Play, the lines become invisible, and you're just left with Life. It's okay to be silly at work. It's okay to be yourself. If you see Work and Life as two separate things, it means you're living two separate lives. That means you're doing even more work to

Increments Episode 101: (Re)Starting with Vulnerability

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Season "0" was just getting started, helping me iron out kinks and figure this thing out... incrementally. We'll be coming back to the topic of Growth many times throughout, but for now we're pivoting to Season 1 where we'll be talking a bit about fears and vulnerability.

7 Ways To Be A Better Hiring Manager

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As a Hiring Manager, if you've not updated the way you have interviews, you're not likely batting average at retaining a strong team. Here are 7 tips you can use to focus on building a lasting relationship beginning Day 1. (And Day 1 is the first interview, it's not their first day on the job.)

Do It For Her

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I always liked the early seasons of the Simpsons that always had an underlying plot that was often sweet, sometimes wholesome, and even if you were a kid - you could still understand. This was always one of my favorite moments - it captured a moment you rarely saw on the Simpsons, which was Homer's one on one relationship with Maggie. There was frustration with Lisa, chasing after Bart - but that one scene really captured his relationship with Maggie in a way that we, as the viewers, never saw. While I mostly leave my family stuff to Facebook/Instagram, I just wanted to share that I too have an amazing little girl that I love endlessly. She's much of the reason why I do a lot of what I do. She likes watching me make the videos I do (she's often slightly off-camera when I'm recording.) I like that she sees me try things I'm not good at, and that she sees me get frustrated with myself. I let her see me be creative when it's putting together a slideshow for a talk

5 Things To Do In Your First 30 Days As A New Coder

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Congrats! You got the job! Those first 30 days are going to be so important (along with the next 30, and next 30.) Here are 5 (ish) things for you to do to better set yourself up for success in your new job.

9 Non-Coding Things to Focus on at Work

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Coding is important. Getting better at your craft is your main goal - but not your only goal. The truth is that great code will only get you so far, and if you're not actively focused on some other important areas you'll fall behind. In this video, I'll cover 9 other areas that you should focus on as part of your day-to-day work.

Connectix QuickCam

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This is a pretty cool picture I took around 1998. It's cool not just because it's of a 14 year old me. What's cool about it is that this picture was taken with the original Connectix QuickCam - it was first released in '94, before webcams and digital cameras. It didn't capture in megapixels, because megapixels weren't even a thing. Resolution was 320x240 (LinkedIn's enlarged the original file) - it could only shoot in black in white, and you had to constantly adjust the brightness and contrast. I'm not looking at the camera because I'm looking at myself in the monitor. I don't have ton of pictures of myself at this age, most of the ones I do only exist as film/photographs. The QuickCam made it easier and faster to take pictures, which - by today's standard - seems like a very foreign concept.

5 Things to Mention to a Hiring Manager During an Interview

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Just because an interview is often a Q&A driven by the hiring manager doesn't mean you can't steer parts of the conversation. Here are 5 important things to make sure you talk through with a hiring manager during an interview.

3 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started My Technology Career

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J ust like anything healthy, nothing here is ground-breaking - but despite being obvious, I think there's too many who write these things off. Because they're so easy to do, there's really no excuse to not be doing them.

Increments Episode 004: How Do You Grow When You Are Stuck?

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Wrapping up the immediate questions around growth by addressing the questionnaire responses to the questions about feeling stuck.

Guidance Counselor 2.0 w/Alishah Novin + The First 90 Days

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Otiose World

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I built this site 21 years ago. We'd just survived Y2K. I was 16 years old, coding video games, building websites and writing terrible poetry while listening to 80s euro rock I'd downloaded from Napster on a 58kbps modem. If you've just gotten into coding: PLEASE. ALWAYS. SAVE. YOUR. CODE. Not just in GitHub, not in the cloud, but with physical backups. Save it all. That way, in 2042, you can relaunch your code and see if it still works.

6 Tips When Writing New Code

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  How do you get started on a new project, new feature or task? Here are 6 things for you to try when you're taking on new work.

Tech Career Video Library

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The  Greater Nashville Technology Council  is putting together a Tech Career Video Library geared towards middle-school  students  to get them interested in  tech   careers . I'm throwing down the gauntlet and challenging my fellow Tech-Nashvillians: record a 90 second video of yourself and share it with the GNTC to be posted on their library (message me for details on how to share).

Increments Episode 003: David Semach on Growth and Changing Careers

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I've had the pleasure of working with David Semach for a number of years. David's great at capturing and sharing a lot of insight about making a career change, moving into code, and growing as a developer.

4 Mistakes I Made on the Job (And Survived to Tell the Story)

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  Everyone makes mistakes - and as embarrassing as they can be, I want to share some of my biggest ones to help others bounce back from their own. Mistakes should be celebrated as learning experiences - and remember: they're only mistakes as long as they happen once.

Today I made a dream a reality.

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10 years ago, I had a dream. Today I made that dream a reality. Dedicated to two beautiful souls, Sal Novin and Mark Winchester, who would have appreciated this on a level only few could understand or comprehend.

5 Coding Projects to Help You Stand Out With Hiring Managers

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  You have a great resume, you're great at interviewing - but for some reason you're still not getting calls. Here are 5 projects to take on to gain a wider breadth of experience, and help you stand out.

Increments Episode 002: Growth (and Do We Need to Really Talk About This?)

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Talking about growth is like asking someone if they're saving enough for retirement. It's not without some anxiety and the truth is, too often we look at external factors to drive our growth. But are there better ways to drive our growth through our own internal aspirations? For reference: DropBox Career Framework

4 Interviewing Tips for Coders

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Here are a different set of tips about how to stand out during an interview. I'm going to assume you know the basics, so this will focus on how to set yourself apart from other candidates. Good luck!

#DreamJobs

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  Re-reading this some 33 years later and realizing I grew up to be what I always wanted to be.

Increments Episode 001: Are you a Coder, Developer or Engineer?

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Before getting too deep into topics we'll be talking about, I wanted to start with a simple question that I think we all wonder: What is the difference between a Coder, Developer and Engineer? Do those differences matter?

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