September, 2019

Published 2019/09/29

#EngineerAdvice

It is time I added this final category topic. Way back in the intro to the # category topics I mentioned that I wanted to provide an area to give new Engineers advice. Welcome to #EngineerAdvice. For any new Engineers first you need to know that working in a professional setting is new, different, and often hard. There are unwritten rules to follow, your responsibilities are greater, and the challenges are different than what you have experienced in the past. While in school or training you are responsibly for yourself and your knowledge. Sure – you may work on some smaller teams and share some responsibility but now you are working for an organization and you are just one piece of the puzzle. There are minefields around working with other humans, office politics, and project expectations that you will have to learn about and navigate. The fist and primary thing…

Published 2019/09/29

Why Do We Measure Things?

Yesterday was frustrating. We attended a competition that one of our kids was participating in and the end results of that did not go as we expected. At the end of the day I think the parents were more frustrated by the outcome than the kids were. And it all came down to a scoring, or measurement system that some faceless people (faceless to us) compiled somewhere else and that led to results that we did not agree with. Think about that for a second. This type of measurement happens ALL THE TIME. Your daily life is a result of these hidden measurements. The speed limit that you drive is a result of someone measuring and stating a result that is estimated to be safe for that section of road. At work it happens all the time. Statements of “you are doing a good job” are a form of hidden…

Published 2019/09/28

“Professional” is a Funny Term

The term “professional” is one that I have always found to be very interesting. The definition of the term “professional” (noun) is: “a person engaged or qualified in a profession”. As an (adjective) it can mean “relating to or connected with a profession” or “engaged in a specified activity as one’s main paid occupation rather than as a pastime”. As I am writing this I am not yet 40 yet I have been a paid “professional” in one form or another in working with computers and development for 20 years. So why are there times that I don’t I feel like I am a “professional”? I really need to explain what I mean here. Some weeks back I remember seeing an article that was talking about a study regarding self perception in younger people and how it was up to 30% more positive when they were living at home or…

Published 2019/09/27

It’s Project Time!! #Project-WPC

Let’s get this ball rolling. I want to start learning something new, so it is time to create my first project! For some reason when I started thinking about this post this morning the old school Batman TV show (WPC Score: 24) theme song popped into my head. So just because I can, here are the lyrics: Batman, Batman, Batman, Batman!Batman, Batman, Batman!Batman, Batman, Batman, Batman!Batman, Batman, Batman!Batman, Batman, Batman!Batman, Batman, Batman!Batman, Batman, Batman!Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, naBatman! source: https://www.lyricsondemand.com/tvthemes/batmanlyrics.html I would love to know that this has now caused the hopefully dozens of people that might read this to get that tune stuck in their heads… but let’s be realistic here. I am getting old and the population of people that might get this reference is shrinking. *sigh* Oh well – let’s get to the project. This will be the first project…

Published 2019/09/25

#EngineeringMgmt

The next topic to tackle from a post category standpoint is in regards to Engineer Management. This is an important topic for me as it describes what I do every day. My current role has a title of “Director of Engineering”. As someone who leads and manages others, especially Engineers, the role can be fun, exciting, challenging, and sometimes frustrating. I would like to use posts in this category to talk about this role, the methods used, and most likely the many ways that I get things wrong. While looking on Unsplash for a good image to use for this post I came across the puzzle picture above and it jumped out at me as a good talking point. Sometimes managing people and projects can feel like you are trying to complete a puzzle while blindfolded in a dark room and the pile in front of you contains a dozen…

Published 2019/09/23

Patience. Success Takes Time.

This post is being started on Sept 22, 2019. I don’t know when it will be posted live to the site. The idea for this post came to me because I hit a significant milestone this morning. Someone else checked out the blog! At this point, things have been live for just over a full week and in that time I have written and posted 10 posts. Already the process of writing feels easier to me. Part of my process is also to create as many post topics as I can so that I always have some runway for choosing something to think and write about. Be warned – there is no method to this madness and the posts are wide ranging and varied and there is no master plan for targeting some posts and topics above others. In fact, one of the ways that I am trying to set…

Published 2019/09/22

Building a Posting Process

One of the ways to be successful in any endeavor is to build a process around an act for goal and to follow that process every time you do it. This builds habits and ensures success. I am a big believer in processes and will be talking about them a lot on this blog. Right now I want to focus on a specific process: Posting a new blog entry. First of all, this is my first post regarding a process. As I will get into in much detail later, you don’t need to get a process right the first time you do it. In fact – if you ever make a process that seems to be 100% right the first time you execute it then you need to step back and seriously think about what the process is, how it can be improved, and why you think that it was…

Published 2019/09/22

#BlogBuilding

The next category to tackle: Blog Building. Many of the categories that I am creating have a specific goal in mind. For this category the goal is all around building this blog and building my knowledge about web technology. One suggestion I have for anyone wanting to create a presence online is to try and figure out what your goals are for what you are creating. To me, the following targets are all related to this goal of blog building and knowledge building. Remember, these are my current goals as of September 2019 and I fully reserve the right to change, modify, or scrap them altogether in the future. I am not trying to build the best blog ever. If this were the goal the a simple search for “blog best practices” would be my starting point. While some of my efforts here are aligned with some of the best…

Published 2019/09/21

Let’s Talk About Coffee

In a recent 1-on-1 meeting with someone on my team the weekly icebreaker that I had set for the meeting was the question: “How do you take your coffee?”. This has stuck with me as a necessary blog post mainly because I also included coffee in the blog tagline: “Thoughts on Engineering. And Coffee”. So let’s talk about coffee. Coffee is very interesting. The drink itself has a rich history (WPC Score: 23). Apparently the drink didn’t really show up until the 1500s – which is very interesting as I have always figured that it had been around a while being one of the main beverages that seems to be found everywhere along with tea (3rd century China), beer (over 13,000 years old), and water (4.6 billion years give or take a few). According to wikipedia, coffe is thought to have originated in Africa, probably in Ethiopia. The first confirmed…

Published 2019/09/19

The Lean Startup (Part 1)

Author: Eric Reis First Published: 2011 Amazon Referral Link: The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses Ok, I need to be honest here. I wasn’t very excited about this book. I had just finished some fast-paced and fun thrillers by Matthew Reilly and knew that I wanted to tackle a book to start writing about on this blog. I actually picked it because it was the shortest of the handful of nonfiction books in the queue on my phone. Sometime in the future I will get into a discourse around audiobooks, but for now, let me just state that the vast majority of my book-based reading is in the form of audiobooks. As such, I always try and keep a number of interesting books loaded on my phone so I have a good selection when I finish what I am currently listening to.…

Month: September 2019