#philosophy

Published 2021/09/26

Oh, How Your Goals Will Change

There are a few things that have become rote at certain events in our lives.

These events are not guaranteed for every person. However, they have become so embedded in our culture to have becomes almost cliched caricatures of the original meaning and intent. They are as embedded as decorating a tree at Christmas and finding candy-filled eggs at Easter.

Yet when it comes to jobs, making money, and being a professional there are also some tried and true customs.

These aren’t your familial holiday traditions.

What Does An Engineer Look Like?

Published 2020/01/25

What Does An Engineer Look Like?

An argument for re-defining what (and who) makes a good Engineer Remember the story about Goldilocks? This originally was a fairy tale about an old woman, badly behaved, who broke into someone else’s house, sat on their furniture, ate their food, and ended up sleeping in their beds. When the owners of the house returned later the old woman jumped through a window, never to be seen again. (She was probably looking for her next house to defile) It was only in later revisions that the main character morphed into a sweet young girl and the owners into a family with a mom, dad, and baby. Yet, still, the main character stayed true to her breaking and entering ways. This story is very popular in many different cultures. The Wikipedia article on the tale discusses possible analogues to Snow White and a Norwegian tale about a princess entering a cave…

Rules for Engineers #9 – Never Present A Problem Without Presenting At Least One Possible Solution

Published 2019/10/23

Rules for Engineers #9 – Never Present A Problem Without Presenting At Least One Possible Solution

One of my most important goals with this site is to provide advice to all Engineers. One of the ways that I have decided to do this is to maintain a list of Rules for Engineers however, the plain rules list on that page simply states the text of the rule, not the context behind it. I would like to take the time to explain each rule and why it is important for success to give people the context behind it and how they might be able to use it in their daily lives. So to start, I decided to pick one at random. I would like to take a tiny aside here and let you know about an awesome function, let’s call it an easter egg, in good search. If you need a quick random number you can get one through search by rolling dice. For those familiar with…

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 2019/09/25

#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 2019/09/17

#philosophy, #goals & the Wikipedia Philosophy Challenge

Quick post! I just wrapped up talking about the category tags and realized that I have already created two of them! Therefore I needed a quick post calling them out so that I don’t mess up my goals before I even get going with them. So here we are. As this is a quick post, I will quickly try and define why each of these categories is important to me: #philosophy – these posts are intended to present my philosophy and ideas in a logical manner that explains what they are and why they are important to me. #goals – this posts are a way of calling myself out to hit some targets and expectations in the future. If I am doing this right, then each goal is like a single pass/fail metric that I can revisit and evaluate the outcome in the future. There – short and sweet –…

Published 2019/09/17

# – Tags

This whole blog writing endeavor is actually pretty fun. I have nobody to answer to except myself. There is no pressure, no expectations other than what I set for myself. I have written the past few lines mainly as a selfish moral justification because I think I am about to use hashtags the wrong way… Whenever I start using a new application I really enjoy diving in and exploring the settings section. It helps to see how the app is put together, how it is intended to be used and usually means tweaking many of the settings to meet my needs or preferences. When this WordPress installation was complete the first area that I visited was the settings. Once there it turns out that there are two ways to categorize posts, by selecting a category and by assigning tags. So naturally I am going to use hashtags on the….. nope,…

Published 2019/09/16

Beg, Borrow, or Steal (or Pirate)

Often when talking about projects I will utter something along the lines of: “Even if we have to beg, borrow, or steal to get there, we will find a way.” Before I get too deep into this philosophy, let me first state that this is not a Machiavellian statement to get there by any means necessary. Nor is it some sort of approval to ignore someone else’s IP and just pirate what is needed to achieve a solution (yes – I mean pirate. Stealing is taking the original item, file, or code. Pirating is creating a copy of an item, file, or code. Look it up!). I am a firm believer in a philosophy that there are always a million and one ways to solve a problem. I believe that an Engineer is someone who can look at a problem and who both understands that there are multiple ways to…

Category: #philosophy