Thoughts on Engineering.

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.…

Published 2019/09/19

#readingmaterial

As I am starting this category I know this will be one of my favorite parts of this endeavor. I am a huge reader. Books, articles, ideas, thoughts – there is a ton that can be learned and discussed and explored through reading material. The goal of this category is to share books and other articles that help added knowledge, wisdom, and humor through my professional journey. Every book and article that is posted will be reviewed and will also end up on the main pages of the site – as of late 2019 the section is at the top of the blog under the “Things I Like” section. The goals of the reading material are simple – to cover anything that could be an engineering influence. This leaves the door wide open for all kinds of fun subjects and topics. I hope you enjoy finding your own reading material…

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…

Published 2019/09/15

Getting Started … And Already Sidetracked

In getting things up and running here, I have spent quite a bit of time thinking, reading and planning over the past week. I know that I want this site to be a place where I can share my thoughts and ideas. I know that I want to pay homage to people, ideas, books, and sites that I respect and that have influenced my Engineering growth. So since yesterday after finishing my initial welcome post, today the goal is to focus on building the site. After spending time setting up some basics – picking a template and adding a generic image on the main page and some generic main navigation links from the default theme – now it is time to start customizing! Unbeknownst to me as I started this effort, this opened up a deep, dark rabbit hole. I have now identified one of the biggest pitfalls of my…

Thoughts on Engineering. And Coffee. Posts