Mar 20
Author: michaelgat
Feb 28
People, Process, Product, Customer, and how people fit in organizations
My best work has been in places that are process-customer, but I’ve done well in process-product as well. I have not done well in people-dominated organizations.
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Jan 23
In praise of simple tools
I write using Emacs and LaTeX. I’ll grudgingly copy and paste to other formats because the organization demands it but I do better work with the simpler tool. Some people prefer to use Vim. They are Wrong, but less wrong than people who use Google Docs, Quip, or (angels and ministers of grace defend us!) Microsoft Word.
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Jan 22
Broadly vs. Locally-useful skills
Early on, I programmed on mainframes in COBOL… I’m sure I could do it again. But I’d be tossing away some highly valuable, broadly-applicable and current AWS skills. Want me to to that? As a spiritual pilgrim once said to a penguin: “cough up some dough, mac.”
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Sep 27
Get up, dress up, show up, never give up… and be replaced by a robot
Never giving up at the things you were told to do was the essence of work in the industrial age. Giving up quickly on things that are more trouble than they’re worth is what it takes to be successful today.
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Sep 6
Rosh Hashana (New Year) Update
It’s been a busy year with a lot of changes, both Covid-related and otherwise. As is my custom, here’s my update for this circle around the sun.
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Jun 13
How I got hired at AWS
Being yourself matters as much as anything.
And be nice to the airline staff. They can really make or break your life.
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Jun 7
What the fuck are you doing there?
“Hey man,” I said in my native New York tongue, “You’re not gonna believe this, but I’m calling from Frankfurt…”
“What the FUCK are you doing there?”
It was a pretty good question.
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Apr 28
No Undoing
The joy of photography for me was never in the finished product, and certainly not the moment of capturing the image on film. The joy was in that painstaking work that it took to bring my vision of what the negative could be, into being on paper.
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Feb 14
Lessons from the top of a snowy hill
Things are rather treacherous out there. In my neighborhood, we have new-fallen (unplowed) snow, on top of wet (now frozen) fallen, partly-decayed, slippery leaves that were never swept or cleaned up because nobody seems to deal with those here either.
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