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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DevOps Lessons from Apollo 12. 90 Seconds that defined what it means to do good work under pressure.
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Lightning talks seem scary, but are in fact one of the best ways to introduce yourself to public speaking in general. Once you can do one of these, you can easily relax some of the rules for longer presentations.
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SCaLE is special and this worked well for the crowd there. There’s a reason I wanted SCaLE to be the first conference where I gave a talk, and was happy for UpScale to be the first place I tried out a funny lightning talk.
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A promo video for my SCaLE 16x talk. This one features Mr. Spock and Flash the Linux Cat. As noted in my comments, pretty much all you need to know is that I named my cats Floppy and Flash.
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I’ve been curating my social media, as I do at the end of every year. By “curating” I mostly mean “deleting annoying rants” but also a whole lot of stuff that was timely when posted but irrelevant a week later. As I re-read things, some of them stand out, and are worth calling attention to.
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Technology and Project Management are universal languages and themes, but they express themselves differently in different environments, different economies and different cultures. Those different expressions are what make meetings, conferences and engagements in other locations so interesting and why, given the opportunity to attend more than one on a single trip, I jumped at the chance.
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You have to disbelieve the client. When a mid-sized client tells you “this is the solution, when can we do it?” it’s not the same as a large corporate client telling you that they’ve selected a software package and now need implementation advice. The latter have both the expertise and experience to have made a rational decision and you can feel safe moving forward. The former has probably fallen for somebody’s sales pitch, or is engaged in what one of my mentors called “management by magazine.”
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