The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Engineering management / careers

tig.log

blog.kindel.com

This is Tig Kindel's blog. He writes about leadership and building products. Also about books, cars, guns, soccer, skiing, and beer.

Engineering management / careersAI / MLC# / .NET

’05’10’15’20’25
Posts
410 from 7 Nov 2003 to 12 Oct 2026
Posting
monthly (22 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://blog.kindel.com/feed/

2026 19

  1. Vitamins, Painkillers, and Minimum Lovable Products
  2. Humans Guessing About Humans
  3. The 18-Month Rule and the Small Business Problem
  4. The Three Confidences of a Volunteer
  5. Locate Yourself: The Path to AI Native
  6. Howie Did It: Principled Apps
  7. Interviews are better with Behavioral Questions
  8. Tig’s Toolbox for Product Management
  9. Hiring First. Everything Else Second.
  10. Load-Bearing Terms
  11. Principal Engineer Tenets
  12. Be Gruntled. I Am
  13. No-Look Coding and the Five Stages of Grief
  14. Prompt to Metal
  15. The Most Dangerous Lie In Project Plans: “We’ll Hire”
  16. MCEC 3.0: Eyes and Hands for Agents on Windows
  17. Building For The Robots
  18. You Are Behind in Using AI. Here’s How to Catch Up
  19. Terminal.Gui: Still Absurd, Now Beta!

2025 13

  1. Program: You Keep Using that Word, I Don’t Think You Know What it Means
  2. Mechanisms In Action: How Tech Giants Scale “Good Intentions”
  3. Leading by Fitness Functions
  4. The Secret to Giving Feedback Without Triggering Defensiveness
  5. Terminal.Gui: My Beautiful Absurdist Adventure
  6. Your Leadership Priorities Are Probably Backwards (And How to Fix Them)
  7. Your Org Is Sinking in Silo Gravity. Build a Damn Rocket
  8. Exorcise the Ghost of Mediocrity
  9. How We Scaled Alexa: One Problem, One Leader
  10. People Management Is Not a Hobby
  11. The First Rule of Skills
  12. Send in the Wolfes: Why Hard Problems Need Fixers, Not Just Leaders
  13. Stop Answering the Wrong Question: Unlock Your True Work Happiness

2024 2

  1. How To: Write a Working Backwards Doc
  2. No Starving Children? The Shocking Truth About Prioritization.

2023 10

  1. Don’t Sell Ideas – Debate Them
  2. How AI Will Keep Us Honest
  3. The Secret to Delivering Outsized Results
  4. Announcing Kindel Leadership Development
  5. cek.log -> tig.log (Charlie -> Tigger)
  6. Biases and Fallacies Lead to Smol Thinking
  7. Engineer the Sh*t out of Errors – Everywhere
  8. Make the Routine, Routine – Blow up Dunbar’s Number
  9. Breaking Down Innovation & Invention
  10. Why Mars? For the Dogs!

2022 2

  1. Torpedo Fuses: The Bane of Classic German Automobiles
  2. Be A Volunteer

2021 10

  1. I’ve Joined STOKE Space Technologies as an Advisor
  2. Posting Wrenching Videos
  3. Advising Rebel Space Technologies
  4. Virtuous Cycles, Platforms, Flywheels, Snowballs, and Tidal Waves
  5. I’m Advising Carv Because It Improves My Skiing
  6. From Servers, Phones, and Voice Assistants to Space…
  7. Find the Crux by Debating Excellence
  8. How to be a Secret Agent (of Change)
  9. I’m Breaking into Space
  10. Do Your Job – Don’t Use Placeholder Text

2020 12

  1. Open Office Hours with Tig
  2. Interview with Authority Mag: Homes Of The Future
  3. kindel.com is no longer at home
  4. Look Back Quotient (LBQ)
  5. Broken Windows – Right Idea, Bad Analogy
  6. Kindel’s 3rd Law
  7. Smart Home + PC = Better Working from Home
  8. Mechanisms
  9. winprint 2.0
  10. Path To Green
  11. Tenets
  12. Work Backwards From The Customer

2019 18

  1. MCE Controller V2 Released
  2. Have Specific Conversations, not General Conversations
  3. Kindel’s 2nd Law
  4. Taxonomy and Lexicon
  5. One-Way and Two-Way Doors
  6. Mental Models
  7. Lead Without Authority
  8. Focusing on users is not Customer Obsession
  9. Debate Tenets
  10. The Tension is Intentional
  11. Good Intentions are Never Enough
  12. Have Strong Opinions, Weakly Held
  13. Everyone’s a Leader
  14. Have a Plan (With Dates)
  15. How Meeting/Not-Meeting Goals relates to Earn Trust and Insist on Highest Standards
  16. Dive Deep != Micromanaging
  17. Just Right Porridge and Leadership Principles
  18. Have Backbone, Disagree and Commit

2018 13

  1. Kindel’s Law
  2. A FAQ About Frequently Asked Questions
  3. I’m Betting on Control4
  4. Tools to Achieve Clarity of Thought
  5. Let Word Work For You
  6. Ownership
  7. Concierge Home Technology
  8. Friday was my last day at Amazon
  9. Clear Narratives Show Instead of Tell
  10. Be a Great Reader
  11. Customer, Business, Technology, Organization (CBTO)
  12. Details Matter in Presenting Narratives
  13. Merit Badges – A Mental Model for Success

2017 1

  1. My Apple ][ Tribute

2015 2

  1. What it Means to Be Great Product Manager
  2. Attention is the Currency of Leadership

2014 1

  1. Find Work That Does Not Feel Like Work

2013 12

  1. Once I was Afraid
  2. Iconic: Photos of Every Apple Product
  3. Be Excellent At Saying No
  4. How to install a 2 port USB power adapter in an ‘87 BMW
  5. Have a Plan
  6. Businesses Buy Differently
  7. "Write Once…" is Anti-Customer
  8. Bubbly Time: MileLogr has its first, real, paying customers!
  9. Why Nobody Can Copy Apple
  10. 1929 Jennings ‘Dutch Boy’ Quarter Play Slot Machine
  11. Don’t Make Your Team Say No To You
  12. Goodbye GitHub: MCE Controller now on CodePlex

2012 62

  1. MCE Controller 1.7 Released – Now Supports RS-232
  2. Be as Excellent at Saying No as Saying Yes
  3. Four Things I Learned in Jordan
  4. Apps are Dead. Long Live Experiences.
  5. Word as a Blog Writer? Finally?
  6. Computer Vision Explosion
  7. Why Win8 Picture Password is Not Secure
  8. Has MS Finally Gotten Through To DELL?
  9. If This Looks like This in 3 Weeks, We’ll Know The Answer
  10. Keeping Tracks of Books I Read
  11. LockerGnome Guest Post on Mobile Fragmentation
  12. Revisiting the Mullet: Why Surface is not a MS Business
  13. I Want A Surface Keyboard for My iPad
  14. The Market Sides of the Mobile Ecosystem
  15. Mobile is Mobile
  16. MileLogr now Supports Outlook.com!
  17. Motorola is a Sunk Cost (and a sinking Titanic)
  18. The Conversation Amongst MSFT, NOK, VZW, & ATT
  19. Why Sr. People Leave MSFT in September
  20. What Kindle Means for Android
  21. Paying Developers is A Bad Idea
  22. Doing git Dev on Two Machines
  23. Eye-Fi: Shockingly Great Customer Service
  24. Muscle Activation Techniques (MAT)
  25. Facebook is like a Brick
  26. Windows Phone’s Canary in the Coal Mine
  27. Retail Pricing, Markup, and Margins
  28. A $199 Surface? I Will Wear a Mullet
  29. My “The Future of Mobile” Talk (Video/Slides)
  30. The Future of Mobile
  31. Seattle Angel Conference #2
  32. A Mouse and Keyboard Don’t Make a Hardware Company
  33. Apps Must Be Cross Platform
  34. Wanna Compete with Apple? Focus on Experiences.
  35. Congrats to the Seattle Angel Conference and Illumagear!
  36. Use of Multiple Calendars in Google Calendar
  37. Seattle Angel Conference
  38. The Job Decision Matrix
  39. You Want to Buy my ’78 Toyota FJ40
  40. Don’t Build APIs…
  41. MileLogr is already worth $1674 – Applying Lean Startup
  42. The Five Big Guys
  43. You are Thinking of Your Career Trajectory Wrong
  44. Experience = Stuff / Time
  45. Brand is a Critical Part of the End-to-End Experience
  46. MCE Controller 1.5.0 Released–Send Unicode chars
  47. Update: Coping with the OSS command line on Windows
  48. Get Off Your Butt and Start Startuping
  49. Books I read in 2011
  50. All of these Operating Systems are Fundamentally the Same
  51. Wanting To Be The Other Guy
  52. Learn Angel Investing in Seattle
  53. R.I.P. Nancy M. Kindel 1928-2012
  54. When the Technology We Create Is Meaningful
  55. Coping with the OSS command line on Windows
  56. Seattle Startup Internship Opportunities
  57. Prevent another SOPA
  58. Book Review of a Book You Can’t Find
  59. WP Engine: Techmeme’d proof WordPress hosting
  60. Fragmentation Is Not The End of Android
  61. Control Your HTPC Via The Network
  62. Use the 520 Bridge Toll to MAKE money

2011 29

  1. 365 Days of Photos
  2. Windows Phone is Superior; Why Hasn’t it Taken Off?
  3. Charlie’s Gadgets Worth Getting Guide 2011
  4. I Won a Samsung Galaxy S II – My Review
  5. Looking for a Software Developer Intern
  6. Wanna Invest in the Seattle Startup Community?
  7. My Best Hiring Stunt To Date
  8. Formally Advising The Buddy Platform
  9. I sincerely tried, but I still hate Linux
  10. How Often Do Startups Join Together?
  11. MCE Controller supports the Windows key
  12. Filtering My Angel Investments
  13. What to do With Your Old Kindle
  14. Crowd Sourced Design Works
  15. Be Either an App or a Platform, Not Both
  16. After 21 Years: Goodbye Microsoft
  17. 90% of the Decisions You Make Don’t Matter
  18. June 22, 1991
  19. Some of my Favorite Quotes
  20. From the Archives: STOP 0xC2 aka BAD_POOL_CALLER Blue Screen and bad memory
  21. The 5Ps: Achieving Focus in Any Endeavor
  22. Griot’s 3” Orbital Polishers Compared
  23. Charles E “Ted” Kindel 1925-1990
  24. The House Kindel Built Burns Down
  25. Now using WordPress
  26. Amazon.com: Shockingly Great Customer Service
  27. BendPak: Shockingly Great Customer Service
  28. Behind the Code
  29. Books I read in 2010

2010 3

  1. Book: The Dead Hand – The Untold Story of the Cold War…
  2. Books I read in 2009
  3. Back on Twitter

2009 12

  1. Longer battery life for the Kindle 2
  2. In 50 words or less: What the 2nd Amendment Means to you
  3. Porsche 911 Gauge Removal
  4. Windows Home Server makes for a happy family
  5. Kindle Tips & Tricks
  6. Peter F. Hamilton
  7. Kindle DX Review
  8. Kindle Support
  9. Windows Live Photo Gallery rocks
  10. Amazon Kindle for the iPhone Review
  11. Mini Book Review – Use of Weapons (Kindle Edition)
  12. You Can Buy the Amazon Kindle 2 Now!

2008 9

  1. Best Free Sci-Fi…Ever!
  2. Stop using Google!
  3. I Love Amazon.com
  4. The Wicked Witch Is Dead!
  5. Great car photos by Sandro
  6. Extreme auto paint care
  7. ǝɯ ʍolloɟ
  8. Hacking the Kindle
  9. Kindle update

2007 57

  1. Kindl. Kindel. Kindle.
  2. Book Review: Halting State
  3. Windows Home Server is actually useful!
  4. 10 years ago I had hair. I and I loved COM.
  5. Book Review: Scorpion Down
  6. Book Review: Queen of Candesce: Book Two of Virga
  7. The connections are eerie
  8. Book Review: Spook Country
  9. I want more life!
  10. PhotoSync for Windows Home Server
  11. Bourne
  12. A revolution is underway
  13. Windows Home Server SDK
  14. Am I a twit?
  15. A Transparent Buzz
  16. Stop Digital Amnesia
  17. More photos from Africa
  18. Using WHS Computer Backup to upgrade a PC
  19. ComputerWorld Review of Windows Home Server
  20. Fake product screenshots
  21. Back from Africa
  22. Hello from the Serengeti
  23. A great runthrough of Windows Home Server setup
  24. Jetman: A human jet airplane
  25. Building your Windows Home Server box
  26. RSS Aggravation
  27. One Man (keeps) Shouting
  28. Scoble says the buzz has died?
  29. Book Review: River of Gods
  30. Windows Home Server team blog
  31. Visual Studio Express and Windows Home Server
  32. Matt Pietrek & Windows Home Server
  33. Change the world or go home
  34. Home Server Flickr Group
  35. Cheesburger Brown…rediscovered
  36. Android Dreams
  37. Questions Answered
  38. He bit him!
  39. My Windows Home Server
  40. Who I’m watching
  41. King5 BillG Interview/Story
  42. Someone created a Wikipedia article for Windows Home Server
  43. A great quote
  44. Interesting Flickr Effect
  45. We’ve been /. ed
  46. HP MediaSmart home server
  47. Alec Saunders taught me craps
  48. Stop Digital Amnesia SWAG
  49. HP MediaSmart pic
  50. Channel9 video interview on Windows Home Server
  51. Divorceable Offense
  52. Bill in the booth
  53. Bill’s Keynote and the "missing segment"
  54. Amazing Response
  55. Windows Home Server
  56. screen clipping
  57. Devs on my team must know INTERCAL

2006 4

  1. Book: Sun of Suns: Virga
  2. Stop Digital Amnesia?
  3. First Ski Day of 2007
  4. Flickr

2005 33

  1. Online purchase to my door in 13 hours!
  2. The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies
  3. Simon of Space is compete!
  4. Blogging from Flickr
  5. Seriously, read Simon of Space
  6. Furrygoat discovers the RAID rebuild
  7. First Darth Vader and now Simon
  8. CATCHPA is Hip
  9. MCE Controller v1.1 Released – and now open source
  10. Do you have a NAS at home?
  11. Old Man’s War
  12. Darth Vader’s Blog
  13. John Cleese Promotes Computer Backup
  14. 6mbps for less $
  15. The Bomb In My Garden
  16. Visual INTERCAL?
  17. If you overclock don’t blame us for your crashes
  18. Sigh. Ski season is over.
  19. My flickr.com photos
  20. Back from Heli-Skiing
  21. Heli-Skiing
  22. MCE Controller 1.0.4 Released
  23. I want my ‘Road kill’
  24. Steve coins a new phrase: DVR Clog
  25. Great Windows Media Center videos
  26. Chris Gray – Building your own home server
  27. Quenching your printer’s exotic thirst
  28. Dell 24" LCD for $1,199
  29. I need a new printer
  30. MindManager feature request
  31. Bluetake BT500 Bluetooth mouse and Windows XP SP2
  32. Mapping your mind with MindManager X5
  33. Blobservations: Windows Server, Home Edition

2004 78

  1. Shadow copies – a peek under the hood
  2. Bluetooth GPS, Smartphone, Channel9, Oh My!
  3. The BEST Pacific Northwest Snow Report Website
  4. Best optical illusion yet?
  5. Car Blogs
  6. My motherboard died
  7. My team
  8. Community Server Beta One
  9. Crazy expensive home server
  10. Killer home server deal
  11. How Many Gadgets Do You Carry?
  12. A File Server…in Your Living Room?
  13. Polar Bears win it all!
  14. Polar Bears win the Sportsmanship Award!
  15. Polar Bears are one game away
  16. Visual Studio 2005 + PUM == danger
  17. New Windows PC Form Factors
  18. Lunar Eclipse – Wow!
  19. How to Build a PC for the future
  20. Media Center SDK on MSDN
  21. In depth MCE 2005 article on AnandTech
  22. Mount St. Helens Photos
  23. When programs just work
  24. Doing the Multimon
  25. Sony Vaio type X
  26. Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 – gamepc.com review
  27. Iain Blogs about Version 1.0 products
  28. Windows Media Center Extenders
  29. Dilbert’s Home Server
  30. Time to RAID PVRs, says Silicon Image
  31. Helmet Home Server
  32. Ichiro’s 262 Hits
  33. Windows Server is listening…
  34. mini-ITX Windows Server 2003 Home Server
  35. Storage at Home – How to store that precious data – Part 1
  36. Storage at Home – How to store that precious data – Part 2
  37. Great article on Personal Storage
  38. Tipping cows
  39. Is your Exchange 2003 server generating spam?
  40. SBS 2003 Rocks!
  41. CodeView: Another Blast from the Past
  42. Stargazing: Astronomy software is just amazing
  43. Building a new desktop
  44. MCE Controller doc ommission
  45. My contributions to the evolution of mascara in Windows UI
  46. New MCE Controller sample available
  47. Live Security Camera Feeds with Windows Media Services 9
  48. Make your own parts
  49. Blogging pictures
  50. Enthusiast Geeks
  51. Tokyo
  52. Peking Duck
  53. In Beijing
  54. Wireless Woes
  55. STOP 0xC2 aka BAD_POOL_CALLER Blue Screen and bad memory
  56. Geeks
  57. Regex
  58. Page 23
  59. Distributed File System (DFS)
  60. Domain DFS from a non-domain joined client
  61. Thin Media Clients and Home Servers
  62. Premise and .NET
  63. The Green Button
  64. I love Strong Bad
  65. Technology Complexity
  66. MCE Controller 1.0.3 Released
  67. New MCE Controller Version
  68. Source Control
  69. Spring
  70. Web based photo gallery using SQL
  71. Cat Skiing
  72. Powder Skiing
  73. MCE Controller v1.0.1 Released!
  74. Why do I do this to myself?
  75. I’m a hardware geek
  76. Quick Reivew Creative Labs “SoundBlaster Wireless Music”
  77. Quick Review of Linksys EFG120 Network Attached Storage/Print server
  78. MCE Controller

2003 8

  1. Ray Ozzie on WinFS & Longhorn
  2. Heros
  3. Check constraints in SQL Server
  4. Polar Bears Rock
  5. Lego robot solves rubics cube
  6. My Premise to Crestron Bridge is now ready for beta testing!
  7. Interfacing Premise with Crestron
  8. My Home Control System Overview