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Mike Crittenden
Call me Critter
- Posts
- 969 from 9 Sep 2007 to 23 Feb 2026
- Posting
- now and then (2 in the last year)
- Kind
- personal blog
- Feed
- https://critter.blog/feed/
2026 1
2025 11
- What makes up an organization’s culture?
- My favorite Panera interaction
- The unreasonable effectiveness of lightning demos
- Kanbanish, a side project
- Beware any dopamine hit that doesn’t require effort
- The art of pre-meeting chatter
- My core values, round three
- Do you talk to think or do you think to talk?
- “Let go of the idea that gentle, relaxed people can’t be superachievers”
- Don’t eat the SCRAPs: a simple rule for clean eating
- The fig tree
2024 31
- My barely useful calorie tracker
- Performance reviews are for two things, and neither of them is “feedback”
- A book quote on finding purpose
- Calculating technical debt (from “Executive Engineering”)
- A template for writing a team charter
- Three year goals: round 1 wrap up
- 12 week goals: 2024 round 1 wrap up
- Brandolini’s law
- How I rate books
- Travel likes and dislikes
- Who vs. whom
- SCARF model for finding triggers
- “Change your thoughts, change your life” is BS
- A definition of management
- Salary negotiation in 30 seconds
- The magic question to ask before writing your self review
- Cream cheese parenting
- Timebox your requests
- “Posts I never wrote” tallied votes
- Resumes are fake
- Less annoying ChatGPT with custom instructions
- Posts I never wrote
- What’s your play personality?
- Feedback 101 (chapter rough draft)
- Responsibilities of EM vs. PM vs. EL
- Unfudging our feedback (talk transcript)
- How to turn off inline predictive text on iPhones
- 12 week goals: 2024 round 1
- 2023 in review
- 2023 annual review, kids edition
- If you had to pick one person to spend more time around in 2024…
2023 241
- Handing off control of my screen time
- Snakes aren’t poisonous
- What DO you want
- Back up your performance reviews
- Torrenting as analogy for single piece flow
- The checklist diet
- Senior+ employees aren’t allowed to miss things
- Don’t lie on peer feedback just because their manager sees it
- The “maybe box” for decluttering
- Death to “not un-“
- My DISC results
- Focus on what’s keeping your manager up at night
- No thanks, I don’t eat sweets
- In defense of not tracking sleep
- Some prompts for positive feedback
- The rage run
- What did you accomplish this week?
- Download Google Slides speaker notes
- A job is just a phase in someone’s life
- Put kids’ wristbands on their shoes
- You don’t know what you know until you pair
- Engineering estimates and weather forecasts
- If a year had 13 months
- The 12 Week Year: 2023 round 1 wrap up
- Modern landfill technology
- Joy’s law
- Hand gestures in macOS Sonoma
- Somewhere to belong
- No introductions, no conclusions
- Precordial catch syndrome
- Special time
- Things that aren’t doing the thing
- Your response to feedback should encourage more feedback
- “The smallest deed is better than the greatest intention”
- It’s OK to not want feedback right now
- Five things I like right now: October, 2023
- On good micromanagement
- “Invest in yourself, not in your job.”
- Write in the style you’d like to read
- “Agile” doesn’t mean “Scrum”
- Tie your shoes better
- Onboarding don’t-worry-abouts
- If you could repeat a single day
- Tales of boys and their fathers
- My note taking system
- Farming my gut
- “The world owes you nothing. It was here first.”
- Atomic habit building with ChatGPT
- The car that was allergic to vanilla ice cream
- If you can’t joke around, I don’t want to work with you
- The Situational Leadership II (SLII) model
- “I decide to just not go there”
- Talk about milestones, not epics
- The most important skill is controlling your attention
- When someone leads a meeting, give them feedback immediately after
- “I work remotely” doesn’t have to mean “I work from home”
- The hidden evils of high WIP
- The voice memo journal
- The modern food pyramid
- Convince yourself first
- How you doing?
- How to fall asleep
- What you resist persists
- You will arrive at the sea anyway
- On when to flag a performance issue
- Would you still do that thing if you could never tell anyone about it?
- Fewer meetings means you have to show more impact
- What would you do if you knew you WOULD fail?
- Management: “The trough of zero dopamine”
- How to buy bread
- An excuse for success
- Surround yourself
- “Happiness is a direction, not a place.”
- Nutrition advice doesn’t change that much
- Nonfiction books don’t need a hero’s journey
- What writing looks like without the words
- Less-than-one-minute habits
- Don’t kick off an async discussion without a clear request and a deadline
- Psychological safety vs. trust
- When a 1-1 conversation with your direct report is drying up
- Sham surgery
- Meeting = Greeting + Reading + Leading
- 800 grams of plants every day
- Goals are like lighthouses
- Servant leader, not order taker
- My first week off
- Nobody wants to follow a pessimist
- You’re born, you have a set of sensory experiences, you die
- The Decision Tree
- Read to fill your mind, write to clear your mind
- Output = time * input * leverage
- You don’t HAVE to spend your work days hopping from meeting to meeting
- Reminder notifications with cron
- Do you want to feel like this forever?
- Half doing something is an expensive way of not doing it
- Reliability vs. other ilities
- Periodically start over
- Nothing trumps retention
- How to take negative feedback well
- Practice coaching on your kids
- White clothes won’t keep you cooler
- Five things I like right now: July, 2023
- Emoji reactions are powerful
- Hackman’s authority matrix and the self-managed team
- My ideal work week
- A life of meh
- The real sizes of countries
- There are no normal weeks
- The four laws of behavior change
- Make them ask twice
- Reheat pizza in the air fryer
- Almost nothing is objectively true
- Debate to learn, learn to debate
- It’s my birthday
- The 30-day minimalism game
- Cute lil time boxed buffers
- Are toddlers polluting your analytics?
- Your pain is your purpose
- Your labels expire
- Use push-to-talk!
- Lower your expectations of people outside your circle
- Run towards something, not away from something…?
- Unmute to laugh!
- What’s the smallest step forward that you could take?
- How to deal with low performers on a mob programming team?
- Start sprints in the middle of the week
- BLOCK SLACK
- The (remote) walking 1-1
- The two minute rule for GTD
- Be a person who does fun things
- The tombstone exercise. Or not?
- Types of running workouts
- Whiten your teeth
- What is management? What is leadership?
- Writing tasty tasks
- i.e. and e.g. are not interchangeable!
- 50 word personal README, version 2.0
- I barely use Google anymore
- Poor man’s team bonding: recurring Slack threads
- Death to purple prose
- The “Shut Up And Write” meeting
- What I want in a job
- “Whoever has the most fun, wins”
- Parroting my blog posts
- Five things I like right now: May, 2023
- The 12 Week Year: 2023 round 1
- Swap out your shoelaces
- Am I OK with feeling like this indefinitely?
- Personal finance in 118 words
- Death to the BRAT diet. Long live FLUEYMASH!
- What is your tropism?
- Don’t give a lot of notice when you quit
- The five minute rule for procrastination
- Exercise during listen-only meetings
- The crappy parts of engineering management
- 9-slide presentations
- Use all of your vacation days
- Finding shark teeth
- All change is not growth
- What’s a low job happiness score?
- Stop stopping at good stopping points
- Estimate relatively, not absolutely
- Pull methodology, flow time, and WIP limits: visualized
- Beware issues that are born in “Doing”
- It’s OK to feel unhappy sometimes
- The physiological sigh
- Nobody knows anything
- What do you feel ashamed of right now?
- OKR scoring is secondary to retrospective
- Invite the “yes” (not the “no”)
- Take pride in skipping meetings
- That which can be destroyed by the truth, should be
- My most popular post of the past year is so dumb
- The best stuff, the worst stuff
- A field guide for sabotaging meetings
- Death to cabinets and drawers!
- Basecamp’s two-person teams
- Bandmates vs. session musicians
- Building safety with TERA
- What stretching does and doesn’t do
- An environment in which success becomes inevitable
- Weekly journal: 2023-03-12
- All things must yield to the impulse of the water in time
- ChatGPT uses for lazy travelers
- My identity grid
- Good life advice is boring
- The permission to stop trying for a while
- Weekly journal: 2023-03-05
- My core values, round two
- Paraphrase the conflict
- Five things I like right now: March, 2023
- What is a team?
- The power of four
- Carry a flosser around with you
- The five stages of team focus
- “Bad news isn’t wine. It doesn’t improve with age.”
- What do you want from a mentor?
- Dear managers, your company is “we” (not “they” or “it”)
- Weekly journal: 2023-02-19
- Consume a little less, create a little more
- Most mandatory things aren’t mandatory
- What is waste?
- I commit to expressing my full magnificence!
- Where are your beans going?
- Weekly journal: 2023-02-12
- Clean up your Downloads folder with cron
- Scrum is still a good default
- If you’re not having fun then just leave
- Luck surface area, visualized
- Content is time travel
- Weekly journal: 2023-02-05
- Half of your perceived life is over by age 18
- Why tell people “let me write about this and get back to you”?
- Five things I like right now: February, 2022
- What would this look like if it was an adventure?
- Don’t expect too much from your job
- Weekly journal: 2023-01-29
- Try the wacky experiment first
- Job search advice for laid off engineers
- Leaders: speak last
- Spend money on what separates you from the ground
- “Can’t let it go to waste!” Oh yes I can.
- Weekly journal: 2023-01-22
- Everything is a gift
- Create a rotating thank you list
- Why debate online, answered
- Why debate online?
- “Firing people is so hard you’ll invent excuses not to do it.”
- Weekly journal: 2023-01-15
- ChatGPT uses for lazy parents
- If you can’t stop it, change it
- DACI over RACI
- The 12 Week Year: 2022 round 3 wrap up
- Who’s reading those meeting notes?
- Weekly journal: 2023-01-08
- People can tell you’re multitasking on meetings
- Build teams that don’t have ice to break
- Let me write, I mean, think about it
- What are you subtracting in 2023?
- Apple Reminders sucks at subtasks
- Weekly journal: 2023-01-01
2022 260
- Five things I like right now: January, 2023
- 2023: The Year of Connection
- 2022 in review
- I look good in green
- 2022 annual review, kids edition
- No, the average American home probably doesn’t contain 300,000 items
- Toxic transparency
- My favorite Yogi Berra quotes
- “Your calendar is a better measure of success than your bank account.”
- The beauty of an empty Downloads folder
- Five random work conversation starters
- Appreciate feeling healthy
- Regular 1-1 question: “What gave you anxiety in the past week?”
- Stop saying “bi-weekly”
- On maximizing leverage
- If we are not building relationships…
- Relationship overhead of large teams
- ChatGPT uses for lazy managers
- “Why We Sleep” considered harmful?
- “What are you hoping to get out of this meeting?”
- “It only takes 5 minutes to break the cycle”
- What’s everyone’s “parting a-ha”?
- Nice things should be repeated
- Talk to me when the novelty wears off
- No, running does not wear out your joints
- Click and drag to rearrange Zoom participants
- Normalize the boring, useful gift
- Eat more fiber
- Give structured fun a chance
- Talk, type, read, review
- Turn the problem around
- Just because everyone knows it doesn’t mean it isn’t worth saying
- Why all these tech layoffs?
- My wife’s Halloween makeup: 2022 edition
- If you feel like something’s wrong, you’re probably right
- Well isn’t that NEAT
- Social facilitation (as a service)
- My management philosophy, take 2
- The boundaries of your environment
- Drop some thankless balls
- Worthwhile peer feedback questions
- Experts rating emojis: a collection
- How to be physically healthy
- 5 things I like right now: November, 2022
- Reminiscing and engineering managers
- Something to be enthusiastic about
- Be a squeakier wheel (to your manager)
- Have you considered not caring as much?
- If the performance cycle ended now, your rating would be…
- Contributors, not attendees
- Paraphrase, paraphrase, paraphrase
- The Rude Q&A
- Step 1: Tell your team how you’re feeling
- The value of notes is in writing them, not reading them
- “How could we make things WORSE?”
- Action as preparation
- Joy in feeling tired
- Make a playlist to keep a routine
- No 0% days
- The 12 Week Year: 2022 round 3
- What meeting do you dread the most?
- Tell the managers first
- Weekly letters for my team
- 5 things I like right now: October, 2022
- Promise me that whenever you’re scared to ask something, you’ll ask
- You are the shape of the things you do everyday
- Why be a manager?
- The fine line between vulnerability and oversharing
- The Bible on “why context matters”
- Think of 10 good things for every bad thing
- Don’t work when you’re feeling less than 70%
- Make everyone else look brilliant
- How little could you work without getting fired?
- Death to kind-of-working
- Sometimes self care means working harder
- Questions for the first 1-1 with your new direct report
- The power of the back-channel buddy
- Keep a laugh list
- Ridicule is my love language
- How metrics can kill intrinsic motivation
- Cage your advice monster with the GROW model
- Poison ivy doesn’t mess around
- To change your culture, change your performance reviews
- Gall’s Law (MVP all the things)
- What are you optimizing for?
- The board of advisors BINGO card
- Polished MVPs are not oxymorons
- 5 things I like right now: September, 2022
- Growth is goopy
- Attia’s rule of exercise
- Six word memoirs
- Critter’s 4+1 Management Process™️
- Death to unexpressed emotions
- Who the crap am I to be ______?
- 40% of the average life isn’t worth living
- Extreme questions for triggering ideas
- Weekly experiment: sharing pictures of everything I eat
- People have a right to deeply understand their compensation
- Intense teams, not tense teams
- Who (or what) is on your mental board of advisors?
- Don’t procrastinate generosity
- Legacy code can’t help but suck
- Thinking in calories
- Your mom is my management philosophy
- Stop doing and start being
- Invert your questions
- Get your critter.blog wallpaper!
- Money can buy happiness
- Five things I like right now: August, 2022
- Frogs won’t willingly be boiled
- Want feedback? Demand it.
- Try subtracting before adding
- Why I write this blog
- Audit your friendships
- Pomodoros don’t work for me
- To change someone’s behavior, change their environment
- How thick is your bubble?
- Take the pressure off of conversations
- Luck surface area
- If you liked it then you shoulda put a URL on it
- Famous men who aren’t taller than me
- The first few months are precious
- Résumé virtues, eulogy virtues
- The three productivity killers
- Naturally enforced digital detox
- Eliminate regret
- Birthday and father’s day cards from my kids
- What made you unhappy today?
- What made you happy today?
- “There’s no such thing as atheism”
- Five things I like right now: July, 2022
- A guide to making your phone suck
- The 12 Week Year: 2022 round 2 wrap up
- Show me your BICEPS 💪
- Finding my force of nature
- “All of us have experiences, but very few of us have stories.”
- “…then we’d all end up happy or something”
- Normalize the crappy short blog post
- If your project was a person, how would it feel?
- Share an anonymous feedback form for yourself
- Happiness is the default
- What goes down at performance review calibration?
- Who, not how
- The right kind of competition
- Could I do this hungover?
- The four time buckets of managers
- The dark side of transparency
- Why is everything so small?
- The myth of the steadfast leader
- If you had to stop doing 10% of what you’re doing, what would you abandon?
- Transactive memory
- Voice the things you’re worried people think about you
- Five things I like right now: June, 2022
- Using disasters
- Schedule a block of time to play the role of the person you want to be
- Churchill’s “Brevity” memo
- Building a vulnerability habit
- Asking for “help”
- When “good for the org” competes with “good for the individual”
- Your development is not your manager’s responsibility
- Rebuttal to “Feelings aren’t all for feeling”
- Feelings aren’t all for feeling
- If you don’t know who you are, pay attention to what you get mad about
- Graph all the things
- Everyone is struggling with the same three or four problems
- Stay new, Ponyboy
- Just do things
- The case for minimalism
- Surface desires vs. root desires
- What you do on your bad days…
- Chesterton’s Fence vs. The Five Monkeys
- Slack tweaks for compulsive inbox-zero addicts
- Would you say yes to that thing if it was happening tomorrow?
- Five things I like right now: May, 2022
- Sell your RSUs immediately upon vesting
- The four feedback gates
- Wear sunscreen every dang day
- Finding my baseline
- The work you do when you procrastinate
- Goodbye Wayfair, hello GitHub
- Write a letter
- Why do I get stressed about 1-1s?
- Shared joy, shared sorrow
- Employee calibration is broken
- Things your manager needs to know about you
- “I know what is expected of me at work.”
- The Q12 survey for employee engagement
- Four quotes about ambition
- My desk is only one option
- Bento boxing your time
- The hidden cohorts
- Transfer the work, not the workers
- Lightly, child, lightly.
- Low quality fun, high quality fun
- The 12 Week Year: 2022 round 2
- Five things I like right now: April, 2022
- “What the world needs is people who have come alive.”
- SMARTPIPE goals
- The 12 Week Year: 2022 round 1 wrap up
- Stop asking for general solutions to specific problems
- My new and improved 1-1 format
- Moral dumbfounding
- Power in goofy hypotheticals
- Decluttering via Craigslist
- No sevens allowed
- Never miss two days in a row
- Change habits by changing friction
- My favorite fidget thingies
- My list of my lists
- I hate learning with videos
- What’s in your zone of genius?
- The fork in the career path
- Motivation vs. hygiene in job satisfaction
- Cultivating a productive complainer
- Kill your temptations
- Finding our paradigm shifts
- What are your danger zones?
- Ultracrepidarianism
- Five things I like right now: March, 2022
- My 40 before 40
- Don’t let your thoughts die with you
- A fast interview process is a competitive advantage
- My ordinary day, 10 years from now
- I don’t have to be local
- “It’s called social media, and it’s mothering you as much as I am.”
- OKRs in 30 seconds
- Ten minutes a day
- Journaling is game film for your life
- Never feel jealous of someone with whom you wouldn’t want to trade lives
- Dunbar’s other numbers
- Glue work is career limiting
- Planning my ideal week
- “Tell me, what else should I have done?”
- “Happiness equals reality minus expectations.” Oh really?
- Before “ruinous empathy” there was “idiot compassion”
- Don’t expect asymmetrical communication
- Spread out the pain
- Want a short meeting? Don’t end early, start late.
- Five things I like right now: February 2022
- Exercise is not optional
- Never set a goal that a dead person can do better than you
- Your screen time may surprise you
- Toward a future state of happiness
- Declare calendar bankruptcy on your team
- Strategies for defusing unhelpful thoughts
- What have you failed at this week?
- The vowel check
- Don’t force growth on people
- My new favorite feedback template
- How can you make the next 60 seconds as perfect and as present as possible?
- I like half of my job
- Join a book club
- Engineering strategy, engineering vision
- Your leverage vs. energy map
- 2021 in review, Tim Ferriss style
- “Be pitiless about this matter of ‘mood'”
- Five things I like right now: January 2022
- The only three reasons to attend a meeting
- The 12 Week Year: 2022 round 1
- Rapoport’s rules for ethical debate
2021 261
- 2022: The Year of Adventure
- Yearly Review: 2021, The Year of Courage
- “Pessimists sound smart. Optimists make money.”
- On mourning the person you could have been
- My kids
- Creating a fun todo list
- Root cause-ing your stress with the Five Whys
- What counts as “work”?
- Price’s law is neat and ridiculous
- 50 word personal READMEs
- One year of experimenting on myself
- Never surprise your boss
- Quotes about how nobody knows what they’re doing
- Pick one and only one recommendation
- Who would you be if work was no longer the axis of your life?
- Ways to think about discipline
- How to write a blog post every day
- “Nothing destroys an organization faster than a leader with the desire to be well liked.”
- Slack-based interviews…?
- My body goal
- Planning my dang weekends
- Use every second of 1-1s with your boss
- Warren Buffet’s two-list strategy
- “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.”
- Involve me, I understand
- What kind of kindness?
- Lesser talked about things I’m thankful for
- The life bug hunt
- Be selfish or burn out
- Why waste time?
- Missing the messes
- My favorite random 1-1 questions
- Brag books and self awareness
- When buoyancy becomes annoyancy
- Adventure of the week
- The Venn diagram of learning
- “Hate is a lack of imagination.”
- Writing that’s meant to be seen and not read
- “Don’t be nice, be predictable.”
- Be outside
- If you send the team jerk to another team, you’re the jerk
- The paradox of hedonism
- The 5×5 rule for worry
- My wife’s Halloween makeup
- Pair metrics with counter metrics
- Two months of fiction
- Write shorter nonfiction. Please.
- My death bed is irrelevant
- Keep a contractor mindset
- I don’t like solving hard technical problems
- Looking stupid as a rule
- Block off more of your calendar
- Becoming a visionary of people
- “If you’re overthinking, write. If you’re underthinking, read.”
- Always be writing your self eval
- Creeping normality
- Learning to care and not to care
- Cultivating the habit of being “unreasonable”
- You’re selfish if you don’t give feedback
- “Kids these days…”
- What does “highest priority” even mean?
- “Disagree and commit” is scary
- Focus on the what, not the how
- Netflix’s keeper test
- Take staycations just because
- “You only need to know the direction, not the destination”
- Why are we so scared of cross functional teams?
- The complimenting habit
- 40 hours is a distraction
- Give the gift of taking time off
- It’s easy to hide behind big aspirations
- The working workout
- “Good To Great” …to pretty bad
- Shame vs. guilt
- Why plain text notes?
- “It’s one of the great fallacies that time gives much of anything but years and sadness to a man.”
- Lose touch with people
- Ask three questions before you share an opinion
- “Do you take pride in your hurt? Does it make you seem large and tragic?”
- An ordinary day, ten years from now
- Do I like it, or do I like being seen as a person who likes it?
- Road trips: a metaphor for Scrum
- Schedule 1-1s right before standup
- I’m a slow processor
- Minoritized people are over-mentored and under-sponsored
- Why isn’t mob programming everywhere?
- “Don’t believe everything you think”
- Burned out on learning
- It’s not Scrum’s fault that you do it wrong
- The Stress List
- House painting and team focus
- “You run like a big cat.”
- Do the stuff nobody else is doing
- “Should” is a dirty word
- Brady Grapehouse
- The simulation
- An outage is just expensive knowledge
- Death to meaningless business-speak
- There’s STILL too much text on slide presentations
- “Wear the world like a loose garment”
- Good at the job vs. good at the company
- Share more useless information
- Fear rules the world
- Rant: being bad at something doesn’t make you special
- Am I doing a good job?
- Put it in writing
- Getting serious about breaks between meetings
- Stop creating names for things that already have names
- Severe clear
- What type of accidental diminisher are you?
- 1 year of daily blog posts
- Stop shaming people for checking Slack on vacation
- The 12 Week Year: 2021 round 2 wrap up
- The five BS rules for life
- Speaking more while speaking less
- Do more things that make you forget to check your phone
- Avoid boring people
- What’s your native genius?
- Assume they’re venting
- Start a dumb podcast to keep up with people
- “Say something 7 times and half of your people will say they’ve heard it once.”
- Mandatory vs. actually mandatory
- SMORT goals
- How you feel is your fault
- Learning styles are a myth
- You have the life you’re willing to put up with
- Joining a new company is an organ transplant, and you’re the organ
- Three tips for speaking up in a meeting
- Find the teams that are killing it
- Mr. Rogers, the king of psychological safety
- 10% of us are barely affected by caffeine
- Preventing bad things vs. creating good things
- The regret minimization framework
- The hair dryer incident and other addiction systems
- Ignoring the reactionaries
- Treat it like you’re bailing
- A thought is little more than nothing
- You’re not losing, you’re winning at the wrong things
- Optimal distinctiveness theory
- Choose tools people like using
- Don’t mistake the lack of your pet solution as the problem itself
- Get creative about assuming best intent
- What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker
- “At my last company…”
- The drift to low performance
- Face the webcam for video calls
- “Quit and stay” syndrome
- The things you don’t want people to know about you
- The actual playing time of sports
- Answer with a link
- The only three things that matter
- 6 months of podcasting
- Stay Interviews (the opposite of Exit Interviews)
- Hey managers, give your people what you want your boss to give you
- Mindfulness is the opposite of mindlessness!
- “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
- Living past the peak
- So what?
- If you keep your options open, you may end up with nothing but a lot of options
- Always do your best…?
- “Shields down” is BS
- Don’t take ANYTHING personally, even good stuff
- I’m going to die, and so are you
- Power in patience
- Do I really want feedback, or just permission?
- Planned ignoring
- Give up earlier
- Build plans around people, not the other way around
- Negativity is preening
- “Resistance increases exponentially with the size of a change.”
- 200 daily blog posts
- Good manager, bad leader
- Model the behavior you want to see
- What are you good at?
- Death to the word “expert”
- The art of booking a meeting just to force you to do a thing
- My two golden end-of-1-on-1 questions
- A template for writing a team plan
- Never create a policy because of one person
- “It’s no good to be pissed if you don’t use it”
- You have to standardize before you can standardize
- Strong relationships built over video calls – impossible?
- Virtual or blurred backgrounds in video calls are a tradeoff
- Future-you will be as busy as current-you
- People can’t change, so what’s the point of coaching?
- Why don’t Computer Science degrees teach Software Engineering?
- The perks of social anxiety
- Gaming Parkinson’s law for good and evil
- Color-coded calendars
- 80/20’ing your meetings
- Ohhh, I see. I have social anxiety.
- Make your toes shorter
- To maximize or to satisfy…ze
- Curing my Slack addiction
- The stories we tell ourselves
- Interpret silence as disagreement
- The evolution of my ebook highlights
- The 12 Week Year: 2021 round 2
- The 12 Week Year: 2021 round 1 wrap up
- You should be a little embarrassed when you share an idea
- Team bonding in misery
- Teams aren’t built, they’re grown
- People can’t jell with multiple teams
- The buddy/coach spectrum of direct reports
- Rebel leadership, rebel innovation
- The manager hat never comes off
- Stop blaming office politics
- Never put up with low engagement meetings
- Servant leadership is a trap
- Managing people more senior than yourself
- Give gifts that people want
- Take pride in ending meetings early
- The wisdom of procrastination
- The gift of a sunk cost
- Negotiate your dang salary
- Death to artificial harmony
- Working through “The Imposter Cure”
- Everything is your fault
- In defense of push notifications
- Imposter syndrome is self-fulfilling
- Does every team need pawns?
- Retros shouldn’t be easy
- Meeting everyone at a new job
- Automatically lower your hand when you start talking in Google Meet
- Anticipation is the greatest joy
- Be a better coworker
- Respect the silly
- Stop fixing problems, start fixing relationships
- Slack standups aren’t standups
- Beware of exception debt
- A template for writing strategies
- Who cares if you’re liked?
- Blogging as a Zettelkasten
- Say things that can be wrong
- The catalyst quest
- The stream of little realizations
- Violent politeness
- Snowflake retros
- Ask “what” questions, not “why” questions
- Tiny habits. No, like TINY tiny.
- Use the smallest word that does the job
- The tyranny of the minority
- A lot of loose ends
- Giving advice is a last resort
- If you could broadcast one sentence to the whole world, what would you say?
- Join the critter.blog subreddit!
- I schedule my friendships like I schedule my meetings
- 90% of everything is crap
- Death to covert contracts
- Consistency before quality
- Your employees are your customers
- Prove you can write regularly before you think about the tools
- Audience friendly goals
- If it will matter after today, stop talking about it in a chat room
- Do teams jell or gel?
- Sometimes we need the world to save us from what we want
- A simple process beats a perfect process
- Atomic blog posts
- “Don’t bring problems, bring solutions” is bull crap
- Don’t flip the bozo bit
- Making success controllable
2020 117
- The 12 Week Year: 2021 round 1
- 2021: The Year Of Courage
- Death to private chats
- Goodhart’s law, perverse incentives, and rats with no tails
- My wife’s holiday costume makeup
- Just start a dang blog already
- 2020: My year of mantras
- Power in naming things
- 2020 BookRiot Read Harder challenge
- 100 daily blog posts
- Stop solving problems nobody complained about
- If everyone else on Earth disappeared, how would you spend your time?
- Good teams are noisy
- Are we actually a team?
- The myth of the expert
- “The tragedy of the commons” in software development
- Lessons learned on an Engineering Manager job search
- The key to happiness is to stop getting upset all the dang time
- Spend your money where you spend your time
- A week by week plan for starting to manage a new team
- The “You Get One Diagram” approach to architecture documents
- We become what we are told we are
- Never underestimate people’s ability to not hear you
- That coworker who just wants to code
- Future-focused feedback
- 5 second feedback
- The problem with “HELL YEAH or no”
- Intense intervention or acceptance. Pick one.
- Death to small talk
- Finding meaning in agency work
- Avoid avoiding
- Discipline eats motivation for breakfast
- Stop trying to be impressive. Start trying to be warm.
- The 2 responsibilities of a manager
- Be the trampoline
- Velocity doesn’t measure value
- Good feedback is pokey
- Death to “Just-Add-Water Team Jelling”
- Jelly, jam, preserves, compote, marmalade, chutney, WTF?
- All self-help boils down to “choose long-term over short-term.”
- Respond to vulnerability with vulnerability
- What we have left
- Better discussion meetings with Lean Coffee
- Core vs. context, applied to people
- The “I Suck” awards
- Single use kitchen gadgets and the Unix philosophy
- The all-powerful bad apple
- Am I an extrovert or an introvert?
- You can’t fail at experiments
- Parenting doesn’t do what I thought
- Blind spots and bright spots
- Non-fluffy brainstorming questions for long term career planning
- A tiny guide to Sprint Planning in Scrum
- Do you feel like you’ve grown more in the last few years than you will in the next few years?
- “Strong opinions, loosely held.” Sure but why?
- The hero culture conundrum
- Parkinson’s Law and friends
- Heads Down Tuesday
- Failing with abandon
- Thanking random internet people
- Becoming a leader, the hard (and only) way
- How easily our lives could have gone differently
- Should bug tickets count towards velocity?
- Guerrilla productivity tactics
- Write 5x more but write 5x less
- Slide deck presentations are the worst way to share knowledge remotely
- Skill stacking
- “If you want a task done quickly, ask a busy person to do it.”
- 2 months of daily blogging
- If you want to be heard, listen
- Declare bankruptcy and don’t be ashamed of it
- Employee growth vs. project smoothness
- Interviewing just because
- Experimenting on myself
- Dating our clients
- Values: pick 2
- Estimates vs. appetites
- Don’t comment your code. Refactor it.
- What to build first
- “Never ask advice of someone with whom you wouldn’t want to trade places.”
- What the heck do I even want?
- Running advice I wish I’d gotten
- 2 things I’ve learned from reading “Refactoring” by Martin Fowler
- If you want to help, don’t pretend it’s for your sake
- Jelled teams and old neighborhoods
- Backlogs are not idea buckets
- What’s in a team name?
- Pretend your internal initiative is a startup
- Delegating to myself
- Your client is a free resource, not a problem
- Coaching without doing
- “Extreme Ownership” book notes
- Hide a problem from your client and now you’ve got 2 problems
- “Jobs To Be Done” is a terrible name
- When and why do you concede?
- Plan the sprint, not the project
- Let people switch projects
- How COVID-19 affected my family’s spending
- Zombie standups? Try walking the board
- Learning a technology you don’t need right now is a waste of time
- Clear is kind, unclear is unkind
- Stop changing, start experimenting
- That coworker who never stops refactoring
- Wiki bankruptcy
- Dear Scrum teams, stop planning Mishmash Sprints
- Productivity porn
- Turn your camera on for remote meetings
- Google has shut down Toogles
- Your calendar should be an allowlist, not a blocklist
- Death to story points! Long live T-shirt sizing!
- Spotting broken processes
- Poor man’s Drupal testing with search reindexing
- Creating robust projects with the PPF (Past/Present/Future) technique
- Grinders vs. thinkers
- Race report: Viking Trail Half Marathon
- Week 1 of monetizing my Chrome extension
- Discussion topics for development teams
2019 7
2018 10
- The power of “The Suck List”
- In defense of Functional CSS
- Utility classes vs. inline styles
- Tool Time, a weekly screencast
- Grav CMS is not a static site generator
- Drupal 8 Cache API examples cheat sheet
- Static sites should be the default
- Parenting tips and tricks
- Book Riot’s 2018 Reading Challenge
- Idiotic feelings per day (IFPD)