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Unbuilding the Ladder Stool
In the summer of 2018 I acquired a cache of 100 year old reclaimed cedar. Right away, I was itching to make something out of it, and was luck had it – I had a problem in my then tiny shop. I had neither a ladder, nor a stool – and I desperately needed both.…
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Freedom
The technology we use daily isn’t truly free. Yet, we often associate much of the experience of using technology with freedom. As a lone developer or member of an open source team, I’m free to develop and contribute any way I wish. I don’t need to prove my worthiness to get started. I’m free to…
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The Evolution of Recommendations
For centuries, recommendations were a simple exchange of knowledge from one person to another. You could take it or leave it. Filtering the signal from the noise wasn’t a skill that was helpful to have yet for most humans. Industrialization and the printing press made it possible to spread the recommendation of one person to…
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Algorithmic Trust
People today entrust decisions to algorithms more than ever before. We could ask for a recommendation or do our own research, but it’s almost always easier to pick from a list of suggestions. If those suggestions work out, we build trust in that source of those suggestions over time. Unlike a genuine recommendations from a…
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Friends
A good friend is one that wants to spend time with you and be there for you. You’ll likely have many people in your lifetime that will fit this description. A great friend is one that wants to spend time with you and be there for you as often as you would like to be…
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Where is the struggle?
Making a sandwich is something most of us can do and (at least in the US) is within reach. We gather bread, fillings, a knife and go to work. It’s a skill most of us learned at a young age. We don’t often struggle to make a PB&J. Now imagine you’re staring at a blank…
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We bought a house in 2021. I have no regrets yet.
Each morning, I’m awaken by the sound of a lowered, grey 2001 BMW 325 starting up around 6AM. I suspect the owner is proud of their investment. It’s was once a respectable car – but this one is illegally modified. It has an exhaust system designed to draw attention via a droning hum that penetrates…
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Perfectly Smoked Salmon
As a kid, Salmon was a meal my brothers and I loathed. It started with my parents buying a smelly whole fish from questionable supermarket sources. After getting it home and immediately stinking up the kitchen, the fish was hacked into large fillets with bones still attached. We’d throw it on the BBQ, wrapped in…
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WFH Tip #5: Blocking out the day
Imagine if you will being at your office. The ambient din of typing provides a calming, perhaps even motivating backdrop for your work. Conversations between coworkers happen throughout the day around you. A phone rings down the hall. Unless you’re front lines in IT or running the front desk, chances are good you’ve got time…
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WFH Tip #4: Snacking
If working from home is your new normal, you’re likely burning extra mental energy adapting to a new normal. The foods you eat throughout the day play an important role nourishing mind and body with fuel you need to thrive. At the start, it’s easy to fall into bad snacking habits that can be difficult…
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WFH Tip #3: Curate your music
Listening to music provides a rhythm to work to – a soundtrack for your productivity. When you’re at home, having a soundtrack helps avoid being distracted by the soundscape of your home environment and instead provide you with some control to use to your advantage. Curate rather than consume While it’s really easy to simply…
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WFH Tip #2: Clean you Window
Working from home is isolating. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been working remotely for 10 years or 10 hours – the lack of people working alongside you is one of the first things you will come to miss. The feeling of isolation can’t entirely be addressed by conference calls and online chats – our minds…
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WFH Tip #1: Working at Home with Kids
Kids aren’t born knowing that they can’t barge in at any time when you are working. They see Mom and/or Dad at a desk typing away as an opportunity for grabbing our attention. What is work? Little do they know yet, that what we’re doing when we’re working is so much more than just sitting…
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Creators Worth Watching: Clickspring
Makers are some of the most interesting people to watch work. The few that make the cut on YouTube tend to go the extra mile with the production of their videos. One of the things that creators discover fast is that there’s an opportunity to tell a story with their videos, which is what makes…
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Creators Worth Watching: This Old Tony
This Old Tony – Metalworking can be Entertaining Metalworking is fascinating to me. Perhaps it’s because it’s something that I used to know so little about as a youth. Now that I’m older and YouTube is a thing, I find metalworking absolutely fascinating – thanks in part to the videos from This Old Tony. In most of his…
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Creators Worth Watching: Matthias Wandel
There’s a vast empire of creators and makers today that share what they do via online streaming video. The format of short videos sharing builds, how-to’s, and tool reviews is entertaining while also informative. Over the next few weeks, I’ll share my favorites in hopes that you too can find a few you like. Matthias…
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The First Experience
Ask any craftsperson how they got into what they do. They’ll likely tell you a story that includes a moment where they spent some time with the craft hands-on and fell in love with some aspect of it. One of my favorite memories early in my tech career was completing the ‘Hello World’ exercises for scripting…
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Platform Indifference
In 25 years, I’ve used a lot of technology. In fact, more than I can remember without really sitting down to think about it. It’s curious, then, when the rare and obsolete question of “Mac or PC” comes up. In these many years, I’ve seen a lot of different operating systems for different computer systems.…
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Migrating File Servers to Dropbox, Box, Google Drive or any other Cloud Storage Service
Some of my customers love their Dropbox/Box/Sharefile/Sharepoint/OneDrive as a file server replacement. Others, not so much and have gone back to their trusty file servers after a failed leap. Many would like to have it, if it weren’t for the other issues that it introduces in more complex environments. It’s easy to believe the hype that…
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The Data Silos are Back
Ten years ago in AEC technology, we were talking about trying to find ways to get data out of ‘silos’ – that is, storage and dissemination systems that didn’t integrate with each other. Files and data were strewn about in different formats and couldn’t be easily told to play nice. Over a very short period…
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But what does it cost?
You can look at a carton of eggs and do the math – $3 for a carton divided by 12 is a quarter per egg. Better yet, eggs are sold by the dozen. The math is already done for you. Your effort effort as a consumer to decide which carton to pick comes down to just…
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Caught in the Middle: Subscription Software
Software Subscriptions can feel like a vampire. They lurk on your OpEx ledger, claiming a value proposition for each month, hour or mile you use them. Gone are the opportunities to squeeze extra value beyond the design intent of the software. You can’t stop paying for them in a slow cash-flow month if you still need…
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Business Technology
Yesterday, we called it “Information Technology.” It was a department of talented engineers and managers that could get the infrastructure in place and got really good at procuring the tools to ride on top of that infrastructure. Today, IT is still important in larger organizations and industries who aren’t well served by mobile and consumerist…
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Organization in a Google World
In the era of Google Searches, Minimalism, Social Media and Apps-for-Everything, folks are less inclined to implement good old organizational skills with their data. Why bother? After all, we can Google anything we need. We can re-download that app when we get a replacement phone. I can go on Instagram and see my photos. Organization,…
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The Innovation via Automation Cycle
Technological innovation is often described as happening in “leaps and bounds.” As cliche as it sounds, it remains accurate through a significant cross section of technological advancements. Beyond the simplicity of this cliche exists an opportunity for businesses to get ahead in their objectives using automation. Innovations are temporary solutions Innovations in computing are making their way into the mainstream at…
Got any book recommendations?