One of the many things that attracted me to tech, back in the day, was the total DIY freedom of hacking computers to do whatever I wanted. And when you’re a kid, it’s even more fun because you aren’t looking at your pet projects through the lens of “value” or “product market fit” or “differentiators”. You just… do stuff, simply because it’s fun!

Or, put more simply: You play. And as adults, we have play beaten out of us. And that is just a darn shame.

Well, one of the fun things about running your own blog on your own server with software you control is that it’s a wonderful place to play! Heck, the re-design of this blog started off as just me screwing around for the fun of it.

So, while on vacation, I thought it would be fun to build a dark mode theme for my blog using the technique outlined in this post (which it turns out is one of many).

If you want to see the results… well, first off, if your OS is set to use a dark mode theme, you might already be seeing it! Otherwise, the little lightbulb icon in the navbar toggles the themes.

In addition, if you poke around in my site, you might find an easter egg that enables a couple of additional retro themes designed to honour the computers of the past that inspired me and lead me to where I am today!

Continue reading...

I absolutely love making socks. As a project, they’re relatively quick, by now very familiar, a small canvas for a bit of experimentation, and in the end, always useful. After all, who doesn’t need another pair of socks?

Unfortunately, that’s also caused me to amass quite the collection of sock yarn over the years. In fact, I spent a good part of 2019 making sock after sock after sock thanks to our indulging in a Michael’s Boxing Day sale back at the start of last year.

But, I’ll be the first to admit, the stash has been building up for a long time, now.

As a result, the yarn that I used in this project–a lovely, variegated yellow yarn who’s label I’ve apparently lost–has been sitting in my collection for a couple of years now, having been pushed down the queue by more recent acquisitions. However, I finally decided to do something with it!

Now, as a toe-up sock knitter, it’s always a bit trickier to find patterns, and so I’ve often settled for coming up with my own designs. However, this time, I decided to try my hand at converting an existing cuff-down pattern to toe-up.

These socks are based off of the My Cup of Tea Socks pattern (hosted on Ravelry), which I then altered, both to convert the pattern to toe-up, and to make the motif a bit larger.

Continue reading...

This is part three in a series on my career shift from software development to product management. If you haven’t read the preceding posts and you’re interested, you can start with part one!

When I first took on the role of Product Manager, it was basically a solo role. While I had plenty of support from our executive team, and a lot of help and direction from both my superiors and my colleagues, absent a dedicated staff, if things needed to be done, I either had to do them myself or trick others to do them for me!

On its face this might seem a bit crazy (and it was!), but it’s important to realize that, at the time, the company had not yet made the shift to an Agile Scrum development model. As a result, back then, if you had asked me to describe the Product Manager role, I would have described it as high-level and directional, while the actual day-to-day execution was being handled by my colleagues in various other departments, particularly development. As a result, a lot of my time was spent on bigger picture stuff: building roadmaps (badly), scoping releases, collecting and managing customer requests, general process development and refinement, and so on.

It’s also worth noting that, at the time, I don’t think any of us at the company had a clear picture of how to integrate a Product Management function into the company in a holistic way, not the least of which because, while this was only five years ago, the role was less defined than it is now. And as I mentioned in my first post, ultimately, layering Product Management as a function into an existing organization is an exercise in change management, and we were still figuring out what that meant.

Fortunately, Agile Scrum came along and gave us a model for how to integrate Product Management into software development in a coherent way: The Product Owner role. And if we were going to have Product Owners, those POs needed to get their direction from somewhere, and that somewhere could be the Product Management group (i.e. me)!

Continue reading...