- (https://b-ark.ca/EEgmEg)
Victory is mine! These socks are my first completed knitting project since the Before Time, and you know what? I still got it.
- (https://b-ark.ca/cmcSGm)
Finally found time to build an expanded workbench in my garage (for the record, the top portion of the chop saw table on the right is an older project, it just used to sit on a pair of saw horses)! Now I just gotta get back to finishing that last sock…
- (https://b-ark.ca/wgKyIe)
So I went to the #Edmonton Expo this weekend and discovered Tee Turtle was there and selling this shirt. As you can imagine, it spoke to me…
So you don't want to be a manager
Early in my career the idea of moving from an IC role to management sounded crazy. But, one thing led to another and I found myself on the management path despite my best efforts to avoid it, and it turns out it can be pretty awesome!
Let’s face it, management is not seen by many as a sexy profession. Whether you’re reading Dilbert or watching Office Space or enjoying the first act of The Matrix, managers are depicted as universally incompetent, do-nothing overhead that only get in the way of the “real work”. And even if you recognize that this is just a stereotype and that strong management brings real value to the table, anyone paying attention will notice all of the crap they have to deal with, including hiring and firing, handling performance issues, and ultimately being accountable for their team’s effectiveness.
Who would want to be that person?
During the first ten-plus years of my career, certainly not me! Just let me code, maybe lead something with a few other sharp team members. Who would want to do anything else?
But then I was presented with an offer I couldn’t refuse: the opportunity to take the lead in building a new Product Management organization. And, of course, that meant not just managing the product but building a team and managing people.
And I was terrified.
Well, it turns out, for someone like me–and let me be very clear, here, this is not a career path for everyone–it couldn’t have been a better move.
Continue reading...- (https://b-ark.ca/isGAAG)
Man, you can tell I’m rusty: It took me three tries and a lot of tinking before I remembered how to knit up a gusset properly…
- (https://b-ark.ca/kIIOUi)
Well, after a lengthy knitting hiatus, with the sabbatical upon me it’s time to get back to it! I’m hoping to get not one but two pairs of socks done for September, the first started recently the second that’s been sitting on needles for… two years…?
- (https://b-ark.ca/i0Y6s0)
I have an old first gen Kindle PW that I jailbroke and had to fall back to after I dropped my more recent model (oops!)
On a lark I decided to put KOReader on the thing, and darn it, I wish I’d done it sooner. Setting aside all the fancy config settings, wireless Calibre connectivity is just crazy convenient. Should’ve done it sooner!
It goes to show how open devices can be better and have greater longevity. But, you know. Amazon.
- (https://b-ark.ca/2Gc_Uq)
Finally got around to playing Never Alone (thanks Steam Deck!) and while it’s not flawless (the platforming and controls are just a bit clumsy for my taste), its flaws are more than made up for by the story, the beauty of the artwork, and the cultural insights. It’s a remarkable example of games as art and absolutely worth playing. I’ll definitely be picking up the sequel when it comes along!
- (https://b-ark.ca/ks2Cgo)
I’ve known about the Wilhelm Scream for years, but here a sound engineering describes the process of recovering sound effects from old tapes, including the full recording session of the famous Scream!
- (https://b-ark.ca/_saOI6)
Re-reading “Product Leadership” by Banfield, Eriksson, and Walkingshaw, and I can’t figure out if I just unknowingly internalized a ton from my first reading years ago, or if I ended up learning all the same lessons, but after ten years in the role, it’s definitely been an object lesson in confirmation bias…
- (https://b-ark.ca/_S0c0S)
Another good piece that echoes something you regularly see: blaming cyclist and pedestrian deaths on the victims instead of cars and broken infrastructure. Protected bike lanes, slower traffic speeds, smaller roads. It’s not rocket science.
- (https://b-ark.ca/mcEOiW)
I haven’t played with linear algebra in a long time, and I won’t pretend to have followed this completely, but this post was very fun! Loved the writing style.
- (https://b-ark.ca/Ow_WSO)
So, to ensure we didn’t bankrupt ourselves during my sabbatical, I realized I needed to get a better handle on our budget and stood up Firefly III. I gotta say, so far, not bad! I particularly love that it has an API with what looks like complete functionality coverage. Just a shame open banking basically doesn’t exist… getting complete transaction data has meant writing Tampermonkey scripts and pulling down data manually. Hard to believe it’s 2023 and that’s still a problem…
- (https://b-ark.ca/uaCgoQ)
Love this piece about AI. It’s a nice, short little primer for the uninitiated.
Tour Alberta for Cancer 2023
Well, the 2023 tour is finally over, and after a couple of days of recovery, a post-ride post!
Well, after a challenging two days in some incredibly intense summer heat, we did it! Team INVIDI completed the 2023 Tour Alberta for Cancer cycling event. And I’m proud to say our team managed to raise another $8,915 dollars for the Alberta Cancer society, all thanks to our many (many!) generous donors who helped the overall campaign reach a whopping $5,560,000 raised, blowing the doors off the $5,000,000 goal that was set for this year.
Continue reading...- (https://b-ark.ca/KMq_WC)
I am irrationally excited about my early birthday gift, Arcade Game Typography by Toshi Omagari. A fascinating and unique take on the history of gaming.
- (https://b-ark.ca/gGaYMu)
A sad day for Evernote users (I haven’t used it any time recently but I know a lot of folks that loved it).
But it’s another good cautionary tale about the dangers of cloud-hosted services. Every company seems invincible until it’s not.
Announcing jekyll-webmention.io 4.0.0
Sabbatical accomplishment! I finally cut version 4.0.0 of this gem for integrating Jekyll with the Webmention.io service, which enables webmentions for static sites.
Well, I must confess when I first agreed to take over maintenance of this plugin I wasn’t prepared for just how burned out I’d gotten at the time, so while I did manage to get 3.3.7 out the door, I have to admit progress was far slower than I would’ve liked.
But, version 4.0.0 is finally done, and I’ve managed to integrate a bunch of changes I had queued up while dealing with a bunch of open issues in the tracker.
Here’s hoping I didn’t break anything horribly (I dogfood the main branch on my own blog but I’m not going to claim that exercises every corner of the codebase, and I’ve not begun the monumental effort to close out issue #29, so automated tests are still very much absent).
With that said, version 4.0.0 of this plugin brings along a couple of major new features, along with some more minor enhancements. While the gem behaviour and associated configuration should be backward compatible with the 3.x series, the changes are significant enough that I felt it best to bump the major version of the plugin so folks are less likely to experience a surprise upgrade.
Continue reading...Ending and Beginning
It’s official, I’m no longer an INVIDI employee. Let the sabbatical begin!
This is a copy of the note I posted to LinkedIn announcing my resignation from INVIDI. Since I didn’t syndicate my last blog post there, you’ll forgive a bit of overlap in the subject matter, but I liked what I wrote and wanted to preserve it on my blog. You know, Own Your Data and all that.
Continue reading...
