Beginnings, like this one, are important. A good beginning draws you in, puts you in the right frame of mind to engage with upcoming ideas or events, and makes you want more. A good beginning might be funny, action-packed1, raise burning questions, make you feel a need, or enrage you. A bad beginning doesn’t do […] …read more…

I’m married and have three kids in the elementary and middle school age ranges. They’re doing things that normal kids do: growing, learning, being active, participating in sports and other activities. My wife and I both work. Our baseline level of “busy” is relatively high, as it is for any family with three kids at […] …read more…

This started as a blog post for the HI Digital Solutions blog, and never got posted for some reason. I’m pretty sure it had to do with it being drafted in April 2020. I think some things may have been happening around then. Anyway, I’m (re?) posting it here. Enjoy! H.I. Digital Solutions (DS) has […] …read more…

My team uses Postman a lot.  We store our collections in git.  But we don’t want to store our secrets there.  Postman is kind enough to allow users to create environments to hold those secrets. Even with environments, the need to keep secrets secret gives us a configuration problem.  Setting up a new environment involves […] …read more…

In the spirit of surveys like the DORA survey or Stack Overflow’s Developer Survey, it’s time for the next round of the State of Work survey. A lot of things have changed since June: kids have gone back to school, sports leagues have gone back to doing sports, offices have re-opened, and people have adapted. […] …read more…

After holding the survey open a bit longer than planned plus a few delays in data collection, I’m excited to share the results of the State of Work Survey for June 2020. To everyone who provided input, thank you. I’m not going to restate the entire report here. I’ll give a few topline findings. For […] …read more…

As anyone reading this in real-time knows, the world has looked different to most of us for the past couple of months. I’m curious what that means to everyone. For me, I started working for a pure-remote company last August, so I had very few work-related changes. On the other hand, I experienced social and […] …read more…

My team at H.I. Digital Solutions swapped out the database layer of an application. We moved from CosmosDB (a document-style/NoSQL database) to SQL Server. Some things went well. Some less so. Check out what we learned in the post I wrote: Retrospective on a Database Replacement. …read more…

I wrote a blog post for the H.I. Digital Solutions blog! It’s all about Processes and Outcomes, in case you didn’t get that from the title. …read more…

I’ve been thinking a lot about policies lately. About how they’re sometimes necessary and sometimes not. About don’t scar on the first cut and about how organizational scar tissue can spread to cover related areas of the organization. I’ve been thinking about the freedom of young companies with no policies, and about the freedom of […] …read more…