I've always found fostering informal relationships surprisingly valuable.
Time is such a limited resource, and it's easy to convince yourself to take a mercenary approach to any scheduling. If you aren't getting predictable value out of it, and it's not required by your job, it's not worth your time! But …
This was written in early 2019 as an internal proposal for why Yelp should adopt Python's Black library for style linting. The document’s style is heavily modeled after Amazon’s 6 pagers (detail here). It's early to declare whether that effort worked or not (though early feedback was positive …
Building true consensus is hard work! By its nature, it implies you've taken time to hear lots of opinions, convince people on the margins by addressing their concerns, and probably spent some of your time discussing with those who will never agree with you. Often the goal of getting true …
As you go from coding from specs, to designing project plans, to building team roadmaps, to leading groups, there is a consistent theme of getting more comfortable with handling uncertainty. It goes from something you rarely have to think about to an omnipresent part of work life. Feedback loops take …
At Yelp, I've been in a role we call Group Technical Lead (GTL) for a little over a year now. In short, it involves being the technical (aka non-people-manager) leader of a technical space that spans teams. The closest industry standard analog is probably Senior Staff Engineer. I worked in …
I've had a pretty good run of writing something (internally, for Yelp) every week for a while now, averaging ~3 posts per month since August. These posts are usually focused on what I've been thinking about this past week, but I try to include a dedicated non-status-update section in each …
I got sideswiped this a confluence of factors that finally convinced me to resurrect a decent static site generator (hi Pelican!) and bring this blog back from the relative dead.
In fast succession: Medium finally locked all useful distribution they do behind an even stronger paywall, I read this article by Fred Wilson on the value of being self-sufficient, and the one and only patio11 kindly responded to some of my questions about how to bootstrap a fledgling website no one visits out of the cold start problem.
So I'm going to primarily be writing on my own blog (e.g. this post at http://www.locallyoptimal.com/blog/2019/03/24/publish-independently-publish-often/), syndicating posts across to Medium for a least a bit, and seeing how it goes.
A one-day conference born from the Vanocuver equivalent of our local SF Python meetup. I had meet one of the organizers (Seb, @elbaschid) during a previous PyconAU and he convinced me to drop by and give a talk.
Really great community (small and friendly!) in a beautiful city. I've never had such a friendly conference audience, it was great to have conversations with many people over the course of the day 😊
I've tried to write up some useful notes on each of the longer talks, but I very much enjoyed taking part and getting to hear from the diverse backgrounds of all the different speakers and attendees.
I was lucky enough to speak at PyconAU 2015, in Brisbane! Least I can do is write up some notes about the talks I particularly enjoyed. Here they lie, somewhat edited and mostly linked against the conference website.
A quick topic -- executing a python module from the command line!