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Last updated: 3/24/2024
Some things about me:
- Live in Chicago. Grew up in Mesa, Arizona.
- On the internet since the 90's.
- Studied Computer Science and Entrepreneurship at UofA.
- Created my first web application in 2005 with the first release of Ruby on Rails.
- I wrote a book, Sketching with CSS, and it paid my bills for two years.
- Previously worked at Accenture, McMaster, Planning for Aliens.
- Currently Director of Product Engineering at SOFware LLC — talent management for elite military units.
Some things I believe:
- A mission that matters adds a +4 to will saves
- The best product strategy is the obvious one
- Product scope is a multiplier for all of your faults
- Data > Feelings
- Outcome-oriented > Project oriented
- Teams that aren't outcome-oriented select for political skills
- If you're not outcome-oriented then you're pleasing stakeholders, not building products
- Developer velocity == Business Value Created / Time
- If finding business value is a search algorithm then research is the best heuristic
- Spend less time on code by decreasing time to feedback; faster test suites, compile time, UI updates, deployments, customer feedback
- Spend less time on overhead
- DevOps is overhead
- Regression testing is overhead
- Writing code is overhead
- High-performing teams are loosely coupled but tightly aligned
- An organization is a weighted graph of trust between individuals. The health of an organization is the sum of the edges.
- High-performing teams require trust. Trust requires accountability.
- Sociopaths, narcissists and bureaucrats thrive in the absence of accountability.
- You only know for sure who someone truly is when they are exhausted, thwarted, the stakes are high and nobody is looking.
- In the military, you can wake someone up in the middle of the night and send them rucking for 70 miles then make them count grains of rice when they get back. That's an interview.
- This is hard to mimic in the private sector. Startups are a decent approximation.