The team I’m on recently released a new product. We’ll call it ShinyNewThing. Several weeks of work and discussion and a soft roll-out to some beta users and we were feeling pretty good about ourselves. People were excited about ShinyNewThing. Oh, sure, testing had revealed an issue early on, but that was clearly an invalid […]
Anyone who follows the DetroitHockey.Net Twitter account has probably seen me rant about jersey numbers more than once. Jersey numbers (in all sports, but especially hockey) are interesting to me – to the point that I once created a database of historical player jersey numbers (the now-defunct HockeySweaterNumbers.com). Today I was cataloging some hockey cards […]
A friend of mine who’s actively looking for a job pinged me yesterday morning looking for advice on what salary to request. My friend’s requested salary was a required field on the application form. I don’t like this, and I said as much via Twitter. Asking an applicant for a salary requirement before letting them meet […]
I’ve got a high school reunion coming up, which means I’ve been added to a group for it on Facebook, which has immediately been followed by a small avalanche of friend requests from people I haven’t spoken to in years. It got me thinking about the different terminology that social media sites use. On LinkedIn, […]
I was staring in anger at my car thermometer this morning when I had a little bit of a revelation. You think about the weather and, in general, people understand concepts. Hot and cold. Dry and wet. We’ve attached numbers to them and we know what they mean but only because we’ve made this association […]
A couple years ago when I has having my basement finished I set aside an area for displaying some of my hockey memorabilia. Actually, it was more an area so that I could start collecting the things I always said I would, as I’d kind of held off on collecting much due to space constraints. […]
I was going to do a write-up of the winners of the Grand Rapids Griffins’ jersey contest over at DetroitHockey.Net – where I’d already done a review and posted my predictions – but I realized doing so after my design didn’t win would come across as sour grapes. Instead, I decided to own that; accept the […]
I’ve written about applying development-like problem solving to realms outside my day job before and another interesting case of that came up for me this week. I’ve been spending a lot of time over the last couple days at MSU’s Munn Arena for the annual MSU Pro Camp, where a bunch of former Spartans and affiliated […]
Earlier today, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels tweeted out an interesting look into Amazon’s past. If want to learn more about building for the long term you should start with Jeff Bezos’ 1997 letter to shareholders http://t.co/IjmT51ua8T — Werner Vogels (@Werner) July 28, 2014 Now, there are lessons to learn from that letter and I don’t […]
One of the things that being a parent has taught me is that children’s bedtime stories have some weird stuff in them. Take Margaret Wise Brown’s classic, Goodnight Moon. The first half or so of the story is spent detailing the items that live in “the great green room” where a rabbit child is going […]