By day, I'm a product manager serving a group of fantastic engineers at Square.
By night, I fight crime and solve mysteries with a robot pal of my own creation.
By midday, I like a snack, generally a cookie.
Part of this biography isn't true (hint, I like cookies and engineering, I don't own a robot).
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Author Archives: Chris
Avoid productivity cookies, schedule time for todos
For me, a successful day doesn’t end once I’ve gotten my priorities straightened out and emoji-fied in Things.app. The next step is to schedule time on my calendar for any todo that needs more than 5 minutes. I make an … Continue reading
Posted in Business, Management
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Eisenhower and emoji: How I use Things.app to get focus
You know that anxiety you get when there’s something you need to do and you’re trying to keep it in your head? You write it down on your todo list and problem solved! Lather, rinse repeat over the course of … Continue reading
Posted in Kanban, Management, Uncategorized
2 Comments
The Heisel Test: Five questions for professional happiness
Five values to look for in job candidates and companies to lead to professional happiness.
1. Do you put customer value and experience first?
2. Do you move responsibly fast?
3. Are you genuinely curious and open to new information?
4. Do you empower your teams and teammates?
5. Do you respect and have empathy for people? Continue reading
Posted in Kanban, Management
1 Comment
Take notes in your 1:1 and share them
The most important meetings I have every week are on my one-on-ones with my engineering managers and the engineers on their teams. The agenda is the same every week – at least 15 minutes to talk about whatever they want … Continue reading
Posted in Management
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Docker standards at Kabbage
I also posted this over at our Kabbage Tech Blog In the five months my team’s been using Docker we’ve stolen adopted some standards to make our lives easier. 1. Build your own critical base images Our application images have … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
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Docker orchestration with maestro-ng at Kabbage
I also posted this over at our Kabbage Tech Blog At Kabbage, my team loves using Docker! We get a ton of parity between our development, testing and production environments. We package up our code, configuration and system dependencies into a … Continue reading
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Get Docker running on AWS OpsWorks
I’ve spent the past couple of weeks at my new job doing a couple of things: hiring kick ass Python and UI engineers and getting some build-and-deploy infrastructure set up so the team can hit the ground running. Long story … Continue reading
Posted in Programming, Python, Technology
9 Comments
DotCloud: Try ALL THE PaaSes
For fun, I’m writing a series of blog posts breaking out what it takes to deploy this app to a variety of Platforms as a service. All of my sanitized config files are on GitHub. Today I’ll cover deploying twitter-dedupe … Continue reading
Posted in Python
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Heroku: Try ALL THE PaaSes
For fun, I’m writing a series of blog posts breaking out what it takes to deploy twitter-dedupe to a variety of Platforms as a service. All of my sanitized config files are on GitHub. Today I’ll cover deploying twitter-dedupe to … Continue reading
Try ALL THE PaaSes
I chose to deploy twitter-dedpue to Heroku to power @slatemaglite. For fun, I’m writing a series of blog posts breaking out what it takes to deploy this app to a variety of Platforms as a service. I intend to keep … Continue reading
Posted in Programming, Python
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Chris Heisel 