Author Archives: Chris

About Chris

Python developer, Agile practitioner trying desperately not to be a pointy haired boss.

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 | 5 Comments

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 | Leave a comment

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 | Leave a comment

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

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

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 | Leave a comment

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

Posted in Programming, Python, Technology | Tagged | 1 Comment

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 | Leave a comment