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
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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RACI for new leaders
Understanding roles is a perennial issue, but especially as a company scales and small-group communication breaks down it becomes more and more of an issue…. Responsible. The people who do the actual work. Accountable. The one person on the hook. ‘The Decider’ … Continue reading
Posted in Management
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OKRs: Adopting Objectives and Key Results
I’ve been looking for a way to up my and my team’s game as competitive pressures, deadlines and customer demand increases. OKRs got their start and Intel and made their leap to Google, LinkedIn and other valley companies. In a nutshell: … Continue reading
Posted in Management
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Keep VirtualBox guest additions up to date in your Vagrant boxes
vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest “And that’s it. From now on every vagrant up will check & install the correct guest additions right after booting:” Every time I ever booted a vagrant box and it yelled at me my guest additions … Continue reading
Posted in Programming
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Focus meetings just on decisions, wither understanding?
How Larry Page Changed Meetings At Google After Taking Over Last Spring Every meeting must have one clear decision maker. If there’s no decision maker — or no decision to be made — the meeting shouldn’t happen. No more than … Continue reading
Posted in Management
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django-configurations: Sanest approach I’ve seen to having multiple DJANGO_SETTINGS_FILE setups for your various environments. Plus it looks like it’d work really well with envdir which lets you store environment variables in files in a folder and execute programs using that folder’s … Continue reading
Applying “patches welcome” to management
Refactoring organizations to increase your impact: “So we changed the meetings to focus on proposals instead of problems. Stating and identifying problems is fine, and sometimes it’s all we can do when the solution eludes us. But proposals are the heavy … Continue reading
Posted in Management
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Personal Kanban with Asana
I’ve found that Asana’s sections and subtasks feature makes it really convenient to set up a personal kanban system. Here’s what my tasks screen looks like: Later is the total backlog of stuff to do and it stays collapsed. I have … Continue reading
Agility in a nutshell: Look, try, learn, repeat; favor easy change
What to do: Find out where you are Take a small step towards your goal Adjust your understanding based on what you learned Repeat How to do it: When faced with two of more alternatives that deliver roughly the same … Continue reading
Posted in Kanban, Management, Programming
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Communication is what the listener does
One of the most insightful and challenging things my boss has ever told me was: Communication is what the listener does Think about the ramifications of that statement: Another developer didn’t understand your architecture proposal – It’s on you No … Continue reading
Posted in Management
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