Short-form insights you can read in under 5 minutes.
Dipped back into financial reporting to setup a rolling summary P&L view: actuals, forecast, or budget/plan for an arbitrary range of months forward and back. Supports agile financial planning and reporting without breaking annual views into budgets and income statements
There will always be some person or condition that has power over our wellbeing and happiness. That is a truth. We feel things about that. Those feelings are also truth. We are not any less because of those truths. The art of life is responding in ways that make a positive impact for us, our communities, and our planet or, failing that, minimizes the harm we perpetuate to others.
I go 21st and 19th century with my meetings, taking notes on quality paper with a fountain pen. It helps me focus and pleases me. I also let AI assistance generate a meeting summary. Then I edit down the summary and add interesting points from my notes. Takes 15 minutes.
Sat in on conversations today about the state of assisted care and sustainability in UX design and came away overwhelmed by our utter inability to construct systems that achieve rational outcomes.
Insecurity is a gift. It is a sea whose waves crash against an ego, etching empathy throughout its granite surface. Reside on its shore, wade the shallows, do not overwhelm in its depths.
Having cranked out about 40 user stories and some system deployment diagrams in the first hours of the day, I feel a bit drained and in that mental void, a bit sad. I need a walk.
We humans are such a flurry of capabilities, joys, insecurities, and sadness. It’s a wonder from time to time we can rise above the turbulent stir of ourselves to see one another.
People don’t change. In aggregate, it’s a safe operating assumption. But it obscures two things: 1) how people behave in a system is a reflection of what it takes to thrive or survive in that system 2) any individual person may be capable of profound growth and change.
Advising, consulting, and coaching all entail listening with empathy and reflecting back to earn trust. Advisors then recommend what to do, consultants advise and collaborate in doing, and coaches unblock people’s intelligence and experience so they devise and do for themselves.
I consider generative ai a tool. One fraught with opportunities for misuse. One contributes to our industries consumption of resources. That said I use it almost daily. Examples of how I use it:
And I’ve done RAG prototypes built on my writing and on publicly available legal documents.
Software engineers with both high craft and an outcome focus will embrace pragmatic decisions in a codebase if the leaders comprehend the downstream implications of those decisions and have a history of methodically paying down tech debt as is it becomes a problem.
Get off the train at Chambers and find myself in front of a breakfast taco cart. Not ‘a’, but rather one of ‘the’ breakfast taco carts. Machacha con Huevos, please. Of the rest of the day, I say, “I see you. Let’s do this!”