Recent Posts
Sabbatical
I've regularly been posting articles - at least once per month - since 2010. This year, a few things came up that took my attention away from creating content to help technical folks get more out of their career. Firstly, I went through a particularly challenging promotion cycle that required
Alternative to Arguing
Sometimes you're right, and you know it. Unfortunately, we live in a world where those around us may not know what we know. Worse than that (by an order of magnitude), others around us may intellectually know they are wrong - or you are right - and fight you regardless;
How to Drastically Reduce Your PowerPoint File Size
I just tried to email a PowerPoint I was working on to a colleague for some feedback and realized, to my horror, that the file size was over 80MB. Obviously, that won’t do. After digging around, I came to the conclusion that the massive amount of images I was
Wooden Blocks
I was listening to a Manager Tools [https://www.manager-tools.com/] podcast over the weekend and they shared a great Civil War era poem by Stephen Vincent Benet [https://gist.github.com/robertgreiner/8eb5066d1996cd01adf5] that applies very broadly to project management and leadership. In fact, they list it as their
DiSC
I spent the first several years of my career as a software developer with an incorrect understanding of my default behavioral tendencies. I thought because I was a programmer and loved being a programmer, that must mean I'm introverted - I mean, aren't we all? I also (incorrectly) thought that,
Leadership Worst Practices
I've been re-watching The Office [http://www.nbc.com/the-office] with my wife over the past several months, starting from the beginning and working through all of the episodes. One thing that struck me this time around, much more so than last time, is how Michael's actions adversely affect the
Continuous Integration with Docker
One of the several benefits of using containers [http://docker.com] centers around your ability to build a container at the development stage, and promote it through each environment to production. This strategy keeps environments consistent throughout each environment, and allows close-to-production testing to be done earlier. Coupling this benefit
Eight Steps to Transform Your Organization
Change is hard, really hard. Most days, I can barely muster the willpower to floss my teeth - even after deliberately placing the floss right next to my toothbrush [http://tinyhabits.com/]. There are all sorts of things I should be doing everyday that I just don't, even though I
Enterprise Ops
Organizations today are constantly looking for a silver bullet to cure all of their technology woes so they can deliver their products to market faster and cheaper than ever before. Typically, this treasure hunt takes the form of a single technology and is described in the broadest terms possible: cloud
Fixing "Couldn't Create a New Partition" Error When Installing Windows 10
> we couldn't create a new partition or locate an existing one I got this error over the weekend while trying to upgrade one of my computers to Windows 10. I was using a bootable USB built with the Media Creation Tool [http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10/media-creation-tool-install]. Everything started