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November, 2019

Looking for feedback

I find feedback incredibly helpful in my personal and professional life. If you have a couple of minutes, I'd love your frank (and completely anonymous) opinions. The anonymous form is here. It's based on a feedback exercise I've found useful in person - although then it's not anonymous. I've found that anonymous ...
November 29, 2019

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a problematic holiday. Colonialism isn't just a ghost that haunts America: it's its skeleton. For many people, Thanksgiving is a day of mourning: "Thanksgiving day is a reminder of the genocide of millions of Native people, the theft of Native lands, and the relentless assault on Native culture. [...] ...
November 29, 2019

The next big thing? The hybrid cloud.

It's been a couple of decades since Salesforce first brought the idea of enterprise cloud services into the mainstream. Since then, firms have been closing their datacenters, moving away from solutions like Sharepoint, and putting their trust in subscription services that they access through a web browser. Even venerable on-premise ...
November 27, 2019

Love as allyship

I decided a long time ago that the secret to a happy life is finding the right allies. In some ways, I'm envious of peole who have religion, who can argue that everything happens for a reason, or that there's a plan for them, or that there's at least some underlying ...
November 25, 2019

One billion dollars

Happy Friday! ForUsAll, where I'm Head of Engineering, now has over a billion dollars of retirement savings under management. We're helping everybody to build a stronger future - not just the people on high salaries who work for well-funded startups or the Fortune 500. Here's the press release. My background isn't, ...
November 22, 2019

Boycotting the attention economy in December

Last year, on a whim, I left social media on Thanksgiving, and didn't return until January 1st. It led to massive improvements in my mental and physical health, overall happiness, attention span, and engagement with the world. This year I've been with my mother while she spent months in the hospital, ...
November 21, 2019

Happy International Men's Day!

AKA the answer to all those people who ask "why isn't there an International Men's Day?" on International Women's Day. Guess what: there is, and it's today. In the list of identities I carry, being a man isn't something I think about most of the time. Which, of course, is part ...
November 19, 2019

Escape from Google

For this month's Linux Format magazine, I was asked to comment for a piece about how Google isn't living up to its "don't be evil" motto. This phrase was removed from Google's code of conduct in 2018, but it's still thought of as being part of the company's DNA. My opinion ...
November 17, 2019

The best way to blog in 2020

Update: This guide has been turned into an up-to-date, standalone website: Get Blogging! I've been blogging - albeit not consistently on the same site - since 1998. That's a long time in internet years, and in human years, and over time I've conditioned out any self-editing impulse I might have. I ...
November 14, 2019

Rethinking founding a startup in Edinburgh

The other day, I had a check in with a friend who's raising money in Edinburgh, Scotland. I lived there for about a decade, and I miss the friends I made there, as well as its anarchic, artistic spirit. Also, sometimes I torture myself by looking at the cost of ...
November 12, 2019

Climate crisis stories must be human centered

The climate crisis is the single biggest challenge we need to face as a civilization. It's also one of the first that we need to face holistically: the entire world coming together to save our collective selves. So far, we're doing horribly. There's been some criticism that the stories we've heard ...
November 8, 2019

The daily creativity prompts that help me spend time on myself

Last month, I drew a new picture every day as part of Inktober, responding to daily word prompts. In response to the word Ash, I drew a response to Brexit: In response to the word Mindless, I drew a self-portait of sorts: And in response to Frozen, I drew a heart. I'm not an ...
November 7, 2019

Here's what I read in October

Books Save More Tomorrow, by Shlomo Benartzi. A behavioral finance approach to helping people save more. The book fails to deal with what I think are some glaring income inequality and societal context issues, but I found it interesting as a human-centered approach to finance. Crossing the Chasm, by Geoffrey A. Moore. ...
November 6, 2019