These are my notes on an interview with James Clear: Designing Your Environment to Shape Your Behavior Improving habits basically means overcoming your orientation toward immediate gratification to instead improve delayed returns. To create habits that stick, you need to: Make it obvious This is the cue/trigger to remind you to do the thing Design … Continue reading Building Better Habits
The year was 2014. I was wrapping up about a year's worth of work on the X-Plane 10 Mobile release, and we were all set for a Christmas release. Timing this was difficult---we were pressed for time, and the App Store approval process takes an indeterminate amount of time; you submit a binary, then wait … Continue reading The Worst Bug I Ever (Nearly) Shipped
We recently hired a pair of software developers at work, and I've gotten a couple requests to write up how we did it. The traditional hiring process—source a billion resumes, eliminate them based on keywords, interview the top hundred people, then pick one—is pretty broken. Fundamentally, filtering by pre-existing experience with your tech makes you … Continue reading Hiring Software Developers
A family member asked me for my thoughts on asking for a raise, and after a handful of massive text messages, I decided I should probably just write a blog post. Before I get into it, one disclaimer: My working experience is entirely confined to small businesses. If you work for a megacorp, for instance, salary discussions probably look … Continue reading How (and Why) to Ask for a Raise
As a guy who's spent the last 18 months working on a particular drudgery, with another 6 months to go, this really resonated with me. What looks from the outside like a flashy, amazing outcome was probably the results of long, mostly boring toil. (So take heart, ye who toil long on important-yet-maybe-boring work!) Read … Continue reading “Invention is Drudgery”
