Category: engineer

  • Beyond print(): Why the Debugger is Your Secret Weapon

    Beyond print(): Why the Debugger is Your Secret Weapon

    I’ve been in this industry for a long time. I had my pick of jobs at Yahoo! back in ‘99, and I chose a path that led me to solve problems at a scale most people never get to see. I wrote a post a while back called “Can You Think Like A Computer?” where…

  • Link: Using LLM is like wearing a Mech suit

    https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0178-why-llm-powered-programming-is-more-mech-suit-than-artificial-human

  • Thoughts on code generators?

    I’m curious whether these tools that claim to auto generate code will be able to help those who don’t have CS background.  My own anecdotal evidence after trying these tools.  (FYI: I have 25 years of software engineering experience).  My hot take is that these tools will make engineers ~30% more productive and it will…

  • Actually making us go faster with greater impact

    Actually making us go faster with greater impact

    Sharing a post here https://medium.com/hackernoon/feels-like-faster-vs-makes-us-faster-828686facc7e

  • link: Tracy Chou : Inside the life of a tech activist: abuse, gaslighting, but ultimately optimism – Fast Company

    Very inspiring profile of Tracy Chou’s journey to build Block Party tool to combat online harassment. https://www.fastcompany.com/90686948/inside-the-life-of-a-tech-activist-abuse-gaslighting-but-ultimately-optimism

  • Computer Programming is art, don’t overplan it

    Computer Programming is art, don’t overplan it

    I’ve argued that building software is much more of an Art than Science. The teams who follow the agile manifesto strictly over plan this artistic endevor of birthing software from nothing with T-shirt sizing, rule of thumb and or fibonacci numbers in 2 week increments of a sprint. What I’ve observed in the real world…

  • link: Protecting a tech company’s most valuable resource

    link: Protecting a tech company’s most valuable resource

    See this post from Casey Newton’s Platformer newsletter about Twitch engineers leaking the entire source code. I wonder if there any effective way to prevent this from happening?

  • Unknown Unknown problems

    Unknown Unknown problems

    We don’t even know this problem exist. How do we know it is even needed? How do we get to a better state with these unknown unknown problems? My co-worker Michael L. wrote an internal page about how he thrives on these type of Unknown Unknowns problems. I’m reminded recently that I get a lot…

  • 2021 What should be in your toolbox as an engineer

    2021 What should be in your toolbox as an engineer

    If you want to be an effective engineer in our industry, get ready be good at the following Basics 0 – This is the basic toolbox as an engineer Be proficient in your favorite IDE (Visual Studio Code seems to be the most popular right now) – my personal favorite is still VIM. git –…

  • Link: It’s Time For Unions In Tech

    Link: It’s Time For Unions In Tech

    For far too long, contractors, people of color, H1B visa holders are treated as second class workers with no way to speak out as a collective.

  • 2021 Goal – Getting to top 6 contributors to AntennaPod app

    2021 Goal – Getting to top 6 contributors to AntennaPod app

    I’ve had 39 submissions to my favorite Podcast App – AntennaPod in 2020. Which makes me #7 on the contributor list. That was a good learning journey for me. For the next leveling up to be #6, 140 of my submissions would have to be accepted. That would take 2.5 years given my current rate…

  • When engineers cared about the content and product

    When engineers cared about the content and product

    20 years ago, while I was the lead engineer for Yahoo News, I was asked to build a very basic feature to allow users to send news articles via a simple email link. That feature was simple: let users click on a link to send the news article with the URL, title and a brief…

  • Creating Software Is *Not* About Planning

    Creating Software Is *Not* About Planning

    What portion of your team’s time is spent planning vs. designing and writing and testing software? Even when you did a great job in planning, how often is your plan exactly on target? When you hit the target of what you plan after 3 months, is that plan still the right thing to solve? My…

  • The Cycle Of Creating Software

    The Cycle Of Creating Software

    As software engineers, our job is to create useful services for other humans or other services that depend on our services. In the idealized world, we write software, deploy, and move on. In the real world, we have to think about Writing software Debugging our own software for bugs Testing it locally for the change,…

  • All Zoom’ed Out

    All Zoom’ed Out

    At work, someone wanted to talk with me about answering the question of “Do people at work feel zoom fatigue?” What would be a good way to look at this question from a data perspective? I proposed the following question, now that we don’t have to commute, shouldn’t we have more time in the morning…

  • Podcast: Kubernetes Podcast from Google: Borg, Omega, Kubernetes and Beyond, with Brian Grant

    https://kubernetespodcast.com/episode/043-borg-omega-kubernetes-beyond/ [00:27:56]

  • Podcast: Cloud Native Computing Foundation with Chris Aniszczyk and Dan Kohn Holiday

    Podcast: Cloud Native Computing Foundation with Chris Aniszczyk and Dan Kohn Holiday

    Software Engineering Daily: Cloud Native Computing Foundation with Chris Aniszczyk and Dan Kohn Holiday Repeat http://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2020/11/24/cloud-native-computing-foundation-with-chris-aniszczyk-and-dan-kohn-holiday-repeat/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=cloud-native-computing-foundation-with-chris-aniszczyk-and-dan-kohn-holiday-repeat [00:36:41]

  • My superpower is “troubleshooting” for engineers

    My superpower is “troubleshooting” for engineers

    My superpower in life and at work is “troubleshooting.” I’m an engineer who helps other engineers when they are stuck. This could mean very detailed technical issues that engineers run into that takes them hours to solve. They will bring that problem to me, and usually, through some questions and answers with me, we can…

  • 50th – embracing my engineer’ness

    50th – embracing my engineer’ness

    On my 50th birthday, at 6:27am my father at 81 years old, sent me a happy birthday message! He has been my role model, his quiet way of being there for the family, showing and doing rather than talking, his love for me and his expectation that I should reach my potential and his beaming…

  • Contributing to Open Source

    I love listening to podcasts, all 111 podcast feeds. In 2020, I wanted to go deeper and understand the podcast ecosystem. I first generated a set of RSS feeds for 12 categories and submitted to Apple’s itunes podcast directory.

  • link: Effective_Engineer Summary

    https://gist.github.com/rondy/af1dee1d28c02e9a225ae55da2674a6f

  • Android Dev: EventBus : Publisher + Subscriber

    While trying to implement a feature for AntennaPod to allow users to auto skip intros and endings in this pull request #3975, I need to be able publish the event when a preference has changed and for a previous object with state that has already read the value of the preference to refresh it’s content.…

  • podcast: Developer Tea: Growth, Uncomfortability, and Deliberate Practice

    http://developertea.simplecast.fm/28eb61ef

  • Software Was Never Meant To Be Free

    Software Was Never Meant To Be Free

    We used to have shareware and that was how programmers could give you software for free.  When 2% of people pay for ‘free’ software, the rest of the world could get the benefits of free software. Because people don’t pay for mobile & desktop apps developers started adding very annoying ads into software causing some…

  • Podcast Ecosystem : Fun Facts

    Podcast Ecosystem : Fun Facts

    When I started working on a hackathon project to publish the Splunk .conf videos from our conf.splunk.com site into a podcast form, I learned a lot that I didn’t know.  This learning through hands on work has led me to contributing software code to an open source project call AntennaPod.  I will write more later…

  • Men in Tech In Positions of Power Making the Industry Look like a Cesspool

  • Link: Salary data on levels.fyi

    https://www.levels.fyi/2019/ – I have no idea how accurate this salary data is, but it’s pretty outrageous how much software engineers are paid.

  • Quick, what is the % of female graduates in computer science?

    Quick, what is the % of female graduates in computer science?

    Before googling for the answer, what do you think is the % women who receive computer science bachelor’s degrees in the United States in 2019? 50% 40% 19% See answer here

  • Each Of Us Has A Part of The Solution, Together We Have The Whole.

    Each Of Us Has A Part of The Solution, Together We Have The Whole.

    Each Of Us Has A Part of The Solution, Together We Have The Whole! Splunk is a company of thousands of talented individuals, distributed across product development offices in 8 offices in the U.S., AUNZ, Europe, and Asia. How do we do our best work collectively and continue to push innovation while expanding at hypergrowth…

  • Hiring practice thoughts and questions

    Hiring practice thoughts and questions

    I’m looking for a list of best practices, (maybe mechanics) with data to back up recommendations: For example, starting with resume reviews all the way to closing the candidates. (some random thoughts ) 1) In the resume tool: Do you create a set of standard templates to send? Do you try to respond by a…

  • Podcast: Chris Lattner creator of LLVM infrastructure, Swift programming language

    Podcast: Chris Lattner creator of LLVM infrastructure, Swift programming language

    I geeked out listening to this podcast following along the career of the creator of one of most successful compiler platform LLVM.

  • Falling in love with a book

    Falling in love with a book

    I started reading the book The Pragmatic Programmer, published In 1999! It is such a fantastic book with very relevant tips for professional software engineers. I am just on chapter 2 now, but I have already marked up the book about important ideas that I need to follow up. How did I skip this vital…

  • Learning at Splunk via Technical books

    Learning at Splunk via Technical books

    6 offices in San Francisco, Santana Row, Vancouver, Seattle, United Kingdom, Boulder and Sydney are received 145 copies of 3 books. Pragmatic Programmer, The Code Complete & 97 Things Every Architect Should Know. Happy reading fellow engineers!

  • Meeting time, maker time

    Meeting time, maker time

    Everyone needs maker time at work. Otherwise either you work more at home, or you often feel unaccomplished. My maker time is about 60%.

  • Walk over and ask to see a demo

    Walk over and ask to see a demo

    (The photo is one of my favorite pencils I borrow from my daughter. I finally used up all the lead in the pencil) 20 minutes, that’s all it takes. “Could you show me how you work?” Let’s turn on screen capture. Oh, interesting, what else? Why do you like this over, let’s say this other…

  • In the areas of learning and development

    In the areas of learning and development

    (This post is not for you, it’s for me) It started out as 5% of my time.  Just a 4-hour hands-on workshop with new hires once a month.  Now it’s the following 1 engineer working on developing a hands-on workshop that will track start, finish, and verification.  Able to track usage, validate answers and replace…

  • Prioritizing with difficulty x cost x quantity = value??

    Prioritizing with difficulty x cost x quantity = value??

    Could it be that simply to calculate the value of my backlog at work?  I once heard on a podcast that a simple way for a startup founder to prioritize all the product backlog in order to focus is via a spreadsheet and do hard ranking. Difficulty x cost x quantity == value?   While…

  • Experiment : Operating at 2 levels ahead

    Experiment : Operating at 2 levels ahead

    Last week a senior software engineer who has deep knowledge in a very specialized and high value skill (Machine Learning) for our company asked me for advice on getting more exposure and impact for her work.  She was in a situation where her skills and opinions are sought after by senior leaders in engineering, product…

  • Pick one, and go deep

    Pick one, and go deep

    As an engineer, I’ll give you 4 attributes to define your work to choose from Ownership Customer focus Data driven Cadance You have to chose at least one of these to drive your work. Pick one and focus.

  • Impactful work takes planning, preparation and follow through

    Impactful work takes planning, preparation and follow through

    (The art piece is done by a SF local artist of migrant workers working in California central valley) Yesterday, my direct report, a principal software engineer who is an expert in our C++ code base presented to over 150 engineers on a piece of code walk through of a “Life of a single data event…

  • The profile of an engineer

    The profile of an engineer

    (The photo is a piece of in store made of thick bacon from Luke’s, Cole Valley, San Francisco) A potential engineer doesn’t have to like math, abstract thinking, typing on the computer all day creating software. I head an interview with a IBM Fellow, who happens to be a woman say that she didn’t fit…

  • Communications habit

    Communications habit

    Last week at work, I learned that an executive has been working on a diversity and inclusion effort monthly. They really care about moving the needed to increase the gender and under represented diversity in our engineering ranks. I was pleasantly surprised that they are so active in this area. I personally have not heard…

  • It is 2019, how could FB store passwords in plain text?

    It is 2019, how could FB store passwords in plain text?

    ( my opinions are my own and not my employer) I just read this article: NY Times: Facebook Did Not Securely Store Passwords. Here’s What You Need to Know. https://nyti.ms/2YdyAKj As an engineer, I don’t understand how it could happen to a company like Facebook. They have engineers and security folks who audit designs and…

  • Why should engineers write?

    Why should engineers write?

    I write a lot of internal documentation, blogs to convey ideas for my future self as well as for engineers internally to reference. Younger engineers often are reluctant to write anything other than code. Here are reasons to write Writing something down clarifies your own understanding of the topic It’s one of the highest leverage…

  • What is next most important to add value?

    What is next most important to add value?

    Our VP Of Engineering asked us to think about this at work. We are all busy at work, but are we adding value to our customers with what we are doing now? What is the next most important item on our backlog that add value to our customer immediately? It’s a great way to prioritize…

  • My Email Flow

    My Email Flow

    If you send an email to me, it’s very likely (95% chance) I will reply If you are recruiting me for a position at company X – You will get a polite / canned response that “I am extremely happy at Splunk and want to be there for 4 years to help the company grow”.…

  • What does Tony do in Engineering Productivity?

    What does Tony do in Engineering Productivity?

    My full time job is to work on engineering productivity. Often folks ask me what I do every day / every week? I often tell them what I’m working on this quarter. Quarterly Focus Well, the first quarter in 2019, my focus is on creating coding labs and content for new engineers that join Splunk…

  • Standing your ground

    Standing your ground

    Two and a half years ago, when I joined my current company I was attending a new hire training and the last slide showed a very long URL to a document that we were suppose to remember for more information. I asked the presenter whether there is a URL shortener so that we URLs are…

  • podcast:  John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners of the Turing Award 2018

    podcast: John Hennessy and Dave Patterson, winners of the Turing Award 2018

    In June, the two engineers will formally accept a Turing Award, the computer science equivalent of the Nobel Prize, in recognition of their work. Hennessy later became president of Stanford University and is now the chair of Alphabet; Patterson is a professor emeritus at U.C. Berkeley and a distinguished engineer at Google Listen to the…

  • Interview 1: Lyn Campbell, Corporate VP, Global Operations at Proofpoint

    Interview 1: Lyn Campbell, Corporate VP, Global Operations at Proofpoint

    I’m celebrating a milestone for a personal 10 year project and I’m seeking your time and attention. Impactful Engineer shares the stories and journeys of women and men who are making significant impact in the software industry. The purpose of Impactful Engineer is to inspire young software engineers to see that are many paths they can take to…

  • Talking About How, Instead Of What

    Talking About How, Instead Of What

    This post is not meant for you, it’s meant for me;  So no need to read. Start With “What” People ask for advice. “What should I do, I’m running into this situation where I don’t know whether I should choose A or B?” Rather than telling them what they should do, I have been realizing…

  • Trending? #deleteFacebook, #metoo, #marchforourlives, #nevergain?

    Trending? #deleteFacebook, #metoo, #marchforourlives, #nevergain?

    Recently there has been news reporting about #deleteFacebook, #metoo, #marchforourlives and #nevergain.  You can track the interest over time at Google Trends For me, I wanted to know the relative traction each of these movements are actually making.  Looks like #deleteFacebook is gaining traction, check back in 7 days to see if the internet meme…

  • link: Facebook’s “engineered addiction”

    link: Facebook’s “engineered addiction”

    http://calnewport.com/blog/2018/02/09/facebooks-desperate-smoke-screen/ The Smoke Screen In my opinion, the first problem — the engineered addiction — is the more pressing issue surrounding social media. These services relentlessly sap time and attention from peoples’ personal and professional lives that could be directed toward more meaningful and productive pursuits, and instead package it for resale to advertisers so…

  • TED: Why I’m done trying to be “man enough”

    TED: Why I’m done trying to be “man enough”

    Thank you Justin Baldoni, because of your speech I *know* I need to dedicate 10 years of my life to mentoring women engineers!

  • Link: What Should We Measure?

    In this blog post, Tim Ottinger shares his thoughts on what we should measure in the software industry and more importantly on what not to measure. https://www.industriallogic.com/blog/what-should-we-measure/

  • Social media sites are a trap for businesses

    Social media sites are a trap for businesses

    When social media sites like Facebook requires businesses to pay to show content to their own followers, it is time to rethink how businesses engage with their customers.  Facebook puts a limit that only 2% of followers will see shared content if a business does not pay. Give this article a read: Social Media is…

  • Dear LinkedIn, Make Diversity Data Transparent For All Companies?

    Dear LinkedIn, You are the only service out there to discover data about companies both private and public, what type of employees work there, which universities the employees graduated from and lots of other useful data about the professional lives of the workers. LinkedIn is a fantastic service for professionals. There have been many articles in recent years…

  • Head of Open Source at Facebook Interviewed on Changelog Podcast

    Head of Open Source at Facebook Interviewed on Changelog Podcast

    This is worth listening to learn about how Facebook thinks about software and expecially how they are trying to push software developer forward for the entire industry.  React and React Native are being called out as very successful open source projects from Facebook.   Cassandra has also been a huge winner.   The interesting take…

  • Why Work @ Splunk As An Engineer

    Why Work @ Splunk As An Engineer

    Splunk’s Company Mission I like the simple and clear mission: We make machine data accessible, usable and valuable to everyone Update: Oct 24, 2018 2 years at Splunk so far Personal I’ve started a large community of badminton players and even setup a badminton net in our court yard I’ve grown a community of engineering helping each other virtually on Slack I’ve…

  • link: What makes a good engineering culture? : The Effective Engineer

    From Edmond Lau’s The Effective Engineer blog 1. Optimize for iteration speed. Quick iteration speed increases work motivation and excitement. Infrastructural and bureaucratic barriers to deploying code and launching features are some of the most common and frustrating reasons that engineers cite during interviews for why they’re leaving their current companies. Read the rest of…

  • If you want true privacy,  do not use your mobile phone

    If you want true privacy, do not use your mobile phone

    (The photo is of my sister and I in China 1975) I was listening to Leo Laporte’s Tech Guy podcast and he was commenting on the FBI vs Apple case about unlocking an iPhone used by the the shooters. He was pointing out the following misconceptions in the popular press. Inspired by his comments about…

  • link: Error 451 is the new HTTP code for online censorship (Wired UK)

    link: Error 451 is the new HTTP code for online censorship (Wired UK)

    The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the body responsible for overseeing the internet’s technical standards, has approved HTTP 451, “an HTTP Status Code to Report Legal Obstacles”. The new status code will show viewers when a web page is being blocked for legal reasons.Source: Error 451 is the new HTTP code for online censorship (Wired…

  • Digital Entertainment I Am Willing To Pay For

    Digital Entertainment I Am Willing To Pay For

    We do not pay for cable, never did and do not have a TV.  We do have a movie projector and a 90″ drop down projection screen. Looking at our digital entertainment obligations: We get the recent DVD ‘s free from the San Francisco public library. We pay for Comcast for 6mbps for faster internet…

  • Goodbye dropbox.com, hello box.com

    2018 update: Now I have box.com for long term storage, dropbox for daily syncs update: box.com is not doing any better either after my switch.  The box.com sync app hung and I had to kill it. Recently the dropbox.com sync app on my Mac has been chewing up 100% of my CPU causing my machine…

  • A Very Fulfilling Day By Helping Others Remove Frustrations

    A Very Fulfilling Day By Helping Others Remove Frustrations

    As a software engineer, I had one of the most rewarding day in recent months.  When I got into the office, a developer from Flickr filed a ticket about UI browser testing into another Jira queue (bug tracking) and I happen to see that it’s related to the SauceLab project I now own as a…

  • When The Noise Is Too High You End Up With A New Norm Of Mediocrity

    When The Noise Is Too High You End Up With A New Norm Of Mediocrity

    My co-workers and I were doing some user studies with an internal developer who was using our tools in order to see how he was using it daily and also asking him how he debugs problems with our tools. It was amazing to see the developer go to the homepage of the tool, he noticed a…

  • podcast: DevOps culture and misconceptions

    Really enjoyed this background of DevOps as a movement to remove friction from a product idea to a feature making it to the end user.  Not focus just on continuous delivery, not focused on specific tools.  Worth listening to for anyone who cares about how to increase the velocity and quality of software releases http://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2015/08/31/origin-of-devops-with-john-and-damon-from-devops-cafe/

  • Prediction of 2015 bubble and crash: Stock Market explained to my 14 year old daughter

    Prediction of 2015 bubble and crash: Stock Market explained to my 14 year old daughter

    On August 08, 2015 my wife and I decided to get out of the stock market 75% into bonds.  Leaving 25% in the market.   We made this decision because my daughter will be going to private high school for 4 years and very shortly she will need money for college. We asked ourselves 3 questions…

  • reading: Infrastructure As Code

    reading: Infrastructure As Code

    Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/jedi4ever/code-but-not-as-we-know-it-infrastructure-as-code Book Preview: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920039297.do ” With Early Release ebooks, you get books in their earliest form—the author’s raw and unedited content as he or she writes—so you can take advantage of these technologies long before the official release of these titles. You’ll also receive updates when significant changes are made, new chapters as they’re…

  • Making a difference in the large corporate world

    While chatting informally with some co-workers, I heard some of them talking about their frustrations about not feeling recognized for their work or working on projects they don’t think makes a difference. Corporations, which usually mean people in management roles, value those individuals who go beyond doing what they are told to do and look…

  • Corporate Efficiency : “Humans Are The Problem”

    I sometimes say in jest that in the corporate world the “humans are the problem”. Communication, expectation and difference in perspectives are some of what causes executions of projects to not work. This is a response to frustrations expressed by people on my team that “other” people are doing things the “wrong” way. I find…

  • Link: Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test

    April 21st, Google will rank sites higher if they are mobile friendly. Check out your site’s mobile readiness with Google’s tool https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

  • link: Consensus-Driven Development | NCZOnline

    Nicholas Zakas take on consensus building. http://www.nczonline.net/blog/2015/04/14/consensus-driven-development/

  • Android Development: Troubleshooting Nested Fragment

    Android Development: Troubleshooting Nested Fragment

    I am working on an Android app which takes the menu data from Locu.com API display the dinner, drink, dessert menu and allows a customer to add items they are interested in into a ‘cart’ for the wait staff to look at and discuss the item the customers are interested in. I’m using the project…

  • link: Mike Long on Modern C++ and the C++ Memory Model

    Mike Long on Modern C++ and the C++ Memory Model.

  • Reading List: Think Like A Freak

    Reading List: Think Like A Freak

    Think Like A Freak – Currently just started, but already loving the way the authors encourage us to use data instead of intuition to understand the world.

  • Git pretty graphics

    Git pretty graphics

    A good graphic to have handy if you are using git

  • link: What are the best life hacks to tackle procrastination? – Quora

    link: What are the best life hacks to tackle procrastination? – Quora

    What are the best life hacks to tackle procrastination? – Quora. “Work expands so as to fill the time available for it’s completion”

  • Linux system tools cheat sheet

    Linux system tools cheat sheet

    http://www.brendangregg.com/Perf/linux_observability_tools.png

  • Math Get To 24 iOS App

    Math Get To 24 iOS App

    My daughter C. designed the logo, intro video and the entire app screen for this fun math game. Try it out and let me know what you think. download on The 24 Game is an arithmetical card game in which the object is to find a way to manipulate four numbers so that the end result…

  • Read: John Resig – Write Code Every Day

    Read: John Resig – Write Code Every Day

    I want to learn from others on how to maintain good habits, one of those is to code everyday. I have missed a few days, but I’m very happy with my progress so far.  It has resulted in 3 mobile apps published on the Android and Apple Appstores John Resig – Write Code Every Day

  • Read: An iOS Developer Takes On Android

    Read: An iOS Developer Takes On Android

    Nice article about some of the differences between development in iOS and Android. http://nfarina.com/post/8239634061/ios-to-android

  • read: Larry Page: The Untold Story – Business Insider

    Larry Page: The Untold Story – Business Insider.

  • link: Apps To Help You Get More Done In A Day – Business Insider

    Apps To Help You Get More Done In A Day – Business Insider.

  • iPhone version of How To Tip app

    A quick follow up to the simple tipping app for Andoroid This is the iOS version of the How To Tip app

  • Trello to track life goals

    I use Trello to keep track of my long term life goals.  I setup ‘organizations’ for ‘health goals’, ‘work goals’, ‘money goals’, ‘family goals’. Then setup boards for each goal. I still use Remember The Milk for single task todo.   Using Trello allows for multiple taks for each goal.  I also look over all the…

  • First Android App: How To Tip Calculator

    First Android App: How To Tip Calculator

    How To Tip Calculator – Android Apps on Google Play. Calculate how much tips to pay. 10%, 15% or 20% Also includes a guideline on tipping in restaurants, bartender, barista, delivery person, hairstylist, cab driver, chauffeur, hotel housekeeper

  • Picking Samsung Galaxy S3 over iPhone 5

    In trying to pick iPhone 5 or Samsung Galaxy S3 to replace my Blackberry. I was torn and have switched back and forth for the last 4 days. I finally found an old document written on November 1, 2011 7:52 AM in Evernote.  I wrote this document when I had the Blackberry and why I actually…

  • link: State of the Computer Book Market, part 4: The Languages – O’Reilly Radar

    http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/04/computer-book-market-2011-part4.html Large Programming Languages — 50,000 — 200,000 units in 2011

  • What Makes Us Happy And Motivated At Work?

    It’s that time of year for me to reflect on why we are here working everyday.  Please chime in with your thoughts. What motivates us to be happy and motivated at work? Money Recognition Being valued Making a difference in the world and self motivation Money is a great motivator, it’s an enabler for future…

  • As A Leader, Do You Communicate Enough?

    Heads up… Do you communication enough with your direct reports? What about your peers in the same group? What about other peers across the company? And your management chain, 1 level, 2 level and ultimately up to your CEO? How often should you communicate? What is the most effective way to communicate (email, face to…

  • Why I’m re-energized to work at Yahoo! after Livestand iPad app launched

    The Livestand from Yahoo! iPad app launched on Nov 2nd and became the #1 News iPad app and #2 overall app on the iTunes AppStore in 1 day.  Today on Friday Nov 4th,  it became the #1 app in 3 days on iTunes.  You should try it yourself and compare it with Flipboard and Zite…

  • link: How To Set Performance Standards for Your Startup’s New Hires – Yahoo! News

    How To Set Performance Standards for Your Startup’s New Hires – Yahoo! News.

  • GTD and investing

    In June 2011 this year, when I was looking at my investment accounts, I noticed that it had fully recovered from the nearly 40% drop since March 2009. I was in the middle of selling my house, moving into a new rental, planning for a wedding for next year and starting an investment in a…

  • Actively Maintain Your LinkedIn Profile : Ask For Recommendation Early

    Actively Maintain Your LinkedIn Profile : Ask For Recommendation Early

    Something I started doing last year is to ask for recommendations on my LinkedIn profile while I’m still working at the company.  Instead of only doing so when I have already left the company. LinkedIn’s value is the business contacts and also an online resume with real recommendations from people who are also on LinkedIn. …

  • *-public email aliases

    How many meetings have you been in, or email exchanges with a selected small number of people.  What you discuss and decided doesn’t get surfaced to the right people?  How do you know where to send the information to? In general, how do you get the right information to the right people? I’m trying something…

  • Single Tasking In The World Of Multitasking

    I have been wanting to be a proficient iPhone programming for 1 year now.  I have tried 3 times to start but have stopped for various reasons. My most recent attempt has worked, and here is what I’ve changed Focus, pay attention to only one thing at a time I have created a separate account…

  • Getting People To Change Is.. Impossible?

    That was my thought last year… however, I have changed my stance.  The most successful way to get children and adults to change is to model the behavior yourself consistently. If you want people to act a certain way you model it over and over again.  Don’t ask them to change though, just act on…

  • Be Prepare, You Will Win Most Of The Time

    Be prepare for meetings ahead of time.  You will be in the minority and you will get more of what you want Have an agenda ahead of time and send it, you will likely get more time If you want to a decision to go your way, anticipate the arguments, the fear, convince the decider…

  • Self Monthly Review: 3rd Month Of Being Solution Architect For Media

    I have a reminder to myself to review whether I’m doing what my job description is defined as Here is the job description and how I rate myself from 1 (needs work), 2 (meets), 3 (exceed) • Evaluates new technologies; builds prototypes if necessary 1 : I barely do any of these right now as…