The Choice to F Up

On the things we are doing and not doing, how these things are not and cannot be accidents, and how it all revolves around choice.

Post from March 6, 2021, filed under Philosophy and Everything Else.

5 Tips for Your Next Promotion or Salary Raise

How do you approach promotions and salary raises? Are these tied to a cyclical event or do they depend on your initiative? Do you invest into building your case, or do you wing it? Here are a few ideas on what can improve your position and chances.

Post from February 3, 2021, filed under Everything Else.

The Internet Shedding a Free-Rider Problem

With more and more software and regulation limiting the data that we pay with for contents and services, we are, in a way, requiring these contents and services to be made truly free. This doesn’t appear sustainable, and the Web is likely to change.

Post from January 28, 2021, filed under Everything Else.

2020

2020 has been a strange year, a year of challenges, but overall a—good year. Personal notes, professional highlights, a few numbers.

Post from January 1, 2021, filed under Everything Else.

People Care

It seems easy these days to lose faith in people. We’re destroying the planet, elect the least competent and least humane of our peers for presidents, kill our own people when we don’t kill people in other countries, etc.—and yet we all care.

Post from October 22, 2020, filed under Everything Else.

A Day Is a Day

On a personal preference for Inbox 0, and doing, delegating, and deferring.

Post from October 11, 2020, filed under Everything Else.

Love

Love is the essence, love is the emotion. Yet it’s striking how we talk about love, as if there was just one type of love. Aldous Huxley comes to mind, and After Many a Summer Dies the Swan.

Post from September 13, 2020, filed under Everything Else.

On Disclosing Our Salaries

For a year now I’ve been toying with the idea of publicly disclosing my salary, as well as my financial assets. Not because of me, but because I’ve come to believe that this step, if taken by others, too, would be a step towards more transparency.

Post from June 18, 2020, filed under Everything Else.

5 Tips to Get Your Dev Blog Running

If you know what you can deliver, if you keep at it, if you make it easy for your peers, if you talk about the effort, and if you measure and improve and employ a process, you’re likely to do well: thoughts on technical outreach.

Post from May 6, 2020, filed under Web Development and Everything Else.

Highlights from “The Crowd” (Gustave Le Bon)

“Crowds are only cognisant of simple and extreme sentiments; the opinions, ideas, and beliefs suggested to them are accepted or rejected as a whole, and considered as absolute truths or as not less absolute errors.”

Post from March 11, 2020, filed under Everything Else.

Highlights from “An Introduction to Psychology” (Wilhelm Wundt)

“There cannot be the least contradiction in the idea that physical and psychical phenomena follow different laws, as long as these laws are not irreconcilable with the actual unity of the psycho-physical individual.”

Post from February 27, 2020, filed under Philosophy and Everything Else.

Round Table

I was late to discover Round Table, but joining this fine service association was one of the greatest decisions and experiences I’ve made in my life. Here’s my story co-founding and accompanying a new table, RT 233 Alster-Milchstraße, for almost four years.

Post from February 20, 2020, filed under Everything Else.

Professional Agile Leadership (PAL) Reminders and Resources

Notes, refreshers, as well as an alternative overview over Scrum.org resources for PAL certification.

Post from January 29, 2020, filed under Everything Else.

2019

Another year, another retrospective. Factoids and data on life and work.

Post from December 29, 2019, filed under Everything Else.

On Leadership

Leadership is important, and it can be learned.

Post from December 2, 2019, filed under Everything Else.

Sources 2019

In 2014, for idealistic transparency and enthusiastic link love, I’ve shared the feed sources I was following at the time. I’m still a huge believer in and user of feeds. As I also still like to be transparent I thought to share an update.

Post from August 13, 2019, filed under Everything Else.

13 Leadership Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

We’ve all seen approaches to team management and leadership that work, and others that don’t. A brief and scrappy list of the mistakes I’ve witnessed (or committed), together with thoughts on how not to make them.

Post from July 8, 2019, filed under Everything Else.

3 Reasons Against Ad Blockers

Ad blockers are popular. Yet, they’re also a problem. They’re a problem that can be broken into three sub-problems, sub-problems that speak not only against the use of ad blockers but argue against their very existence.

Post from May 31, 2019, filed under Everything Else.

199 Love Haiku (the Book)

In 2016, I wrote 1,000 short poems, haiku-style. I wrote those poems to challenge myself as a writer. I launched a website for the haiku and I shared the story. Today, I’ve published the 199 haiku that a few friends and I liked the most as a book.

Post from April 9, 2019, filed under Art and Design and Everything Else.

What Happened on Google+, the Philosophy Archives

Google+ is shutting down, pulling everything with it. I’ve used Google+. And although I’ve changed and would put a few things differently now, I decided to archive a few of the somewhat philosophical Google+ posts.

Post from March 8, 2019, filed under Philosophy and Everything Else.

2018

A retrospective.

Post from December 31, 2018, filed under Everything Else.

Highlights from “Advice to Young Men” (William Cobbett)

“The first thing to be required of a man is, that he understand well his own calling, or profession; and, be you in what state of life you may, to acquire this knowledge ought to be your first and greatest care.”

Post from February 1, 2018, filed under Everything Else.

On Loyalty

We should be protective of our greatest possession—our values.

Post from January 27, 2018, filed under Everything Else.

Oh WTF My Tone, or: On Germans Speaking English

Anecdote. When I was working at Google, shortly after I had made one of my first bigger contributions, I experienced one of my more memorable performance reviews. You’ll never guess what happened next.

Post from January 17, 2018, filed under Everything Else.

Highlights from “The Elements of Style” (William Strunk Jr.)

“Consciously or unconsciously, the reader is dissatisfied with being told only what is not; he wishes to be told what is.”

Post from January 15, 2018, filed under Art and Design and Everything Else.