Posts tagged: catalytic Archive

2026 Resolutions

2026-01-08T10:48:12Z

It’s that time of year, Coming back to work out of a big break and thinking about big changes.

Daily Notes #

Keep up with daily notes, maybe not here, I tend to have more targeted notes here with full blog posts, but for work daily notes is POG and needs to be leaned on. LLM’s do really good at ingesting markdown and reminding me of things that I need to do, or did, or need to follow up on.

Reader #

Social media is changing, quickly becoming enshitified, I enjoy interacting with some of the people I’ve met online, reading their opinions, and learning from their experiences. I don’t need their hot takes, don’t care about their political takes. I like boring posts that typically fade out of whats picked up on the algorithm. I like a good 5-10 minute read or a long form podcast talk. I will be aggressively collecting more rss feeds to read and keep up with.

(Neo)Vim #

I’ve had these bad habits in my config for years, from day one of using vim. It’s time to kill these. jjgww. I killed them this morning, we will see how long I keep typing out jj all over my editor before I fix it mentally.

-- bad habits
vim.keymap.set("i", "jj", "<esc>")
vim.keymap.set("i", "jk", "<esc>")
vim.keymap.set("i", "JJ", "<esc>")
vim.keymap.set("i", "jJ", "<esc>")
vim.keymap.set("i", "Jj", "<esc>")

Tip

I need to lean on <C-o> a little more to run single commands in normal mode from insert mode. The pattern that is hitting me hard right now is jjgwwA insert mode, format, insert at end of line.

Distrobox #

I was a heavy user of distrobox as my primary dev environment on Bazzite and I need to get back there. I have a lot of stuff installed on this current system. I’ve been sloppy. I am not sure I was planning on staying on arch/hyprland long, I did it to do it with my son, his got borked a month ago and he is back to bazzite, I think I’ll be back there and want to be ready to float freely between distros.

clean dotfiles
work from a distrobox image that I make
keep working projects backed up

Vibe Coding #

Agents are the future, people that I really trust are on both sides of the argument. Some saying they stopped coding months ago and claude does everything for them. Some in between, some are completely against.

It feels like the tooling has really taken off over the past few months, the models are getting better, but not at the same rate they were. The tools are really making this possible.

My experience is quite mixed, I’m often impressed with what it does, and appalled at how bad it does other things. I just want it to do what I mean with the fewest words possible. I’ve been working on deeper plans more and more, still with mixed results. With larger plans the models seem to do more work, but still not getting that great experience every time.

I really need to get my workspaces workflow down, have models working in a separate workspace, and be willing to throw away shit code quickly and try again from another angle.

The future is a deep understanding on what needs to be done, how do to it, and not the syntax. The tools are getting better. You need to know less and less about them, less and less about models as the auto routers get better. The core skills of architecture, design, and implementation are more important than ever.

Last year I was able to vibe out some POC work, but still not letting the agents touch my production code. It wasn’t there for me, I probably did not have access to the really good stuff either. Now I think what I have access to is catching up to Claude.

sandbox them
quick to POC
quick to move on from broken attempts
learn to lead
learn to let go of syntax opinions
learn what makes good products/tools/apis hold the vibes to this.

There’s something here, very respectable people are betting on this, but its not working for me, I don’t think I have the right tools. I already have it a day, and got a few hundred LOC out while theo is claiming opus can do 10k.

Not Everything will be a side hustle #

I’ve tried to start too many side hustles, none of them work out. Thinking of them as a side hustle steals the joy of the hobby. I have too much going on outside of work for adding things like this not to add stress to already stressful situations, I need to reduce stress and find the joy and happiness in side projects and not turn everything into something more.

Keebs #

This one is fresh on the mind only because I just built out a new keyboard for work. I want to have a good robust build at home, work, and potentially have a good backup. I have a good design that is very cheap and fairly easy to build, but is quite time consuming. I am going to put some work in early this year to get a couple of clones.

More Offline #

Looking back at 2025, I actually did fairly well of doing a bit more offline. It’s been a hard transition out of pandemic times for our family, we had a lot of extra health precautions that lasted longer than most other people.

This year I should do more of this. More bike rides, more skate, more basement hangouts, more art.

New dart board in the basement

More creativity. I designed and built fingerboard obstacles to work like legos with 3/4" plywood last November.

building a fingerboard park in the basement

More building

building set for Jolly Holiday with Rhiannon

building boxes for Jolly Holiday with Wyatt

More bike rides, fewer nice days wasted, they are relaxing and get good energy out.

Bike Rides

💭 Post | LinkedIn

2025-11-11T02:43:05Z

Mark Zuckerberg scaled Facebook in 2005 - without Kubernetes, Serverless Functions, Redis, Managed Auth, Rust, or Kafka.

No fancy orchestration. No distributed event streams. No cloud-native… | Anton Martyniuk | 270 comments

Mark Zuckerberg scaled Facebook in 2005 - without Kubernetes, Serverless Functions, Redis, Managed Auth, Rust, or Kafka.

No fancy orchestration. No distributed event streams. No cloud-native anyth…

LinkedIn · linkedin.com

Lean on your skills and your goals. If your goals are to have fun, use whatever you want. If you are looking for a job, Lean on tech that bridges the gap between your resume and the job you want. If you want to build a good product use the tech you are best at. No one in their right mind would throw away 20 years of tech progression because Zuck built facebook ftping php to a server.

The sentiment in this post is fine at best the picture feels triggering and oversimplies way too much. If you like kubernetes just fucking use kubernetes.

This topic deserves a full on post, maybe later.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 #artificialintelligence #hiring | Gary Vaynerchuk | 20 comments

2025-10-24T00:39:49Z

#artificialintelligence #hiring | Gary Vaynerchuk | 120 comments

I care about humanity first, THEN skills .. and in this AI-scaled world, human sh*t will win 🔑

#artificialintelligence #hiring | 120 comments on LinkedIn

LinkedIn · linkedin.com

More Human stuff that’s what we will be doing. Less looking at docs, more architecting (which suspiciously looks like writing docs), more decision making, more explaining. This is a good positive take on AI right now.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 Big W: A Family Tradition

2025-09-19T14:03:04Z

Big W: A Family Tradition

A quick look into where we came from and what inspires us to do what it takes to build a solid reputation.

Big W Engineering Solutions · bigwengineering.com

I first met Adam in college, he seemed like quite a character on the outside, but was always quite smart and often leaned towards realistic solutions to problems rather than over complicating things. He was part of the SAE Formula car, well known for taking a simple problem and trying to turn it into a real formula one carbon fiber solution. I remember a period where he was a fan of old world blacksmithing as they would say at the time. He even got a few very simple and light parts on the car that were easy to make unlike the carbon fiber alternatives. By the time I was there he was more of a leader and did not do a lot of design on any whole system, but would take out class projects for a component or help with some hard problems. This company feels like it is a great extension of who he was a that time, with about 15 years of professional experience tacked on.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 How To Become The BEST Engineer At Your Company - YouTube

2025-09-10T16:08:36Z

When you fill all of your time with a bunch of other things, it becomes really hard to become a friendly person. Prime talked about trying to learn how to drop the hurry in his life, and how to not always be in a frenzy of going from one thing to the next. It’s something that puts us in a state that its hard to remember to be friendly. Hard to remember that theres always time for coffee.

I do my best to always leave time for coffee, whether at home with my wife and kids, as well as at work. I am in a very unique place at work where I have a rare set of skills for the industry I am in. This comes with a lot of people insterested in how to do things like running data pipelines or managing server infrastructure. I always take time for these conversations, I find them interesting, and useful. Sometimes you end up with someone who asks the same questions every 6 months, other times, you have someone flourish from these conversations. I’m not saying to take on work from every other team in the org, but giving 30 minutes to help mentor others can go a long ways.

I’m still not the best, I still get wrapped up in my own stuff just like prime calls out. I sometimes get frustrated with others around me when things come up that prevent me from doing my work, or just getting the things out of my head that I had momentum on while the lightning was hot.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 You Should Be Hiring Mullets. (write that down)

2025-08-21T01:14:21Z

You Should Be Hiring Mullets. (write that down)

Not because it's cool (it is), but because it's what your company actually needs right now.

"Business in the front, party in the back" isn't just some throwback style. It's the whole point.

In ou…

Candid and colorful thoughts on enterprise readiness · simplecto.com

We need more mullets (as sam describes them). Not so serious, but serious when it counts. Ready to back you up, get some shit shipped, roll up their sleeves and do the work, stand up in front of people and pitch ideas. We have too many hustle bros pitching shit they cant do, ai doomers who have been here 10 minutes think they can replace everything they don’t understand with a word calculator, framework Andys afraid to ship till its perfect. Grow a Mullet.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 How To Build The Tallest Building In Town

2025-08-02T15:04:49Z

How To Build The Tallest Building In Town

There are two ways you can build the tallest building in town. Once you understand this, things get really good.

Gary Vaynerchuk · garyvaynerchuk.com

Have some positivity! “Just Build the Tallest Fucking Building” is one of my favorite Gary Vee quotes. Build good community, bring others up, and stop tearing everyone down, listen to the vid.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 DHH on X: "You have all the time you need, you're just spendin...

2025-07-31T00:56:40Z

External Link

X (formerly Twitter) · x.com

The message so many of us need to hear, stop scrolling and start creating. I’m not sure that I have a heavy issue with this, I barely scroll the socials anymore, I have my own rss reader curated with people that I enjoy consuming from. YT is often done as a family activity (with my wife) or listening while doing something like dishes. But I think I’ve been on the other side of this for awhile. There’s something that ticks my brain by twiddling with linux nonsensically or pip install thing-i-heard-about-today and try it. I’m not imune though, I often fill gaps in the day with nonsense short content, but try to avoid the short trap.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

principal-engineer-at-meta

2025-06-30T20:22:08Z

Jake Bolam principal engineer at Meta, has some of the best career advice for those looking to become principal or just be better at their craft. This video was such a banger I had to bring it in as a full post, and not just a thought. It was a random YouTube auto play, something that I probably wouldn’t have clicked on given title an thumbnail, but turned out to be very impactful. Jake is such a smart guy with a lot of great insights, and I can tell he thinks really quick on his feet, he just pulled all of these things out of his head on the fly.

YT Algorithm Gold

I don't know what it is about this title and thumbnail, but it gives me "ex

google, ex facebook, ex microsoft, $100M engineer" vibes in a cringy and not satire kind of way. I would have never clicked on it, it autoplayed after a podcast and it hit, immediately I’m like who are these guys? subd and started this post it was so good.

Long On Boarding #

Jake had a super long period of on boarding at meta, he came in as a seasoned leader yet took many months to get going. This was a phase during or near the end of the COVID-19 pandemic and his team was so swamped they were unable to give him time to help him. He felt his on boarding was taking longer than he wanted, and found backend work at Instagram. Moving to Instagram he jumped in and starting making impact quick and found his way moving up the ladder serving as tech lead for several teams.

I grabbed a ton of clips from this video, but did not for this section as it was kinda long.

Always open for a Chat #

As busy as Jake is, he leaves “Always open for a chat” on his internal profile. He does not care about rank into account, the intern can ask for a coffee chat. His key metric is how well is this person receiving information. If they are coming back with the same questions every 3 months he is going to start telling them he does not have the time.

I’ve had a fair amount of personal experience with this. Early in my career I experience quite a bit of higher ranks feeling untouchable, they were impossible to get a hold of, blew you off, and had more meetings than anyone could bear. It made me really look outside the company for inspiration and mentorship most of the time.

There’s always time for coffee #

While I don’t have “Always open for a chat” on my profile, I’ve had many of these types of conversations with my peers. It might be about something career related or more often how to implement containers, cloud, and good practices into small teams.

I remember a course in college shared the famous quote “There’s always time for coffee” and it stuck with me. The demonstration goes that no matter how much you fill your day with big rocks and tiny sand particles, there’s always a little more room for coffee, and he dumps coffee into a jar that he has already filled up.

These conversations often become very impactful. They can lead to having good relationships or job opportunities.

If we are not getting enough feedback, move faster #

Take Down Prod Sometimes #

This was an interesting take. None of us really want to take down prod. No one is advocating for major outages, but this is is not 2005 shipping out software on CD’s anymore. This take 100% depends on what you do and where you work. Obviously some sectors cannot take any downtime; nuclear power, cloud systems supporting nuclear power, navigation systems, idk theres a bunch of stuff. I bet if you are reading this that aint you. You’re probably writing some backend dashboard for the marketing team, or building out a website to upload cat photos on … Wait, thats literally what jake is doing here.

Idea being if you don’t occasionally cause some small production issues, you probably are not taking enough risk. You are moving too slow, getting feedback too late, your competitors just ran past you.

Go where you are rare #

I find this interesting. I’ve found myself within non-software companies doing sofware and data analysis most of my career, the amount of value you can bring by being that one guy that knows some pandas, containerization, how to run a vm is massive in an org that uses excel as its primary database. The rest of the org generally has massive knowledge in the business, but greatly slowed down by their ability to find value in the data.

Do work that you don’t get credit for #

I’ve worked with a lot of people in my 15 years of professional work, and I can tell you the worst ones to work with are the ones that focus too much on value. Every ounce of effort they bring needs to be backed by dollars comming into the business. I’ve seen this shake out a number of ways. You got the guy who sits on his ass all of January waiting for goals to be set, you got the guy who holds everything he knows close to his chest so that he is the one that can take the glory, and you got the guy who wont ever; refactor his code, cleanup, lint, update dependencies, and so on; because that does not have direct line to dollars coming into the business.

The clip goes a bit further than this, and hints at things that are going to enable you and your org to move faster. You might shave off 2 minutes off of ci, or docker builds. You might give everyone an easy way to run dev containers with production like dependencies in a snap. You might give them a way to clone prod data into a sandbox. These type of things provide no dollars to the company, it’s likely that few will notice but damn they add up to an efficient running organization.

Work Diary - the value of writing things down #

This one hits home, for far too long I’ve been in between note taking systems and am finally getting [[ marakta ]] setup to build out a really good zettelkasten style work notes. I’ve kinda had this on my blog for a long time, but not fully. I think the piece that I am missing here is the dumping ground. I don’t yet have a daily notes implementation that lets me just dump idea onto a page that I care little about, but is the process of starting something bigger, crosslinking between people, meetings, tasks, and launchdocs.

I hadn’t heard of the term launchdoc before this, but I took it and I am using it. I generally do an ok doc in the changelog of my products and spice it up to go to the announcement chat channel, but I don’t fully keep record of it, pulling the changelog into a launchdoc gives me that chance to spice it up and have the language it needs to go right into chat.

perfect

2025-06-26T13:55:17Z

Perfect is a made up word that humans use to describe something that is above average, or works really well for them. The idea of perfection is fleeting, as you think more deeply about something, you can continue to chase the idea of perfection to unimaginable senses. Sometimes perfect simply means good enough. Could there be something better, Always, but at what cost. If I spent 10 more minutes on this post would it be better, maybe, but I might fuck it up. If I spent my lifetime studying how humans read and think, sole focused on how it pertains to this post, ya it would get better. When I use this word perfect it’s not meant in the most literal sense of the word, but perfect to me, maybe good enough given the constraints I have, its the best thing I’ve got.

💭 neverjust

2025-06-23T23:55:57Z

neverjust

a guide to better developer communication

neverjust · neverjust.net

I just never quite understood why the word just can send people over the top. I get it when you don’t know someone, you don’t have history with them, and they come in saying you are doing something wrong.

I pulled this out into a full post just

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

just

2025-06-23T19:02:29Z

I just never quite understood why the word just can send people over the top. I get it when you don’t know someone, you don’t have history with them, and they come in saying you are doing something wrong.

When you say “just,” you’re skipping over all the invisible complexity. You’re assuming the problem is simple, and that the person asking for help hasn’t already considered the obvious.

You’re not seeing the constraints:

Legacy code Business requirements Team conventions Time, budget, or technical debt Platform limitations

~https://www.neverjust.net/

If I’ve worked with someone for more than 6 months, we have established patterns for problems, libraries we use, and they are deep in the weeds of trying to fix something, I want to ask “Why don’t you just do the same thing we do everywhere else?”

I don’t need a snarky ass response, I don’t need you to get bent out of shape about it. I am communicating that I do not know the damn constraints to this problem. I am communicating I am ignorant to the pain you have suffered trying to do something for days that I thought should be copy paste pr up in 10 minutes.

What I want to hear is “Well here’s the story of why this particular one is complex, and let me take you on my travels.” or “I’m about there and don’t have time right now just understand that this is different, we can discuss later.”

My just should not cause you pain, it should not cause you to feel belittled, If we have worked together for any amount of time and have respect for each other, you should understand that this is not coming from a place of belittlement, rather its an open door for you to explain why this thing is not what it seems at surface level.

Just use another library #

~https://www.neverjust.net/

Here Sam asks “Why don’t you just use another library?”, and Alex replies “If it were that easy, I would have done it already.”

Honestly this example is a little vague and non-specific. On boarding a new library to a team can be a big ask. It becomes something that the team has to integrate and depend on, and take on supply chain risk. This example would be better with something more specific, if the team often uses a mix of SQL, pandas, and occasionally pulls out polars for bigger tasks, Sam might legitimately ask “why don’t you just use <insert pandas, polars, SQL>”.

This communicates that Sam see’s the obvious we use polars when things get tough, or we use SQL when data transfer gets too slow.

You are not Dumb #

I want to hear the story. In no way am I calling you dumb, in fact I’m probably claiming ignorance to the problem at hand. I see that you have a lot more time invested than me and I’m offering help, not asking for snarky ass remarks back Alex.

In fact take it as a sign that I am this comfortable with you and that you are so far from dumb that I don’t have to risk being taken out of context.

Or maybe you are #

Or maybe Sam is trying to belittle Alex here, if that’s the case we need to have a conversation and work some shit out or find somewhere else to be, Alex should not be belittled like this because Sam is full of himself.

Suggestions #

~https://www.neverjust.net/

The suggestions are fine, but they feel like they are asking me to hunt around for the problem rather than you recognizing my ignorance to the issue, and let Sam tell me “Why don’t you just use another library?”

Final Thoughts #

In recognizing how much pain this causes others I do try to limit my use of just, it comes out from time to time, though I try not to. I try to remain kind, humble, and helpful. And typically in the first few weeks or months interaction with new teams/people I kinda walk on eggshells for a bit. I don’t know you or where you are, if I make it sound like you are dumb and turns out that’s what people think of you I’m gonna feel kinda bad. Just understand that not everyone is trying to attack you, communication via text is hard, give folks a break before jumping them.

Don’t be an Ass #

This post is not trying to say that you can freely belittle your team, go forth and be the irritating guy on the team that comes off like a know it all. I’m saying when you are on the receiving end try not to take it with such offense and as an opportunity to explain without the need to dance around the issue.

💭 Root for Your Friends · Joseph Thacker

2025-05-27T02:27:24Z

Such a great message right now. I feel like everywhere I turn is negativity, especially social media. It feels like so many things are trying to divide and create hate. “This” is what we should be doing with social media. There are a lot of elements of “there are two ways to have the biggest building in town, tear down all the bigger buildings, or just build the biggest fucking building”, If you want to be successful in X then surround yourself with others successful in X. This is a catalytic skill that everyone needs to have in their belt.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 Proompted Kiddies Learning The Hard Way - YouTube

2025-02-14T19:15:41Z

Damn prime makes an interesting point near then end of this video. He’s seen a bunch of people able to just throw down charts and shit at their company and end up being “the coding guy” cause they proompted something once. In a way I can relate, I got into software in a similar way, but at a time that it took a lot more hard work, understanding , and copy past from the right stack overflow. Based on some of the people around me at the time I can only imagine how some people must feel like they got pushed into it without wanting it, and now are building something they don’t know anything about with no care about it or care to build any expertise. Is the future proompted charts from enterprise chatgpt or do we only continue growing more need for software from here.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 The Worst Thing You Can Do For Your Career - YouTube

2025-01-17T14:54:14Z

Don’t stop learning! Stop trying because you have a doomer outlook on ai, llms, industry and think they are taking over. If you have no hope for the future, if you stop now you are cementing in that you will be no good and the ai will be better. Many, maybe most of us in this industry go here by hard work, long nights of learning, trying to solve problems that our job had. If llms take over then the world is going to be a whole lot different, it will be a world you cannot predict or plan for. For now put your head down and succeed in the world we have today.

TEEJ has some great thoughts on this whole sentiment, put this on for you morning walk or whatever you do.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 Fork Around And Find Out | Remaining Authentic in Retirement w...

2025-01-03T16:39:51Z

Fork Around And Find Out | Remaining Authentic in Retirement with Kelsey Hightower

Retirement is about the journey, not the destination. For Kelsey Hightower, it’s been an epic journey. On our debut episode of the Fork Around and Find Out Podcast (and much to Autumn’s elation...

share.transistor.fm

What a great first guest for FAFO. Kelsey is always such a great listen. He talks about killedbygoogle and how engineers get no incentive to work on old projects, google had no incentive, and you got the thing for FREE in the first place. He talks about end of career and having love you money, having so much in the bank you can say no. If you are presented with a project that does not align with your values you can say no.M

Justin even mentions how Google has more killedbygoogle projects than Amazon has total projects.

If we knew how hard it would be, we would never build it.

Autumn’s Fav quote from ep1 of shipit

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 Getting a Dev Job in 2025 - YouTube

2024-12-27T02:53:55Z

Theo weighing in on the 2025 job market. It’s no 2018 out there right now, the ratio of jobs to engineers in the market has flipped big time. Theo as usual really focuses on community, being in a community, and being a good citizen. At the end of the video Theo weighs in on his experience hiring, and generally it starts with we need someone to do x does anyone know someone, then goes to a more formal internal post, then more formally asking internally does anyone know someone, then maybe to his community, and if he really still needs the person it might become an external post. These days there are so many good engineers on the market that very few good jobs actually get a posting for in his opinion.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

blogging in 2024

2024-08-05T10:02:09Z

Over the past years couple of years blog traffic has been tanking, for some time I thought it might have just been me, but then i heard it from Dave Rupert on Shop Talk show, and it made sense. LLMs and AI is slowly killing the internet as we know it.

My metrics #

I dug into my emails from the google search console team and found two results nearly one year apart. Impressions are only 60% of its value a year ago while clicks are only 35% of where they were a year ago. I’m getting less impressions and even less clicks.

May 2023

June 2024

Suspicions #

What I think is happening is a large portion of users are getting their answers from ChatGPT, Copilot, and llms like this. A lot of my posts have been filling gaps in the internet, notes for myself when I struggle to integrate x in y because there was a gap of how to do so in the docs and stack overflow. Some small fraction of users have moved on to duck duck go and other non global warming search engines with AI in their results.

Clicks are down even further, than impressions. I can’t tell for sure but my gut feeling is that people are using the AI generated results. I know I use them quite often, but listening to Justin and Autumn at the end of the latest ship it podcast https://changelog.com/shipit/115, they both claim that they get no benefits from it and don’t know anyone who does. In fact Justin has taken the most ethical approach to move to duck duck go since it doesn’t kill the earth with each search by injecting AI results. Personally I do find it quite helpful, sometimes the answer is there, or an idea that triggers me to think of the idea.

Ok blogging is dead why keep going #

Just as always blogging has been for me. It’s a great place to write down your thoughts for later reference, and to help cement them into your brain. Beyond getting famous and clicks blogging is useful to you first and foremost, that should be the number one reason.

How do we keep the internet of old #

RSS feed readers is a great way to keep creators that you like and want to support in your feed regardless of what the higher powers of search and social media think of them. This year I built my own [[reader]], and I use it every single day to read articles out of my own custom curated feed.

I have also created Thoughts to help share and lift up creators that make good posts. I have a crome extension that allows me to create a blog post tied to a link right within chrome. I use this several times per day to save some pages for later with a small note.

💭 /Tips-for-Being-Happier--Healthier--More-Productive

2024-07-20T18:02:22Z

Tips for Being Happier, Healthier, More Productive by The GaryVee Audio Experience

Today's podcast episode is an interview I did on the Happier with Gretchen Rubin Podcast with Gretchen Rubin and Elizabeth Craft. We discuss balancing ambition, tenacity, humility, and patience. I …

Spotify for Creators · podcasters.spotify.com

Deep breath, the deepest you can take in

Smile, a real fukin smile not some pansy bullshit

Say I’m not going to give a shit about this when I’m 90

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

My Reader Project

2024-07-07T10:24:28Z

In 2024 I built my own reader after years of being bitter about google killing reader more than a decade prior.

Seealso

All the way back in 2020 I made a post on what I wanted to build into my own reader. It went long forgotten until I tried to make this post and slugs clashed. Reader-2020

Built on markata #

I built it on top of my own static site generator markata, feedparser (🐍 Parsing RSS feeds with Python), some jinja templating, and tailwind.

After putting all the work I have into markata, it makes projects like this fairly easy to build out with just a custom loader to load new posts in.

What I'm learning in 2024

2024-06-09T10:06:30Z

2024 has been a learning fueled year, Diving deep into things I never would have previously thought I would. It’s been a bit of a mix of the 🔥hot twitter trends, and exactly what tech twitter tells you not to do. It just goes to show community is great, the tech community is filled with strong opinions, but you need to think about what really makes sense for you, your career and your customers (or lack there of).

tech #

k8s
tailwind
fastapi
htmx
jinja
opnsense

successful one day builds #

play-outside
reader
thoughts
thoughts chrome-extension

Kubernetes #

Damn did I sleep on k8s for way took long. This is like exactly what I’ve needed for a lot of things. It’s a perect example of what happens when you listen to the tech community tell you.

Looking for a Heroku replacement, What I found was shocking!

I started looking for something to make my homelab deployments easier at home. Previously I needed to ssh into my server and fuss around with docker compose. This just did not feel right for me to go into production and fiddle with it like this.

In my search I keep seeing kubernetes crop up as the best solution. I held off for a long time, until I finally decided to give it a go. I’m not sure if I got lucky or what but my first few applications that I migrated in went smooth as could be.

I chose to run k3s as this seemed like the lowest power consumption, easiest to manage, and still allowed me to run multiple nodes. At this point I was unsure if I would use multiple nodes, but I did not want to take away the option out of the gate.

I wrote a follow up article on my experience 6 monthts in.

kubernetes 6 months in

tailwind #

Again I wrote off tailwind for a long time. This time tech twitter really likes it and tells me I should use it, but I already know css and I just don’t see the point of needing to use a framework.

It wasn’t until thePrimeagen roughly said all css classes are shitty, everyone writes shitty css classes, and you might as well use the same shitty css classes everywhere that it really hit me, and I gave it a shot.

A Case For Tailwindcss

What I really found was that having a designer lay out all of the rhythm, spacing, and colors for you is really powerful.

I now have this site fully styled with tailwind, and even use md-it-attrs that allow me to pop extra classes right in markdown and style posts like [this]

fastapi #

I’ve been using fast api for a little while now but using it more and more in 2024. It has a lot of really great ideas with dependency management, and pydantic for moving data in and out of routes.

Here are some of the posts I’ve made about fastapi, theres defitely more to come here, I have some Ideas that I am honing down around meeting users where they are so that routes return the appropriate content type based on their explicitly requested content type or assumed by user agent.

how to host static content with fastapi

[[ fastapi-jinja-url-for-with-query-params ]]

htmx #

I have posts about htmx going back to Ease into htmx with htmx-get on 3/25/2022. I’ve been interested for awhile, but just didn’t really have the platform to use it till recently. My public content has been all static built content for a long time, but now I am building applications for myself that are server rendered such as Thoughts and One Day Build - Play Outside. I’ve had more use cases for using htmx.

The last pre-release of markata from 6/15/2022 now supports feed partials. This gives me a really easy way to pop things like recent posts on the bottom of every single page. I’m sure I can do this with jinja, but htmx makes it really easy to do and understand. If its up and running you will now see a Recent posts seciton below the article on this page powered by htmx.

jinja #

I’ve been using jinja for years now, but its mostly been some template variables here, some loops there. Now that I am putting fastapi and htmx to work I am really learning how to setup and design templates properly. Building up from a good re-usable base, including partials that so that pages can be rendered as full pages or partials.

just #

I have long been using my shell history to re-run complex shell commands that I use to build projets, compile tailwind, build docker images, run docker in local development. Most of the time they are not complex, but sometimes are something that would take me a few minutes to remember if I lost my shell history without it being documented

I’ve started storing all these things that I can in just. If its something that I get from my shell history I start thinking about how it would belong in a justfile. I’ve tried a few others over the years but they always seem tied to a language or build tool, just is language agnostic and runs in any terminal. Worst case, someone does not want to install it they can copy paste out of the justfile.

Biggest benefit is that it communicates to others what I do when I am working on a project. There are some good competitors like runbook that run readmes, but just has been working great for me and easy to use.

thinking about static sites in 2024

2024-05-30T12:57:24Z

actions build

k8s build

fastapi sqlite

my linked in work history

2024-05-30T11:14:16Z

My linked in work history is empty. I made up a position about content developer that tracks how long I’ve been blogging. I think i did this because LinkedIn requires it. Either way this is public knowledge and fine sharing.

If you have taken any security class for your job seriously you have already been told not to share your work with most companies to the public, this is private information that only opens you up for social engineering attacks against that company.

I care about privacy and security #

I care about the security of these companies I work for and their reputation, so I refuse to publically share it.

Need to know #

If somehow you need to know where I work it’s my choice to tell you. I don’t need to advertise to every social engineering hacker where I work on the platform that they go to get that information from.

Your LinkedIn is Garbage

2024-05-30T11:02:39Z

Your linkedin link sits at the top of your resume, its one of the first things I see when I open your resume, but yet it gives me no more information that the damn resume you sent me.

Save that space on your resume for something useful.

So you want that /in/me on your resume #

Fine if you want it on your resume make it actually useful for someone reading your resume.

Actually post something #

If I am reading resume’s and I actually take the time to look at your linkedin I want to see you post something. Take a side, make an opinion and post it. Learn something new, make a post about it. If you have a blog and you make a good post share it there.

Your work history belongs on your resume #

Any security 101 tells you that you should not share your work history on linked in. You should not share photos of you at your workplace that include sensitive information such as your badge.

Your work history on LinkedIn is for hackers to steal and use for social engineering.

If you took security seriously you would not include you work history at all, and any hiring manager who gives a shit would see that and should understand. Reality is that they probably don’t and it probably raised more questions than answers for them.

my linked in work history

Congrats on your work anniversary #

All these comments and messages are auto generated, both sides know it and its garbage. If you actually care about someones work history or achievements take 30s to craft a message of your own to them, that actually means something and is not garbage.

TLDR #

If you are not going to take the time and effort to make something worth sharing, take your garbage profile off your resume.o

Make the easy things easy

2023-09-06T19:46:19Z

It’s so easy to get out of rhythm, get busy, and drop the ball on some things that you really want to do or should do. This blog is a good example. I took some time off for some family reasons, but have taken a long time to get back to it simply because I am out of rhythm. As I am trying to get back into the rhythm there is some tooling that I have set up for it that I completely forgot about that feel good to use again.

Repetitive Tasks #

Simple Repetitive Tasks that I have to do often can just feel soul crushing, and one main thing that got me interested in programming.

AI tools are becoming more and more useful at solving these problems. For instance code generation tools like co-pilot or codeium are really good at boilerplate and pattern repetition. Things that used to be a few vim macros is now just banging on tab.

I often look for setting up templates or some sort of snippet to replace a big chunk of boilerplate that I know I will need over and over.

timebox #

Don’t be afraid to give up on making a better workflow for something that just might not be worth it. Give yourself a session or two to show some progress, if you don’t get it, don’t be afraid to put it on pause, let it stew, or just forget about it. Often times I will come back later with new knowledge and knock out an thorn in my setup with new skill much easier the next time around.

Low Hanging Fruit #

Often things like having a quick template to get a blog post up and running are worth it. It might not take that long to setup a new post, set the date, title, tags, and create the file, but sometimes that is enough of a barrier to stop me from even making a post. Making a template and a script that I can call in a few keystrokes makes me much more likely to make a post.

Learning #

I am often reminded of this xkcd comic about automation, and how easy it is to overdo it. Spending far more time automating things than it would have to do the original task is a very easy pit to fall into. I’ve been guilty of it many times. I’m sure most people who have written any automation code is as well.

What this comit misses is learning. If you never take the time to learn any automation you will not be any good at it and it will always take longer to automate than to just do the thing. You have to tackle some things that you think are achievable with skills you think are transferable to other tasks. Scraping that one weird endpoint out of the Microsoft Graph API that is not in the cli is a prime example. Often there is a series of undocumented n+1 queries that you have to execute and each leave you feeling like you are almost at the data that you can see in the ui, but want in the terminal. Learning this api will leave you with nothing but potentially one task automated.

Learning how to leverage cli tools like curl, grep, xargs are great examples of skills that can solve many automation problems quickly, but the first time you will end up spending hours looking for the right thing before you realize what you need.

devops philosophy

2022-12-06T09:49:04Z

How to keep a secret - https://changelog.com/shipit/58 Kelsey Heightower Fundamentals - https://changelog.com/shipit/44 What does good devops look like - https://changelog.com/shipit/28 Docs are not optional - https://changelog.com/shipit/17 Dave Farley the foundations of Continuous Delivery - https://changelog.com/shipit/5

name it claim it aim it

2022-08-04T14:28:30Z

Deliberative #

People exceptionally talented in the Deliberative theme are best described by the serious care they take in making decisions or choices. They anticipate obstacles.

I am risk-adverse. I want everything well thought out and calculated before I make any sort of change. I have never gambled in my life and just the thought of it makes me anxious.

Aim it #

I can use this as a strength to plan out potential issues and prevent them. I do this quite often with my role in infrastructure.

I need to make sure that I use deadlines to keep this as a strength and not hinderence.

Automation #

One of the biggest ways that I utilize this skill is automation. I am all about automating things, not just because I don’t want to do the manual work, but I am not sure when I am going to need to do something again.

Nix Versions By Commit Count

2022-02-02T15:12:35Z

I was listening to shipit37 with Vincent Ambo talking about building fully declaritive systems with nix. Vincent is building out Nixery and strongly believes that standard versioning systems are flawed. If we have good ci setup, and every commit is a good commit the idea of a release is just some arbitrary point in history that the maintainer decided was a good time to release, and has less to do about features and quality.

Since many things still want to see a version number, there is one automatic always increasing number that is a part of every single git repo, and that is the commit count. Nixery is versioned by commit count. When counting on the main branch there is no way for two points in time to share the same version. The git cli will count all commits by default so you have to be careful to only include commits from the branch you want to version/release from.

git rev-list main --count

Mentorship Vs Sponsorship

2021-04-17T00:00:00Z

https://www.hanselminutes.com/784/doing-open-source-with-brian-douglas

Stand With Your Team

2021-01-22T00:00:00Z

People who are quick to toss team members under a bus are not well trusted or highly thought of and it will lead to some toxic team dynamics.

Building Steam #

While collaborating on any project there are going to be decisions made that aren’t necessarily your favorite, during a summer internship my mentor made some decisions that I was not on board with, but I accepted his wisdom and moved forward with little push back.

Full Spead Ahead #

During a review, leadership showed interest in the option that I wanted to go towards. I was quick to jump up and say I told you so right then and there and pitch reasons why my idea was so much better.

The Aftermath #

I walked out so proud that leadership recognized my idea, but I will never forget the look on my teammate’s face and what he told me after the meeting.

“Wow quick to throw me under the bus in front of everyone 😢”. I

~ my teammate

Realizing what Happened #

It was at this moment that I threw my mentor, a good friend in front of a bus that was at full speed. I will never forget this moment and the importance of being a good trustworthy team player.

Speak your Mind, be heard, shut up #

This day I learned that there is a time to speak your mind. While that bus is sitting idle it would have hurt no one.

There were times to hear out ideas, and there were times that we need to accept the decisions the team made. The team that you were a part of and had a chance to steer.

There are times where it’s appropriate to sit down and shut up.

Your Story 👇 #

Do you have a story of how not standing with your team caused you pain later on. I would love to hear and learn from your experience.

How to crush amazing posts on DEV

2020-08-07T05:00:00Z

This post was inspired by a comment I left on @dsteenman’s post.

{% post dsteenman/how-long-should-a-blogpost-be-2k6n %}

Most of the time I prefer short as I am more likely to read the whole thing. If its setup as a series I am more likely to work my way through the whole series in a matter of a few sessions. Just my preference

I will say though there are certain articles that fit well to the long format. They are articles that folks tend to come back to often as a reference again and again.

Sections #

layout is key #

Either way, you go layout is key. You are not Steven King, no matter how great of a writer you are, you are unlikely to hold attention like he can. Most folks reading blogs scan articles first. I often scan, then read. If the article is really good or pertains well to me I will read everything, otherwise, I go back and read only the sections of interest. If there are no discernable sections you lost me.

For this reason, you need to break up your post, into sections and treat the heading for each one like you would a title of a full post.

TOC #

Table of Contents

A lot of folks responded to Danny’s post suggesting a table of contents. For some reason I have never included a TOC in my posts. It’s something I am now considering. I am really good at changing layout right before, or after, shipping a brand new post.

semi-auto TOC

As I am highly allergic to unnecessary rework and potential mistakes I put together this snippet that generates the TOCautomatically, just paste this into your console, and paste the results in your article.

// pres F12
// paste this in the console
// get your auto generated DEV TOC
console.log(
  [...document.querySelectorAll('.anchor')]
  .map(a =>
    `1. [${a.parentElement.innerText}](#${a.href.split('#')[1]})`
  )
  .join('\n')
)

Break it up #

Use headings, images, and blockquotes to break your article up and make it scannable. I treat each heading as an article title. It should be engaging and pull the reader in, but not be clickbaity and irritate them when they didn’t get what they expected.

make it scannable! … treat each heading as an article title

Markdown #

Get Familiar with Markdown. Check out this cheatsheet or the reference right in the DEV editor. This is not an article about markdown, but here are the most common tags you need to break up your article.


# H1
## H2
### H3
... up to H6

* unordered
* list
* of
* things

1. ordered
1. list
1. of
1. things

![Alt text of image](put-link-to-image-here)

**bold**
_italics_
~~strikethrough~~

👇 Horizontal rules are great a making a hard break between sections

---

DEV also supports these HTML elements for additional flair, use wisely. Some can make for some really jarring style that really pulls the readers eye to and is hard to focus on the rest. I’m talking about you <mark>.

<small>small text</small>
<sup>superscript text</sup>
<sub>subscript text</sub>
<mark>highlighted text</mark>
<abbr title="Table of Contents">TOC</abbr>

Liquid Tags #

When Editing a post click the Liquid Tag reference to the right, for a list of everything. The post tag is the retweet of DEV.


{% post helenanders26/sql-series-from-a-to-z-2pk9 %}

{% user helenanders26 %}

{% github forem/forem %}

{% github forem/forem no-readme %}

Article types #

As I can see there are several article types on DEV

superpost #

I think this is what @dsteenman is eluding to with the (+3000) word post. This is the hardest to pull off in my opinion, but if done right it will land you at the top of the search for a long time, in the top 7, and potentially the top 1 for a given tag.

I used to think that every post needed to be a super post that everyone would rave over. I have found personally that attempting to do this makes it so I rarely post and way overthink them. I need to at least make a cutoff time that the post is going to ship.

This can also be the most frustrating, you have put all of your eggs in one basket. If you don’t title it right, post at the right time, share it at the right time, it might not take off like you had hoped.

{% post helenanders26/sql-series-from-a-to-z-2pk9 %}

@helenanders26 takes the 👑 as the queen of the superpost. She is the first person who comes to mind when I think of this post type

single post #

Your average post. There are a lot of great techniques to making the average post great (some added above). Sometimes they find traction, sometimes they don’t. I don’t sweat if they don’t. I like posting shorter content as its achievable for me and my lifestyle. I can always crosslink them and generate more views/discussion across them.

{% post taillogs/how-to-write-a-good-blog-post-2eom %}

@taillogs has a good article on his process to writing a good post.

For those struggling to find what to write about, this is a great article from @swyx learn-in-public-hack

series #

Using the series tag you can break super posts into smaller ones. This puts fewer of your eggs in the same basket. I typically start a series when I know that I am going to post about a single topic often, but don’t have it all laid out. I’ve been told for these to be really successful it needs a bit more pre-thought.

I do notice that I get a bit of engagement back to older posts every time a new one is posted. so this does help drive engagement by continuously pulling readers in. I am not sure if its quite as good as a link, or liquid embed. Keep in mind when doing this the series component will show the first 2 and the last two without clicking. Make sure that the first two really count, they will likely get the most traffic benefit from the series.

{% post waylonwalker/what-are-github-actions-1lhh %}

I personally put a lot of my content into a series. I don’t think through the full series ahead of time very much. I do it because it helps me organize and retrieve my thoughts. I find it easier to get back to the post I want to reference if I can find the series it was part of. I think of it as a tag that no one else can post to.

discussion #

Posts just like this one, where the author leads the discussion with an intriguing question or comment but holds back on their opinion. The key here is that the author should engage in the discussion, keep the discussion moving, and provide their thoughts here.

Selfishly this is one of my favorite types of posts to make as I learn the most from them.

{% post ben/how-do-you-identify-over-engineering-1oad %}

@ben is the king of the #discuss post. He is able to get just the right titles that pull people in and generate quite large discussions.

Post what you want to read #

At the end of the day YOU are the most important component. Post what you like to read, post what you are able to write. If you struggle to wrap your head around concepts in small posts and have a talent at making rockstar super posts do that. Do YOU

Black Tech Pipeline

2020-08-03T05:00:00Z

I was particularly inspired by @chantastic episode 103 of the react podcast with @ParissAthena. They spoke about the black tech pipeline as well as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Pariss is quite an inspiration. She has done so much work to create a better place for POC in tech. I like that not only is she helping them get jobs but acting as a mentor for their first few months on the job to make sure that they are able to find their place and fit in.

Based on an episode of react podcast.

🎙 Listen to the full episode.

So Inspirational #

Losing their culture #

One thing that Michael brought up was the feeling he gets when he has other Asian friends to collaborate with at work is just a feeling of fitting in. All too often he feels like he has to put on this persona of “Hamburgers and Beer are my favorite thing, like all the time” just to fit in.

Growing up in Rural America (me) #

I grew up in a very rural part of the United States Dominated by Whites with a prominent Mexican community, there was almost no Asian or Black. I can’t tell you how many times I heard, “I have this friend John, He’s black, but he’s not really black.” I will say that I was never quite this low, but growing up in a region where this was the norm, I probably wasn’t the best ambassador either.

Years later I recall taking some training for work that could not have described the people I grew up with better. It described rural parts of the United States as completely accepting of any POC as long as they completely leave their culture behind.

“I have this friend John, He’s black, but he’s not really black.”

I heard this statement far too many times coming from rural United States

Thinking a little bit more into this statement I realize that as a culture Rural America was very open to POC, but not at all open to their culture.

This is where a lot of what we were taught in school in the ’90s and ’00s falls short. We were so heavily focused on, " I don’t see color". We were taught that race was all about color, having friends of color, and treating everyone equally. But I think that not seeing color puts us in a situation of not really treating everyone equally. Their color may have been seen as equal, but their culture wasn’t.

We have failed to embrace others the way we would want them to embrace us.

“Hamburgers and Beer are my favorite thing, like all the time”

This is where I really connected with Michael’s statement “Hamburgers and Beer are my favorite thing, like all the time”. So often we can look past color, but we completely miss making a real connection with other cultures.

Welcome Everyone #

Like, really welcome them.

Further, into the episode, Pariss spoke about being hired into tech and feeling left out of the conversation because she didn’t feel like she fit in. She would hire in with a non-POC on the same day and felt like people would stare at her like a zoo animal while treating the other new hire as a real person.

people would stare at her like a zoo animal

Take Action #

I know that I do not want to make anyone on my team feel like a zoo animal. I feel like listening to this episode gave me a bit of perspective into what it might be like to be just a bit different than everyone else. I really appreciate the both of them for being so open about sharing their experiences. I will definitely think of ways that I can make any new hire just a bit more welcome next time.

For this post don’t follow me on Twitter, don’t join my newsletter.

Share the episode with a friend.

react podcast 103

Follow @ParissAthena

Follow @chantastic

Follow them they are some amazing people. #

I have been trying to build out the content in mine. I later found this is called a shadow newsletter or evergreen newsletter. I will say that it gets tough to keep up with. I’ve been trying to do it weekly, but have definitely had some folks get ahead of my pace, I’ll have to figure out how to split the out and resend articles they missed.

– for yours –

I like the branding that you have put into it, and how it matches yoru cover images elsewhere.

I like how you have included sections of posts from various places that pull me in and make me want to go see more.

your video to @WellMax81 is amazing, do more of those.

One thing, I am not sure if there is a “right” direction with this, but it doesnt give me any new content. If I were to have been following you everywhere I would have likely seen a lot of this already. That might make me wonder why I am subscribed over time.

How I Built My GitHub Profile

2020-07-10T03:00:00Z

I ran a discussion on dev that collected quite a list of examples in the comment section. So many great calls to action, animations, memes, and weird tricks.

My current profile #

Upload all of your icons to the repo in a directory such as icons or assets, then link them with a height attribute like below. I used html for mine, not sure if you can set the height in markdown.

<a href="https://dev.to/waylonwalker"><img height="30" src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/WaylonWalker/WaylonWalker/main/icon/dev.png"></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;

note I did add a bit of   (non-breaking-whitespace) between my icons. Without adding css this seemed like the simplest way to do it.

Center #

Aligning things in the center of the readme is super simple. I used this trick to align my social icons in the middle.

<p align='center'>
 ...html
</p>

right #

For my latest post I floated it to the right with a little bit of align='right' action.

<p>
  <a href="https://images.waylonwalker.com/latest"><img width="400" align='right' src="https://waylonwalker.com/latest.png?raw=true"></a>
</p>

You may need to play with where you put this in the document, and the size of elements to get things to flow right.

redirects #

In order to keep my latest post always up to date on my readme I implemented a netlify redirect to always point to my latest post. As a digital gardener this helps me keep pointed to a the best one in my opinion. Any automated way would pick up half finished posts.

# /static/_redirects
# netlify redirects

# latest post
/latest            /blog/kedro-catalog-search/
/latest.png        /kedro-catalog-search.png

Now I can reference both the post and the post cover image.

summary/details #

I also wanted to list out a few of my favorite posts without taking up a ton of space, so I used details and summary tags so that it would collapse.

<details>
 <summary><strong>other favorite posts</strong></summary>
 <a href="https://images.waylonwalker.com/eight-years-cat/"><img width="400" src="https://waylonwalker.com/eight-years-cat.png?raw=true"></a>
 <a href="https://images.waylonwalker.com/keyboard-driven-vscode/"><img width="400" src="https://waylonwalker.com/alt%20b.png?raw=true"></a>
 <a href="https://images.waylonwalker.com/what-are-github-actions/"><img width="400" src="https://waylonwalker.com/what-are-github-actions.png?raw=true"></a>

</details>

Go ham on your profile, its your own slice of GitHub to completely personalize and speak your brand. Give a powerfule call to action, share a funny meme, record a wicked cool GIF, its your space.

Practice your craft

2020-03-04T06:00:00Z

Show up For Practice #

how I practice #

What Works for You #

Productive one on one

2020-02-24T12:53:00Z

Inspired by https://m.soundcloud.com/front-end-happy-hour/episode-095-shot-for-shot-one-on-ones

Don’t waste your time learning everything

2020-02-19T06:00:00Z

“Don’t waste your time learning everything.”

Inspired by this linkedIn post

I felt that this comment was very powerful. Here are my 2 cents.

Be Productive #

Stick to what you know, and learn a little bit of something new every day. If what you know is how to use Excel like a boss, don’t fee ashamed that you are missing something. Be proud and use what you know.

Don’t Stagnate #

Take small steps enhance what you know now with something new that you get you closer to where you want to be. If you need something that sci-py offers learn how to load in data and use that part. If your sick of waiting for IT to pull data out of the database so you can use it, learn that.

Dont Overwhelm Yourself #

If you try to drop everything you know now and jump whole hog into these new flashy things its not going to work. Learn what you need to know. New things crop up very often. They will come and go. Some things will get traction, some will never get much traction past an impressive hello world example.

Keep your finger on new tech #

Its important to keep your finger on the state of technology, but dont Overwhelm yourself learning every new thing that comes out. Make silly hello world examples in these new things and walk away. When its time to implement something new into a real project you will be ready and understand how to do it. If that thing dies its good that you didn’t waste a lot of time on it, but chances are it inspired the thing that actually takes off. Then you will have some understanding of what the next thing is doing ahead of everyone else who missed out on the original.

I’ll leave you with this inspirational video by Kitze #

![](https://images.waylonwalker.com/2020-02-16 09-57-03_Microsoft Text Input Application.png)

Navigating the hype-driven frontend development world without going insane - KITZE

It's not all about winning

2019-02-02T00:00:00Z

This is my story into data science.

The Journey Begins #

I am addicted to the process of learning and improving my skills nearly to a fault. The reason I say nearly is because my addiction is fueled with results. I crave the output of my work enhance the work of others. I jump with joy as I see users gain insights they could have never imagined before. My mouth starts watering as I see their boring repetitive data mining activites be completed in a matter of seconds, opening up their mind to focus on their expertise. The day I stop learning will be the day that I start looking for another career path.

It’s not all about winning.

~Mom

This happened to me in 2014. I have a mechanical engineering degree and had a really good position at the time. I owned full engineering control of a small subset of engine components. The problem was that Everything is so proprietary and hardly documented the process of learning did not click with me. I felt like I had learned a lot about the product early on, and was stuck without any more resources to learn more. On the side, I had started learning python and data science techniques to enhance my job.

every time I feel like I have reached the peak of anyone topic the fog clears and I can now see a whole new mountain range that I did not know existed.

I was addicted. I felt like there is so much knowledge easily obtained online in my free time, and I was able to take it back to my job and achieve results. Every time I feel like I have reached the peak of anyone’s topic the fog clears and I can now see a whole new mountain range that I did not know existed.

Love the Journey #

By 2017 I was really good at gaining results for our business and decided to make the jump to the data science team. I have achieved great results, and have been recognized as a high contributor to our business. Still, I do not feel like I have won. My goals are always moving and will always be 3-6 months ahead of me. I truly enjoy the process of learning and providing value so much that I will never let myself sit back and think that I have won and its time to reap the rewards of my hard work. I will say that I am winning. Not because of any results, awards, or recognition, but because I am happy. I have found a career path that I really enjoy the journey and I am not just trying to get on the fast track to a destination.

Follow Your Passion

2019-01-01T00:00:00Z

Follow Your Passion #

my journey into data science

In January 2018 I started work as a full time data scientist turning my passion into a career. It is something that I didn’t see myself doing 5 years ago, but is something that I love to do. It combines my love of data, visualization, story telling, software development, and writing code. Most of all it allows me to work in a space that promotes learning and creativity. As a mechanical engineer for a company that has been building equipment for nearly a century the mechanical engineering is very well established I felt that there was not a lot of room for creativity.

Find Your Role #

When I first started as a full time mechanical engineer

No More Death By PowerPoint

2017-12-31T00:00:00Z

No More Death By PowerPoint

I Waylon S. Walker vow that from this point forward I will no longer create powerpoints to be considerec DEATH BY POWERPOINT

If you have not seen David JP Phillips Death By PowerPoint TEDx, stop now and watch it. You will never look at slides the same again. Watching this video ruined me for watching presentations with these issues. Reveal is a tool that makes it very easy to follow these principles

I currently work in a company that employs over 100K employees, and to this day I cannot recall a single presentation given where the slides did not violate the rules stated in David’s Talk. This year I am putting a stop to this starting with myself. I am starting a new job role in 2018 and there is no better time to make some drastic changes to my workflow than now. I expect there to be a few followers and many naysayers, but I dont care. I will employ the directives listed below.

1+1=0 #

Very few people (if any) in your will be able to multi-task. The human brain is just not built to truly multi-task. Some folks can be good at task switching quickly but very few of us can truly multi-task. By overwhelming your audience with more than one distinct message, you have successfully overwhelmed your audience and successfully delivered 0 messages to your audiance.

6 items #

The human brain is very capable of processing up to 6 items very efficiently, beyond this becomes an exponential rate of processing. Watch David’s video and you will see a remarkable example.

Size and Contrast #

The most important points should be the fist thing that your eye goes to on the screen.

Supporting Material #

Sentences, Notes, reference material, etc belong in the speaker notes. This is the part that took the longest for me to realize. In my company PowerPoint documents as living documents that folks will reference long after the presentation is over. For this reason we tend to put every point that we want to discuss on the slides, so that they are there weeks, months, even years later when someone goes back to review your slides. Placing this material in the speaker notes will allow you to utilize your presentation as reference material if you need to, and refrain from placing it on the screen.

Tools #

A tool that is becoming very popular outside of the PowerPoind world is Reveal js. It is a fantastic framework to build beautiful slides using html. I find that maintaining html to be a bit cumbersome. And the templating language pug to be much more simple. I will be using my own fork of reveal.js-jade in 2018. It will allow me to have interactive visualizations right in my slides. Reveal also does a really nice job at making it hard to break the Death By PowerPoint rules. It tends to be hard to jam a ton of information into them.

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2026 Resolutions

Daily Notes #

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Not Everything will be a side hustle #

Keebs #

More Offline #

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Always open for a Chat #

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If we are not getting enough feedback, move faster #

Take Down Prod Sometimes #

Go where you are rare #

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Work Diary - the value of writing things down #

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Just use another library #

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Ok blogging is dead why keep going #

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What I'm learning in 2024

tech #

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htmx #

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my linked in work history

Social Engineering #

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Your LinkedIn is Garbage

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Congrats on your work anniversary #

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Make the easy things easy

Repetitive Tasks #

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Low Hanging Fruit #

Learning #

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Deliberative #

Aim it #

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Nix Versions By Commit Count

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