Works Well With Others

I've been thinking a lot about teams and, based on my own lucky experiences, what makes them work well. I've been at Fractured Atlas for almost three months now and am legitimately delighted at how quickly and easily I gelled with my new team. The one thing I keep coming back to when trying to describe why I've been able to connect so quickly and accomplish so much is this: Safety.

"Safe spaces" have been the subject of much mockery (mostly through exaggerating their intent to suggest extreme coddling vs safety), so I initially shied away from this description. However, I keep coming back to it because it's honestly the best word to describe what's working. Because I feel safe at work and amongst my team, I'm not carrying the cognitive load of being defensive or trying to prove myself and, instead, I'm able to just get the work...

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First week on macOS

With the exception of an original iMac I worked on for a couple years after graduation, my personal computers have always been, well, PCs.

I've also had a progression of Android smartphones and tablets, plus a mostly abandoned Ubuntu laptop, but 99% of the time I'm sitting down to a machine with a keyboard, it's had a Windows OS.

Until last week—when I unpacked the...

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Vagrant + Middleman = Victory

I finally conquered a technical challenge that had been stumping me for awhile. This blog runs on Middleman, which requires Ruby and a slew of other things that aren't necessary in my work dev environment (i.e., the laptop I usually take with me when I travel). This is clearly something I didn't think through when starting up this blog—clearly evidenced by the "location...

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Encouraging Highs, Crushing Lows

While this could easily be a commitment to a new year, a reboot for my blog (I know it's been awhile), first I have to look back, to write something that's been in my head since September and shares things beyond even 2015. (Spoiler alert: This post is going to be just a word dump and sans technical/code examples.)

Professionally, 2015 was the best year I've ever had, better...

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