In today’s resume tip, I talk about the importance of an old concept on your resume. That old concept is “Above the Fold”. The short version, don’t make the person reading your resume go hunt for the reason to hire you.
My big caveat with this series is that I’m not in HR, I’m not a professional recruiter, I’m just a manager who has read a bunch of resumes. The tips are my perspective on things.
I’m starting a little Youtube series on resume tips. Over the past handful of months, I’ve read close to a thousand resumes and there are some things that really make a resume stand out, good and bad, to me. I’ll be covering these in small bite sized chunks. My goal is one a day. Help hold me to that… 🙂
My first tip is about telling me what you did, not what you were responsible for.
I don’t really care what work people assigned you. I care about the work that you drove and the things that you accomplished. That gives me a far more interesting look into your past.
My big caveat with this series is that I’m not in HR, I’m not a professional recruiter, I’m just a manager who has read a bunch of resumes. The tips are my perspective on things.
I’ve attended a few online conferences recently and one of the most important features, the group chat, is arguably the least functional of the features of the web infrastructure. The reason I attend conferences rather than just watching content on Youtube is the interaction with the rest of the audience. Since we can’t do that in person these days, the group chat in the conference is often the closest thing and I’ve not seen an online conference that does this well yet. That’s not a fault of the conference, it’s that there’s not a group chat that is actually built for conferences that I’ve seen yet.
I’ve spent some time researching this feature set and haven’t found anything that actually does what I believe that a conference chat should do. There are some things that are close but nothing that I’ve seen that actually fulfills all the requirements.
I’m posting here on my blog because I would love input, argument, additions to, … the features that I think are important and if there is a viable solution in the market at the moment. If there is, fantastic. Otherwise, I might start a project to fill this niche in the community. More on the possible project at the end.
I’m sure that there are other features that are important and I’d love it people could suggest them here until such point as we get a github repo going and we can just put things in issues there. I’m holding off on the github repo at the moment though as I’d love to find an existing solution to the features above.
So far, there’s a bunch of things that do subsets of these features but they are typically company chats, not conference chats, that we are trying to bend to our use case but they definitely don’t actually do everything we need as conference organizers and attendees. I’m not going to drain all of these options such as Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, … as it does them a disservice. They are awesome products but not purpose built for conferences.
I’d LOVE for this to be a solved problem. 🙂
What I’m thinking about doing is starting with Kiwi IRC. It has a ton of the right functionality already so a large part of the heavy lifting would be creating UI around the existing features to make it easily usable for people who are not intimately knowledgeable with IRC.
Anyway, I’ve been thinking about this and would love some thoughts and opinions.
Also, feel free to tell me that while this is not a solved issue, that I’m the only one stressing about it so I should move on. 🙂
Looking forward to the discussion.
We just wrapped the Seattle GiveCamp 2019. If you’ve never heard of GiveCamp, make sure to check out https://givecamp.org/. The short version is that we get a number of non-profits with technical needs and a number of willing technical volunteers to come help them with those technical needs – lots more detail below.
I’ve been involved in the Ann Arbor GiveCamp back when we were really early on in figuring out the process. Chris Koenig got this movement started in Dallas. I got involved when Jennifer Marsman and Michael Eaton ran one in Ann Arbor. I feel in love with the movement and have been involved a ton. Two years ago, while at a conference and giving a talk about building community, I talked heavily about GiveCamp and the Seattle GiveCamp leads, Paul Litwin and Suzanna Litwin, came up to me and asked me if I’d like to get involved in the Seattle GiveCamp. Of course I said yes and have helped with the last two.
This year has been a fantastic labor of love. We had 10 non-profits this year:
We helped a lot of people this weekend. As always, it was an incredibly rewarding and incredibly exhausting experience.
Paul and Suzanna have been running the Seattle GiveCamp for the last 9 years and have decided to step back a little. They will still be involved but not running things next year. They have asked me to lead next year and I’ve said yes.
Looking forward to next year’s Seattle GiveCamp! It will be Oct 23-25, 2020.
If you are or know of a non-profit in the Seattle Area, have them sign up for notification when we have the call for non-profits, have them sign up at http://seattlegivecamp.org/nonprofit.aspx.
If you would like to volunteer, either as a tech volunteer or as a operational support volunteer, please register to be notified when we open our call for volunteers at http://seattlegivecamp.org/volunteer.aspx.
Over the years, I’ve had a ton of folks ask me for tips on visiting Ireland. I lived in Ireland for close to three years and, honestly, still consider it my second home. I’ve spent a ton of time writing people emails and guides and decided that I really need to just publish this on my blog so that I can refer people to it.
Obviously most people start in Dublin as that’s the largest city and there’s a big international airport. Dublin is awesome and has a ton to do.
There’s a ton to see up north and I’ll be adding more as time goes on but here’s some highlights. And yes, I’m conflating some Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland places.
I’ll be adding to the list here and categorize these better sometime soon. The ones that ended up in this list are awesome and I love them, they just don’t categorize with the other items geographically.
This is far from complete and I’ll definitely be adding to it but this is a starting list with some descriptions.
So I’ve switched roles at Microsoft. For the last 11.5 years at Microsoft (which is 9.5 years longer than I thought I’d be here), I’ve been in some form of developer relations. However, I’ve never shipped a product at Microsoft.
In my new role, I’m joining the Web Platform Team to run the Web Applications and Frameworks team – my new title is the Principle PM for WAF. I’m managing two products related to people writing apps with web technologies. The first is WWAHost which is how we write Progressive Web Apps which are native apps written with web standards and technologies.
Check out Get started with Progressive Web Apps for more details.
The second is Webview which is how you incorporate web tech into a standard native app written in .NET, C++ and so on.
Check out Microsoft Edge WebView for Windows 10 apps for more details.
I also work with JavaScript frameworks internal and external to Microsoft. To this end, I’ve got a great dev on my team named John-David Dalton. He’s had a continuous streak of activity on Github since July 23, 2013. This has included building lodash, contributions to Babble and even as far as adding ESM support to Node.JS and NPM.
I’m looking forward to shipping a product that touches millions of people. 🙂
There are times that your customer will ask you to do something so you do it. But did you stop to ask them about why they need that done? The story here is an old one that you might have heard but recently someone gave me an addition to the story and it blew my mind.
If someone comes to you in the hardware store and asks for a quarter inch drill bit, what do they actually want? Quarter inch holes. A drill bit is just a tool and if there’s a better way to give them the quarter inch hole, give it to them.
The addition was, now ask why they want quarter inch holes… Turns out they are hanging a ceiling fan. Ask them why they are hanging a ceiling fan. Turns out they are trying to sell their house and they were told that a ceiling fan in the bedroom would help. Ask if you could come take a look… Turns out that the paint outside is faded and cracked so the reality is that when they asked for a quarter inch drill bit, really they needed 5 gallons of paint and a ladder and in all honesty, they should slap you for selling them the drill bit.
I’ve been reflecting on this a while and I’ve come to the following…
I’ve long had a philosophy that I’d like to
“Do something, anything, even the wrong thing, learn from it and iterate.”
This has been my guiding light and has helped me keep from getting stuck in analysis paralysis and drives the analytical people around me absolutely nuts (Looking at you Gary Sweeting…) 🙂
That said, I was talking to my new friend that I met at Collision Conf this week, Bas Wouterse (CTO at http://telm.nl), and I realized that I’m slightly off there. It was an aha moment for me as I realized that I’ve been voicing my actual process wrong for years.
Here’s my new motto
“I’d rather do the wrong thing than solve the wrong problem”
The original motto still applies once I figure out what the problem is that I’m solving but it’s not enough to just start doing stuff. I was out with a young developer who asked what’s the difference between an architect and a developer. My answer was “An architect is an experienced developer who cares about the requirements phase of the project.” And that’s the case. I care about the requirements. I’ll investigate until I get a grasp of the problem. Then I’ll start doing stuff in that direction. I’m normally wrong in my approach the first several times. However, as I get more experience, I have gotten better about being less wrong about my direction even in those early phases. The trick is to quickly realize that I’ve made a mistake and fix it. I don’t try to make mistakes, however I’m not scared to make them.
The biggest mistake though, as I’m learning from my previous mistakes, is to solve the wrong problem. It doesn’t matter how correct your solution is if it’s the wrong problem. This goes from macro to micro.
At the macro level, I’ve met a ton of startups who are solving the wrong problem. Normally this means that they are solving a problem that their users have but not solving a problem that their potential customers have. Noodle on that a bit… 🙂
On a micro level, customers always tell me that X is not responsive enough or something very generic and sweeping like that. Rather than digging into the speed testing and all that, I ask them what they mean and start unpacking “responsive” means to them specifically. Often it turns out that you and your customer have very different definitions of responsive. Once you figure out what responsive means, anything that you do to solve the responsiveness issue has a much higher probability of being a step in the right direction.
Summing up, spend the time to ask that next question that will get you closer to solving the right problem.
At PHP Tek 2014, I saw a set of talks organized by a guy named Ed Finkler. This included a talk by Greg Baugues and Paddy Foran. They really opened up and talked about their own mental health issues including anxiety, depression and more. There was not a dry eye in the house. I’m not going to tell their story. That’s their to share. What I am going to share is how it affected me and my story.
Reason I’m blogging about this now is that I recently had a chance to interview Ed and post that to Code to Live.
I’ve always joked about having ADHD but it was always just a joke. My wife, Phoebe, was talking to someone (I don’t remember who) and they recommended that I read a book called Delivered from Distraction. 
Shortly after this I went to a therapist who specializes in ADHD. He worked with a phycologist and between the two, I was officially diagnosed with ADHD in 2008. I was prescribed with Adderall. The good news is that I knew what that was because I had read about it and the upsides and the side affects. There are two basic types of ADHD meds, anti-depressants and stimulants. They work very differently and sometimes one works better for one person than the other. If you suffer from ADHD, you should work with your mental health professional(s) to figure out what’s going to work for you.
This happened in 2008 but the reality is that I didn’t talk to people other than good friends until 2014 because I was ashamed about it. Ed, Greg and Paddy showed me that we need to talk about mental illness and take away the stigmas. That’s the only way that we can actually create a supportive and healthy environment. The worst thing that we can do is try to suffer in silence and not seek help.
If you want to learn more, if you’re suffering or are not sure if you’re suffering a mental health issue, there are resources up on Ed’s site at http://osmihelp.org.
I recently got back from an amazing trip to Costa Rica. It was absolutely amazing and has changed me (I hope) forever and for the better. Unfortunately it wasn’t 31 days, but rather it was only 8 days. However I’m taking on a writing challenge of writing something every single day for 31 days straight. I decided to write about the change in my life…
¡Pura Vida! is the Costa Rican way of life. Translated it’s “pure life” which sounds pretty simple but in practice it goes much deeper. Most of the time folks look at it as just like a “hang loose” or something like that. But it goes a lot deeper than that.
It started in a 1956 film from Mexico called Pura Vida in which the main character said the catch phrase all the time as an expression of unbridled enthusiasm. The movie was a hit and the phrase started spreading. It was slow but by the 1970s, it was all over Costa Rica. It was even officially recognized in dictionaries in the 90s.
The phrase really means that life is wonderful, that there is always someone who is less fortunate that you and we are all in this together. This pervasive outlook on life is outstanding and something that more of us need to adopt.
As I looked around Costa Rica, I saw some real poverty but everywhere I looked I saw amazing generosity, joy and community. Jeremy Sublet and I were driving through a small town and stopped for lunch. The town obviously didn’t have any money and everywhere I looked I saw joy and love whether it was couples walking in the park or having lunch together or kids playing in the streets. At the end lunch, we were headed back to the car when one of the guys at the bar held up his beer to us and I heard that phrase for the first time – “¡Pura Vida!”.
At the time I didn’t understand what it meant. But I laughed and said “¡Pura Vida!”.
Now that I understand more about it, I look at my life and think about all of the times when I’m wallowing in self pity. Yes, I have hardships in my life. But there are so many people who have so many more real troubles in their life.
Over the next 31 days, I’ll be writing about ¡Pura Vida! and how I’m going to be trying to incorporate it into my life.
Justin Bronder in a boat at Rio Clara
The first time that I met Justin Bronder, he was just back from a trip that he acted like was the trip of a lifetime. He showed me amazing pictures of obscure birds and crazy little monkeys. Actually, the first picture that I saw was of a monkey’s behind as it mooned the camera. I thought he was nuts, that he was was awesome and that we’d be friends all at the same time. Turns out I was right on all accounts.
Fast forward a year and I know for a fact that Justin has got one of the biggest hearts that I know. And amazingly, he headed back to Costa Rica and invited me to come with him. Something in Costa Rica had touched him and he wanted to share that with more people.
The restaurant at Copa de Arbol at night.
While I was excited to go, I really didn’t know what to expect. Justin had talked about the both the jungle and 5 star resort and pointed me at the hotel web site – http://www.copadearbol.com. When I looked at the web site, I saw that it was both – a 5 star resort in the middle of the jungle. There were some other things that were fun. The resort is right on the edge of the Corcovada National Part which is a green zone. There’s no roads to the property so everything is water taxi or hiking. That made me even more excited.
I talked to my wife and got permission to go.
Honestly though, I didn’t spend enough time researching Costa Rica. That was a failing on my part.But I didn’t look at the amazing country that I was about to go to other than seeing it’s in Central America. I spent a little time reviewing my pathetic Spanish. “Gracias”, “Hola”, “Adios”, “Caliente”, “Frío”, “Uno, “Dos”, “Tres”… I spent some time looking at my camera gear, picking up waterproof backpacks (I picked up an awesome one – Phantom Aquatics Walrus 25 Premium Waterproof Backpack Dry Bag) and the like.
It was all completely selfish but the good news is that despite this failing, I was ready to start packing for the trip.