My Team and I Built A Thing: Bluetooth + Swift = iPhone and iPad Payments!

TLDR: In-Person Payments for WooCommerce is Live A few years back, I drafted an unusual multi-year proposal for my small team at Automattic (the parent company of the open source DIY e-commerce platform known as WooCommerce ) -- that we would integrate hardware into our apps and systems so our online merchants could expand into …

SwiftUI and ViewModels

I came across this wonderful somewhat recent article on Clean Architecture and SwiftUI. Bookmarked. Thinking of printing it out even. In color even.

Expanded mmWave Support for iPhone 13 5G

Apple's September 14th event introduced the new iPhone 13 and what caught my attention was a brief mention by Tim Cook of "new bands and antennas" for the iPhone 12 successor. Looking more closely at the specs shows that the iPhone 13 adds support for 26 GHz mmWave (n258), which builds on the 28 GHz …

Don’t let the dangerously innocuous pandas maul your career

A firm warning about career blind spots from the Harvard Business Review couched in an amusing metaphor. Having assessed over 2,000 CEOs and over 18,000 C-suite leaders since 1995, we are struck by how often careers of talented executives stall or even derail because of seemingly trivial issues, many of which are utterly fixable. We …

Why Being Nice as a Leader Backfires

Valuable advice from the folks at Know Your Team: Ultimately, being nice as a leader is selfish. It doesn’t serve the team. It serves your ego. The team is looking to you to help them achieve a goal. And instead, you’re looking to have your decisions, actions, and yourself perceived as positive by them.Claire Lew

Manage People as Adults, Not Children

A great article from Entrepreneur on the downsides of having employees overly reliant on leaders for decision making.

Always Be Clarifying What Success Looks Like

By the end of the project, we had done more than we probably needed to. Honestly, _far_ more than we needed to. The requirement had come down to build "Service X", and the team rallied and pulled it off. But, in hindsight, I think we might have been able to deliver sooner - if I …

Thoughts on “The Manager’s Path” by Camille Fournier

It’s a quick read, focusing on some of the unique challenges of leadership at technology companies, and the progressive structure (e.g. team lead to manager to manager of managers) makes it easy to jump in at whether level you find yourself at on the ladder (and to see what you missed and should have picked …