Roger Bikes

Category: Off the Bike

  • Mourning Loss of a Team Member as a Remote Team

    Damn. This is a rough reality of remote work. We need to be checking in on each other not just for deadlines but because we give a shit about each other. I struggle with wanting meetings to be super efficient so that I can get back to work, and spending some pre meeting time with a bit of friendly conversation.

    If we don’t keep some humanity in our work how can we expect there to be any in our products?

    “In person, comforting each other in times of loss is something we all have experience with. Doing it with an all remote team across 5 timezones where we’ve never met each other is more challenging. This is my story about losing Pete.”
    — Read on www.sofuckingagile.com/blog/mourning-loss-as-a-remote-team

  • Turns out: Email not dead

    Telegram’s founder and CEO has responded to the Brazilian Supreme Court’s order to suspend the app in the country… by blaming email for the company’s failure to respond to orders.
    — Read on www.theverge.com/2022/3/18/22985737/telegram-brazil-supreme-court-ban-email-address-statement-durov

    It seems strange to ask a vendor or government to change an email to use, and not leave the old address as a redirect to the new one. Also it sounds like the old email was still collecting emails anyway so why did they even ask the Brazilian government to change emails? Bizarre and ouch.

  • Word of the day: Philomath

    I took one of those personality tests today as I needed to write about myself. It turns out that I’m bad about writing about myself so this gave me some filler content to use.

    Anyway…

    In the results I was identified as a philomath which is a word I had never seen before. The definition is a person who enjoys studying and learning. Not necessarily someone who is greatly knowledgeable in a lot of things which is known as a polymath. They are similar to philosopher but instead of wisdom a philomath focuses on the process of learning.

    I’d say that I do enjoy learning new things, to a point. Eventually my curiosity fades and I go ride my bike or something. Apparently it’s not attention deficit disorder it’s philomathery.

    Philomath – Wikipedia
    — Read on en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philomath

  • Patience is practice

    Patience is practice

    I’ve been struggling to wake up and motivate for my workout this week. It’s partially that I’m not sleeping well but also that I’m overthinking things. I’m sure this is due to moving into my new position at work.

    Before I got out of bed this morning I committed my worst sin and checked my phone. I was scrolling Hacker News and saw a story about how to prepare for a recession. Its a great post though and I am glad I read it and then the comments in Hacker News.

    Basically the advice is that, if you are investing in a pragmatic long term method, a recession is just a bump in the road. This is great advice and something I have been practicing for about ten years now. If you have questions I recommend starting here with the Bogleheads.

    What is insightful for me was the HackerNews comments and specifically the top voted one when I looked. Comments on an internet forum are about the lowest form of intelligence I have seen. Youtube takes the cake here but even an ‘enlightened’ site like HN has pretty bad commentary. This one is a great example as well. They even admit to having read the entire article but still miss the point.

    The point of investing, for me and many others at least, is to let some of my money accrue in a long term approach so that at some point I can stop working on a daily basis. This means that I am not trying to time the market or guess the future. Instead I trust that the economy will continue to grow steadily as it has for the last 100+ years. If that does not happen then it probably means money is worthless and we are either living in caves or have moved into another type of arrangement that doesn’t involve money.

    What does that have to do with patience and me not sleeping well or working out? Well kinda everything. If I am not patient with investing and try to time the market history shows that I will probably lose a lot of money. If I am not patient with work and allow things outside of my control to happen I will annoy my coworkers and not do a great job. Finally if I am not patient with my workouts and take the time to do them then I will not improve my overall health.

    All of these activities are a practice of some type and doing them well requires patience.

  • Eleven

    Eleven

    Yesterday was the eleventh anniversary of our wedding on 3/11/11. Last year we went on a week long bike ride through southeastern Arizona. This year we took a long weekend and are gonna get four days of skiing and snowboarding in at Crested Butte ski resort.

    All smiles all day
    Crested buttes got the views.

    Neither of us have visited Crested Butte in the winter and so far it’s been very impressive. Nice runs. Short lift lines. Amazing views. The small town has great food options too.

  • 100 days and more

    Today marks 100 days since Dec 1st when we started an internal blogging challenge at Kinsta. I missed a few days but overall wrote a lot of posts over the last 100 days. While I didn’t get a perfect score I feel like it was a successful challenge nonetheless.

    I got to know a lot more about my coworkers who participated. We shared a lot about ourselves that I don’t know how else we would have known about. As a remote company we don’t have the random get togethers that happen when leaving the office at the end of the day. There are random water cooler discussions in Slack but those are generally surface level interactions.

    Now that the challenge to write everyday is over I feel some relief. I want to keep blogging about various things and I hope to continue to do so. There are so many things to write about that deciding what to write can be the biggest challenge.

    The 100 days of blogging challenge 2021/2022 is dead, long live the blogging challenge!

  • The Flying Enzo!

    The Flying Enzo!

    This is my boy Enzo. He is maybe 9 years old but is still the same dog we got from the foster all those years ago. If you cannot tell he loves running in the snow.

    Liftoff
    Airborne
    Hover
    Dazeys trying for liftoff.
  • Night snow blowin

    Night snow blowin

    It’s been snowing here the last couple of days. Today we woke up to a few inches of new snow so I had to get the snow blower repaired. I broke the impeller which is the piece that throws the snow into the chute and blows it off your driveway.

    It is also the piece that is in the middle of the entire assembly. To replace it you pretty much have to completely disassemble the blower part of the snow blower. At first this seemed like a monumental task. Then I googled and found this excellent tutorial:

    Perfect tutorial for taking your snow blower completely apart.
    Impeller replaced and reinstalled into the main part thingy.
    Blower connected back to main body and engine.
    It’s got headlights for those dusk jobs.

  • Tech Companies Are Reopening Their Offices, but Tech Work Has Changed Forever – WSJ

    “We’re moving into a world now where leaders have to be so aware of every employee individually, what they need and how they work best,” Ms. Katsoudas said. “So there isn’t a one-size-fits-all with work.”
    — Read on www.wsj.com/articles/tech-companies-reopen-their-offices-facebook-google-11646365155

    Good article that covers some practical aspects of remote work. I cannot imagine ever working in an office again. I don’t see the benefit. In person meetings a couple of times a year? Sure but it’s gotta be compelling and organized to the gills.

  • Scripting News: Evolution in software

    Scripting News: Evolution in software
    — Read on scripting.com/2022/03/04/134033.html

    Interesting thoughts on why we have a major disconnect in software tools for the web. When the web took off in the 90’s it was based on Unix tools since that’s where all the networking came from to make the web and internet work.

    Since then we’ve been trying to shoehorn GUI into networking. We’ve got things like cPanel which try to let you do Networking things from a user friendly interface. The problem is that it just confuses things. You are much better off learning the command line tools which are what the devs use to build everything.

    The problem with the command line is that it’s not what we have been taught to use for computing. The Mac and Windows gave us tools that mimic the real world. Directories are called folders. We work in windows. These add complexity to already complex systems and allow users to remain ignorant and lazy.

    Evolution doesn’t go backwards. Learn the command line.