Category: Posts

2023-04-05

Footnotes and asides are a warning

Overuse of footnotes, commas, em dashes, and parentheses suggest your writing may be unclear. Keeping sentences focused helps your reader.

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2023-03-29

Use a decision log to record context

A decision log is a record that you leave for the future. It shares the context to save time when revisiting a past decision.

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2023-03-22

Words mean things

Choose your words carefully. You want people to discuss the facts, not the wording.

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2023-02-22

What you’re measuring is different from how you measure it

Start with understanding the “why?” behind what you’re trying to measure. Then figure out the measurements, knowing they’ll be imperfect.

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2023-02-08

Write standard operating procedures

When you document how to execute a process, that ensures you’ll do it right the next time. This helps your future self and your successors.

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2023-01-25

Perception matters — make people feel heard

Making someone feel heard doesn’t mean doing whatever they want; it means they feel like you’ve made a good faith effort to understand them.

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2023-01-12

Why does this meeting exist?

If you can’t come up with a sentence or two that says why you scheduled the meeting, you should consider what that implies.

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2023-01-04

How open source projects collaborate

The idea of helping your competitors might be hard to accept, but when we work together, we all do better.

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2022-12-07

Manage your project deadlines

Deadlines are easy to set and hard to meet. So how do you set deadlines that aren’t hard to meet? It’s not hard!

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2022-11-30

Should you require a criterion when nominating a release-blocking bug?

The people discovering — and thus nominating — blocker candidates may not be intimately familiar with your project’s processes.

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