Help Me, Help Me: My Experiment Taking Self-Help Seriously

Here’s the thing about self-help books: They contain wisdom, but something about them makes my eyes roll. As I read, I often agree with their thesis, but my inner soundtrack of “yes, but”s disputes the advice. I am so adept at contradicting the advice of self-help books that I’ve become immune to their teachings. Then […]

Managing Your Career in Tech – Part 2: Leverage OKRs for Personal Growth

Yesterday, I outlined some ways to take ownership of finding meaning at work. But taking ownership of your own career and aligning your personal sense of purpose with your purpose at work isn’t enough to find success. You also need to execute consistently in areas that make this alignment real. To do this, you need […]

Managing Your Career in Tech – Part 1: Make Work Matter

It’s an amazing time to work in technology. There is so much opportunity available to talented, driven people. Any of us can rise to the top of our chosen profession. But where we go and how far we rise is increasingly up to us. How will you manage your career in technology? This is a […]

Dungeon Master Skills You Can Bring to Work #6 – Teamwork

Prestidigitation is a low-level spell in Dungeons & Dragons that allows the caster to perform a subset of minor effects, such as lighting a single candle or cleaning a square foot of a piece of clothing. It’s a spell that most magic-casting classes can learn, but it has few benefits in battle. One of my […]

Self-Hosting Your Own Cloud – Part 4: Movies and Music Using Emby

Services like YouTube, Netflix, Spotify, and other streaming services are convenient, and I still use some of them. However, the content they offer changes frequently, with some things becoming unavailable due to changes in licensing, or varying depending on which country you are in. When you buy your content free of digital rights management (DRM), […]

How Teaching Board Games Makes Me a Better Consultant

For the past two years, I’ve attended a little-known convention called Gen Con. Okay, depending on who you ask, it might not be that little-known. It draws over 60,000 unique attendees (over 200k visits throughout four days). Besides spending time enjoying everything at the convention—from visiting exhibitor booths to making purchases, trying out new games, […]

Dungeon Master Skills You Can Bring to Work #5 – Adaptation

Things don’t always go the way you expect them to go. Sometimes, you have to improvise. You roll with new information and new events as they unfold. Dungeons & Dragons actively invites uncertainty with the randomized dice-based system. Because of this, I know that it’s impossible to plan everything. Instead, I have to rely on […]

Four Characteristics of a Good Short Talk

I recently had to give a short talk for a conference. All the talks at this conference were about 20 minutes long, and it got me thinking about what I like about short presentations.

Dungeon Master Skills You Can Bring to Work #4 – Communication

Dungeons & Dragons is a game that is almost entirely based in oral storytelling. From my players explaining what they want to do in a battle to my role as the Dungeon Master (DM) describing the nefarious villain, words are the foundation of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. That’s why communication is key. We need […]

Who Takes High School Computer Science?

I didn’t take computer science in high school. Neither did any of my friends who are women. I was fortunate enough to go to a school district that offered Advanced Placement Computer Science (AP CS). I’m also young enough to remember that I chose to take psychology instead. That decision doesn’t make any sense. I […]

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