in|retrospect
Posts on page 32
The Politics of Management
Early on as an engineering manager, I made one of those rookie mistakes that seems obvious in retrospect, but in the moment was absolutely confounding. I had heard about another team needing some help with building a landing site for…
Five Years of VR Progress
A couple weeks ago, I received an OculusMeta Quest 2 VR headset, courtesy of the team at Plato with their first metaverse, virtual conference. The last time I messed around with VR was borrowing a friend's original, first-generation…
Bypassing Car Dealerships
Despite being overvalued as a meme stock, Tesla rightfully gets a lot of credit for jostling the car industry from its decades of gradual, incremental improvements and forcing more drastic step function changes. The most obvious is popularizing EVs and…
Rules of the Game
Playing to Win: Becoming the Champion is a book published back in 2006 on the mentality of competing and winning at the highest levels, framed around a trifecta of dorky games: Street Fighter, Chess, and Magic: the Gathering. Of course—…
Textbook Answers
One of the first interview questions I learned to give, as a new grad engineer a couple months out of college, was asking candidates how to detect a cycle in a linked list. I was taught that the "right…
The Intersection of Capability and Opportunity
If you take even a cursory glance at some of the blog posts that I've written here over the years, it's not a surprise that I've thought a fair amount about career ladders, particularly…
