I gave a talk at Ignite Boulder 26 — The subject of my talk was the stigma of suicide and of mental health — This was my first time speaking in front of 1400 people, much less about suicide. Here is a video of the talk: I’ve attached a transcript of my talk below: In 2010, I met my family met me for lunch in Manhattan. 4 of them visited but actually only *3* of them were Read the article…
I’m really excited about the launch of Atomic Slack — Atomic Slack is an add-on to Slack that builds features for communities of interest (as opposed to teams at work). Their first feature is a daily digest of the most important messages on a slack team. I’m definitely going to use this on the Data Scientists Slack Team. Click here to check it out. Read the article >>
A job or two ago, I was under pressure to hire up a team of engineers, but the CEO wouldn’t let me use a recruiter. While there was some short term pain associated with that directive, it was the best move in the long term. Once I learned to recruit on my own, I found better candidates and I found plenty of them. My CEO was right. He made me break my recruiter-habit and I’ll never look back. Recruiters…
One of my first projects at my new gig was to set up streaming replication on Postgres 9.4 database server. Replication is a handy way of mirroring data stored in postgres across several servers. It’s useful for scaling reads to a database cluster (in our case, a driving force for the change was to make sure our nightly backups were not running from the master server). The first thing to do is Read the article >>
I am pleased to be joining Occipital this summer as an engineer on their web team. I have a long history of friendship with the co-founders of Occipital — Vikas Reddy and Jeff Powers. They went through Techstars in 2008 the same time as Ignighter — the team I with which I went through Techstars. Occipital makes (among other things) the Structure Sensor — a device that allows iPhones and Read the article >>
Following the success of the Data Science Slack Team, I am working on another experiment to bring engineers in the front-range software community together: ColoradoEngineers.com is a, free, private slack team that we will use to Kick around startup ideas. Debate the merits of different tools. Receive mentorship from other engineers. Share job and event information. There are only Read the article >>
Some selected photos from Boulder Startup Week 2015. Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 See More @ Flickr Read the article >>
I’ve noticed a meeting anti-pattern and I need to get it off my chest! It’s when a meeting chair hasn’t set their meeting up for success. Thoroughly preparing for a meeting conveys respect for a teammates time. Here are some maxims that I’ve adapted to my own flavor of meeting logistics: 1. The best meeting is no meeting If you can resolve the question via email or via a 10 minute phone Read the article >>
This is the 5th in series of posts on datawarehousing. To see the entire post list, click here. The Dimensional Design Process The four key decisions that are made when designing a Kimball-style dimensional star schema are as follows: Identify the Business Process Identify the Grain Identify the Dimensions Identify the Facts When embarking upon the design process, your final deliverable Read the article >>
I’ve never seen someone rise in an organization as fast as when they become an expert in something important to that organization. There something organic about leadership that occurs because an engineer is the subject-matter expert in a piece of scope that the rest of the organization is betting on strategically. I’ve seen engineers be most successful at this when It’s a subject they Read the article >>