"Son, please come here, I need to talk to you." "Sure Mom, what's up?" "Well, as you know, around this time of year we do our annual performance reviews" "Performance reviews? Are you kidding me?" "No son, we take this very… Continue Reading 'A Familiar Performance Review'
If you had a warning label, what would it say? "Caution: Extreme Sarcasm. Handle with levity." That's probably what mine would say. How about yours? This is the type of question asked every week during "Team Hugs" at Four Kitchens. Team Hugs is the name of… Continue Reading 'How Inquisitive Questions Spur Kinship at Work'
While the main Mocha.js website provides useful information, it's fairly verbose (that's really a good thing). Here are several tips to help newcomers understand some of the main features of Mocha. Running commands before and after tests (i.e. Hooks) Take advantage of Mocha's before, beforeEach, after and afterEach… Continue Reading 'Mocha Usage Tips'
My first interest in automated testing came in the form of unit tests. With that, I learned about assertions, test suites, promises, mocks and a plethora of other terminology. This knowledge helped when setting up WebdriverIO, a functional test utility (which I really love by the way), with Mocha, a… Continue Reading 'Take a Drive with WebdriverIO and Mocha'
Micro-manager. A term that will bring dread to any heart that's been through the turmoil of working for one. Even those who have never worked directly for a micro-manager can sympathize with the the atrocities committed by them. Who didn't laugh when President Business commanded "Send in a micro-manager!… Continue Reading 'The Manager Matrix'
Over the past few years, I've developed a habit of reading books on management and leadership. These books have transformed who I am and where my career goals lie. As I reflect on the words written, three books stick out to me as especially insightful. While there are many great… Continue Reading '3 Books to Transform your Leadership'
The New York Times had a quiz a while back with a simple task: figure out the mathematical rule behind a sequence of numbers. As a reader, you would enter your own numbers and see if they pass or fail your guess at the rule. In my mind, this is… Continue Reading 'Stop lying to yourself when testing'
I just finished reading Seth Godin's Tribes and wanted to get a quick review of it out because I know I won't do it if I wait. I think this was the perfect book for me to read at this point in my life. I recently switched jobs after having… Continue Reading 'Tribes: A quick review'
One of the key metrics to employee engagement is how they feel their day-to-day work relates to a shared vision. It's tempting to think that this simply means being more communicative about the company goals (which were often defined by a group of managers outside of the team). However, there's… Continue Reading 'Share your Paintbrush, Share your Vision'
Slack. It's amazingly wonderful; except when it's not. I've been a huge proponent of using communication tools like Slack over in-person meetings for a long time. To me, you can be be so much more productive holding a discussion over chat than you would be in a meeting. Except when… Continue Reading 'The Tricky Thing about Asynchronous Communication'
I'm good at visualizing success. It just comes naturally. I see it, me standing on a stage, ending my last sentence of a 50 minute talk with the perfect closing thought. The crowd has a moment of stunned silence, then erupts in to applause. Afterwards people are lined up waiting… Continue Reading 'Avoid failure by visualizing it'