I'll join the chorus of saying that falling down at age 40 means my skinned knee is still healing three weeks later. I'm very risk tolerant, but it's striking how the tides have turned on healing.
This seems like a situation where the adage "praise in public, criticize in private" would have helped.
It's important to have hard conversations about a team's ability - if for no other reason than expectation setting - but maybe in front of the entire team is not the right place.
This analogy seems like a stretch. An artist that has paint dripping from their strokes strikes me as sloppy. Is this analogy really tied to a single specific type of painting?
I really enjoyed this satire from reddit a few years back:
> I would prefer them to have no business or coding skills of any kind, so they'll be free to express their unbridled, uncorrupted creativity. I would also like massive underestimates of the worked required to implement their idea and no concept whatsoever of the time it take to fulfill their ambitions. I would like for their creativity to be unencumbered by concepts like "reality" and whatnot.
> whether that leader is deemed to be in the first case or the second case will be a matter of opinion mostly.
Respectfully, I disagree. One scenario results in a plan, one doesn't, and that's a core distinction between the two scenarios. Whether it's a good plan or not is a subject of opinion, but its presence or absence is not.
> you’ll be internally persecuted for saying so, no matter how diplomatically.
That's not true in my experience. It sounds like you've worked in some pretty rough places!
The 11th hour change was just one example of causing chaos provided by a leader, but for the sake of argument, let's focus on it. Let's imagine a hypothetical situation where a product does ship next week, there are some pretty critical flaws, and we're doing some final review with leadership. I think we can still raise red flags and follow the author's advice. The author of this article is suggesting there's a good way and a bad way to handle this.
Bad way: "Back to the drawing board, we can't ship, this is garbage."
Good way: "I see some serious errors here, let's outline them and make a plan to address these specifically."
I really like article's litmus test because of this - "Any room that you enter should have more certainty and a firmer plan by the time that you leave it." That's not suggesting that there can't be a change of plan.
Reading this article got me wistful for my Peek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peek_(mobile_Internet_device). You can do so much with email (todo lists, news, etc) and the device just felt good. It had a physical keyboard (!) and a real scroll wheel on the side.
Peek was also created by a small company but doesn't have the community support that the Chumby or Pebble has now. Maybe that's a product of being connected only to a cellular network?
Wikipedia, it's essentially a modern day library, and amongst internet resources, it might have had the biggest impact in my life. It's always been there for me to look up a concept, settle a bet, or to explore when I'm bored.
The National Coalition for Sexual Freedom [0], because it's bizarre what is still illegal in the United States between consenting adults.
But that's almost a harder decision - you can certainly buy a bland colored skin to put stickers on, but if you're going to the effort of skinning your laptop, why not pick an interesting skin?
Dropbox has treated me well. I think it hits all the boxes you're asking for. The app automatically backs up my photos from my phone, but because it's not photo specific, I'm able to backup all my other files (music, documents). I've also not hit a video limit.
Indeed! CirclMastr (someone who leveled up to 99 in the very first portion of Final Fantasy VII over the course of 500 hours) puts it even better:
> It is because nothing has meaning unto itself that we are free to create meaning, to make metaphor, and in doing so reflect on ourselves and our world.
I love that Kliff gives a shout out to Kaiser Health News’ Bill-of-the-Month feature (https://khn.org/news/tag/bill-of-the-month/), which is a really similar project. I wonder if these two projects were independently inspired? Either way, totally a good thing to get more public visibility into medical billing.
Ditto! pannenkoek2012 is operating at a level that every hacker should aspire to. Piecing together that solution for that star in 0.5 A presses is a thing of beauty.