Posts 11–15 of 52

How status quo bias makes it hard for us to embrace change, personally and at work

When we are faced with change, most of us react with skepticism, hesitancy, reluctance, and maybe even downright hostility. This may seem natural, but why do we react this way? The reason is that we are humans. We have emotions and biases. In this case, there are 3 cognitive biases that come together Voltron-style to create a default bias towards the status quo. But understanding them can help us overcome them.

There's no manual for how to be a software engineering manager. But these will help.

I definitely didn’t know what the heck I was doing when I first became a manager way back in 2004. I was just the least bad person to fill a needed role. But over almost 2 decades of managing technical teams, I have read a lot and learned a lot from great managers around me. I’ve come to believe that there are a dozen+ resources that hit all the key points on how to be a great manager. I think these form the basis of a learning track for engineering management. I've listed them below, divided based on different stages of maturity.

CapitalOne's checking account for teens has a critical flaw

The CapitalOne MONEY teen checking account seems like a good way to give your teens their own bank account while still maintaining oversight of what they're buying and how much money they have. Unfortunately, for 2-parent families, it has a critical flaw.

How to Create a Free, Private Knowledge Base

You can easily create your own, free, private knowledge base site with minimal effort. Here's how it works - you will capture your knowlede base notes in Markdown files, which get turned into a searchable website by Docusaurus, and then are published privately on the web via Gitlab pages. Then you can access and search them from anywhere.

How to Run Emby in the Cloud

I’ve been running Emby locally within our network on an old mini-pc because I’ve found it’s the easiest and most user-friendly way to share media within a family. However, when you have it inside your network, it’s harder to access from your phone and you can’t hook it up to Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant.

I wanted to try hosting it externally to see if it would simplify things, but I couldn’t find a good resouce on how to do this. I eventually got it working and figured I’d share how to do it in case it helps others.