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Essayons — Cultivating an Expeditionary Mindset for Problem Solving

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An expeditionary mindset is a frame of thinking I attribute to my time as an Army Combat Engineer — a kind of problem-solving posture shared amongst light infantry units that says: when you’re in a jam, you can’t wait for the cavalry to arrive and save the day. You are the cavalry. Essayons is the Combat Engineer regimental motto, and is taken from the French verb essayer. It literally means… Let us try.

The Parable of the 2x4s

Steve was a super likable guy who recently got out of the Navy, so naturally, had a ton of excellent drinking stories involving far-off ports of call and exotic locales in the south Pacific. While he wasn’t super skilled when it came to the trades, Steve could handle a saw and a t-square, so he worked as a kind of floater—going back and forth from area to area where there was need for roughing in.

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Chicago & the Sandwich Deliveryman Hypothesis

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I lived in Chicago for 14 years, and during that time, before going into tech, worked as a grocery bagger, a cashier, a caddy, a lifeguard, an elevator operator, a landscaper, a knife salesman, an adult literacy advocate, a portrait framer, a shirt steamer, a forklift driver, and an usher at Soldier Field. Eleven of those years were spent working in the restaurant business—as a line cook, dishwasher, busboy, waiter, barback, bartender, and shithouse sommelier. I learned how to size people up based on their accents, cuff links, shoes, conversation topics, and the kind and quality of bullshit coming out of their mouths. The time I spent in Chicago, working these weird jobs makes me (I think) a crackerjack spotter of a whole range of put-ons, bullshit, ass-puffery, and weasel wording.

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Being Very Very computer — How Tech Workers’ Attention Spans Wander

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The internet is really good at helping you waste time – often during the pursuit of a work-related goal. Something like that happened to me this evening while I was hunting down the answer to Proxy server & NET:ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID . By 7:45, I found myself reading the origins of Care Bear tummy symbols. This post is a recap of my findings…

One Useless Fact: An Origin Story

During covid lockdown – when my engineering teammates were confined to their homes, just trying to deal with long stretches of boredom and depression – the preambulatory chitchat of agile standups took on greater importance. So I took it upon myself to always have a few well-researched miscellany in my back pocket. When I left my job, I decided to continue sharing useless facts with my teammates.

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Illusions of Explanatory Depth (IOED)

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In 1993, everyone seemed to know of a pool cleaner who could also build a web site. That’s no longer the case. Now, there are too many sub-disciplines within software engineering for a single person to know how to design, build, test, and deploy a secure application from scratch. Most software engineers know this, but some are convinced they know more than they do – a completely normal phoneomenon known as the illusion of explanatory depth.