I’ve spent a significant portion of my career working in companies that are at least partially remote/distributed. One of them was globally distributed, with no central headquarters at all. Everyone worked from their homes. When I founded VividCortex, I wanted to blend the best of both worlds, and to my credit, some of what I did has been an improvement. There are still downsides, though, and in this post I want explore how distributed teams can address a basic human need: seeing each other in-person.

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I wrote previously about configuring Chrome for privacy and convenience, to ensure that cookies and history don’t accumulate in the browser. I recently decided to switch from Chrome to Firefox. Here’s how I’ve configured it to behave in a similar fashion, which I believe helps protect my privacy.

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For various reasons, I’ve become interested in analytical databases. These are traditionally called OLAP (online analytics processing) and are designed to extract insights from very large datasets, often with expectations of long response times (hours). More recently, though, various databases capable of running relatively interactive queries over large datasets have emerged. This post is more-or-less a list of analytic databases, with somewhat of a taxonomy added.

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I’ve developed a Hugo theme for this blog, and now I’ve published it for you to use too. It offers a fast and responsive layout, beautiful design, built-in search, JavaScript presentations, LaTeX equation typesetting, social and SEO optimizations, and much more. Many of the theme’s features are pretty unique—for example, the extensions to give you control over formatting images, which I wrote about here, are built-in natively.

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The first time I tried to monitor a database, I was overwhelmed. There were hundreds of variables to monitor, and there were lots of Nagios check scripts that had dozens of checks. I wasn’t sure what alerts I should set up, so I set up too many and got a bunch of noise as a result. A couple of years later, I returned to that company and found all those alerts still in place, still spamming everyone—but they’d just filtered every alert to the trash.

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You’ve probably heard a lot of repetitive advice about how to make presentations effective. Number of slides, number of bullet points per slide, font size, all that stuff. My advice is a little different: it’s the things I’ve learned that nobody ever taught me.

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This post is a collection of some things I’ve done to help me create and maintain complicated spreadsheets. Spreadsheets can be enormously powerful, and it’s probably not an exaggeration to say the world runs on spreadsheets. But with that power comes complexity, and it’s pretty hard to maintain a complicated spreadsheet. Errors and inconsistencies can creep in quickly and can be really hard to find.

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Do you use spreadsheets to organize and categorize lists of things? I do, and using conditional formatting rules helps me stay efficient and accurate. This saves me time and makes me more productive. Here’s how I do it in Google spreadsheets.

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My father used to keep a note in the pocket of his blue work shirt, with two columns: one of plus signs, one of minuses. He used the columns to score my behavior and determine whether I had earned privileges and rewards. This did not have the intended effect. Reflecting on how I responded to and resisted this parenting technique has helped me understand myself and others in new ways.

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Markdown is a convenient HTML-focused shorthand syntax for formatting content such as documentation and blog articles, but it lacks basic features for image formatting, such as alignment and sizing. This post presents a variety of ways to format images with Markdown, from brute force to proprietary syntax extensions, unwise hacks, and everything in between.

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I travel frequently, and I’ve found gear that helps make it easier and more fun for me. A lot of it is unusual stuff I wished for offhandedly in a moment where something wasn’t ideal. I made a note, looked it up later, and discovered that if you can dream it, someone’s selling it on Amazon. Here’s how I travel light and with everything I need for all the circumstances that come up.

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Have you ever faced a tough decision that had you swinging back and forth, vacillating between “let’s do it” and “I’m afraid” until you feel unable to move forward at all? I have. And in the midst of one such watershed moment, my wonderful wife gave me a simple tool. It broke my impasse and helped me see the obvious truth that’s been staring me in the face for months.

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Hugo is a fast, and very powerful, static site generator. I use it for my blog, as well as for fancier things like Markdown-based slideshows. I also use it for practically everything else I can, and every time I have to use a database-backed CMS I cringe and plot to rip it out. In this talk I’ll explain the basics of Hugo and how it works.

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I bought pairs of Bose QuietComfort 35 Series II and Sennheiser PXC-550 wireless noise cancelling headphones, and compared their performance. Both are good headphones, but the Bose is the clear winner in nearly every category. The Bose headphones offer significantly better comfort, ease of use, sound quality, and noise cancelling. And both are priced at $350, so the choice is easy.

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There’s always an endless list of things that all seem to need urgent attention. Customers, employees, board members, circumstances, and many other sources of pressure compete for space on your priority list. It took me a while to learn how to isolate the few things that deserve focus. Along the way I created a simple three-part prioritization framework that helps me a lot. Here it is.

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The first time Baron Schwartz tried to monitor a database, he was overwhelmed. There were hundreds of variables to monitor as well as lots of Nagios check scripts that each had dozens of checks. He wasn’t sure what alerts to set up, so he set up too many and got a bunch of noise as a result. A couple of years later, Baron returned to that company and found all those alerts still in place, still spamming everyone, but the company had just filtered every alert to the trash.

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