Present Perfect

"With everyone and their dog shifting to containers, and away from virtual machines (VMs), we realized that running vendor-provided software on VMs at Google was slowing us down. So we moved."

Bikram co-authored this blog post last year about DASInfra's experience moving workloads from Corp to Anthos. The group I run at work is going down a similar path by migrating VMs to Anthos on bare metal for on-prem.

Taken from The Playlist - a curated perspective on the intersection of form and content (subscribe, discuss)

"With everyone and their dog shifting to containers, and away from virtual machines (VMs), we realized that running vendor-provided software on VMs at Google was slowing us down. So we moved."...

"Without a next action, there remains a potentially infinite gap between current reality and what you need to do."

David Allen's Getting Things Done is the non-fiction book I've reread the most in my life. I reread it every couple of years and still pick up on new ideas that I missed before, or parts that resonate better now and I'm excited to implement. Before Google, I used to give this book to new employees as a welcome gift.

The book got an update in 2015, and I haven't read the new version yet, so I'm planning an extended GTD book club at work in Q2, spreading the book out over multiple sessions. (In fact, I did just that for the young adult version of the book with my 16 year old godson back home in Belgium) If you've run a GTD book club, drop me a line!

Find out more at Getting Things Done® - David Allen's GTD® Methodology

"Too many meetings end with a vague feeling among the players that something ought to happen, and the hope that it’s not their personal job to make it so. [...] ask “So what’s the next action on this?” at the end of each discussion point in your next staff meeting"

Taken from The Playlist - a curated perspective on the intersection of form and content (subscribe, discuss)

"Without a next action, there remains a potentially infinite gap between current reality and what you need to do." David Allen's Getting Things Done is the non-fiction book I've reread...

"Most women fight wars on two fronts, one for whatever the putative topic is and one simply for the right to speak, to have ideas, to be acknowledged to be in possession of facts and truths, to have value, to be a human being."

In honor of International Women's Day 2022 (this past March 8th), some quotes from the 2008 article that inspired the term "mansplaining": to comment on or explain something to a woman in a condescending, overconfident, and often inaccurate or oversimplified manner.

I've certainly been (and probably still am) guilty of this behavior, and this is a standing invitation to let me know when I'm doing it to you.

Read the original article with a new introduction at Men Explain Things to Me – Guernica

"None was more astonishing than the one from the Indianapolis man who wrote in to tell me that he had “never personally or professionally shortchanged a woman” and went on to berate me for not hanging out with “more regular guys or at least do a little homework first,” gave me some advice about how to run my life, and then commented on my “feelings of inferiority.” He thought that being patronized was an experience a woman chooses to, or could choose not to have–and so the fault was all mine. Life is short; I didn’t write back."

Taken from The Playlist - a curated perspective on the intersection of form and content (subscribe, discuss)

"Most women fight wars on two fronts, one for whatever the putative topic is and one simply for the right to speak, to have ideas, to be acknowledged to be...

In the ever more vertical company that Google is becoming, it is even more important to collaborate on some of your communication - more people want to contribute to the message and get it right, and more thought needs to be given to the ever wider audience you're sending mails to.

A while back I copied over AppScript code from an internal Google project to send meeting notes to make a different tool which makes it easy to go from Google Docs draft to a mail in GMail and avoid embarrassing copy/paste errors. I'm happy to be able to retire that little side project in favor of a recently released built-in feature of Google Docs: Draft emails from Google Docs - Docs Editors Help

Taken from The Playlist - a curated perspective on the intersection of form and content (subscribe, discuss)

In the ever more vertical company that Google is becoming, it is even more important to collaborate on some of your communication - more people want to contribute to the...