Category: Ramblings

2011: the year that was

Bleh.

My nieces and nephews carry my father's coffin in July, 2011.

To say that 2011 was eventful is a bit of an understatement. I began the year in an apartment in San Antonio, Texas, a scant month or so after starting a new job with Rackspace Hosting. I traveled back and forth to Beaumont and Houston more times than I can count to be with my parents in the hospital and, ultimately, to attend their funerals. I lost my brother quite suddenly to an aortic aneurysm, and my sister-in-law to complications from surgery. And I lost two dear aunts on separate sides of the family.

Given all that, the fact that my alma mater won a bowl game and had its first Heisman trophy winner in the school’s history doesn’t seem like such a big deal. And, in the grand scheme of things, it certainly isn’t (but I will definitely lord it over everyone else for the next year).

I remain, as ever, full of hope, however. I suppose I have reason to complain, but life has its ups and downs and its our job to handle what we’re given.

All the best to you and yours in 2012, and may God give you the strength to handle whatever challenges come your way.

A good nights’ sleep

This is not my bed

I was diagnosed with presbyopia—”old eyes”—in 1997. At the time, the optometrist said that it’s not unusual, it’s just that I was getting it about 10 years before most people.

In 2002, I took myself to the doctor because of “crunching” noises in my knees that I could hear when I went up and down stairs. He referred me to a specialist, who told me that I had arthritis. It’s something most people will get eventually, he told me, it’s just that you’re getting it about 10 years early.

In 2006, we replaced the mattress that we had purchased when we moved to England in 1996. Both my wife and I had been having problems with pain—shoulder, back, etc., and we thought a new mattress might help. It did, mostly, but I still had a fair amount of back/hip pain and I lost a lot of mobility.

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Goodbye, Bro

We laid my brother Mark to rest this afternoon, in a small, remote cemetery near Dobbin, Texas, under a canopy of oaks a near the graves of assorted Civil War veterans and other notables. An honor guard performed a 21-gun salute; the trumpeter played taps, and the flag was presented to his widow along with the thanks of a grateful nation.

Mark was 54 years old when he collapsed at work and died of an aortic aneurysm; something the coroner called “natural causes.” There were several trained EMTs in his classroom, and they were unable to help. I’m told that, even if he had suffered the ruptured aneurysm on an operating table under the care of a talented cardiac surgeon, his survival chances would have been minimal.

None of that makes much difference to me, honestly, nor to his five children or his five grandchildren, nor to his wife, his parents, or his other two brothers. He’s gone, and there’s a gaping void there that I expect not even time will fill very well.

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Top 10 reasons I’m moving from California to Texas

Many people have asked for the reasons behind my move; here are the main ones:

  1. California. I mean, seriously, you have to ask?
  2. No state income tax.
  3. Gasoline is $2.49/gallon.
  4. My family is in Texas.
  5. Watch me convert from a conservative demagogue to a liberal hippie in 24 hours, without changing any of my opinions.
  6. I’ll be able to say, “I’ll Google that,” like all my friends.
  7. Excellent BBQ available from places that also sell motor oil.
  8. I can buy a $2 million Palo Alto house for $149,000 in San Antonio.
  9. They know how to fix iced tea.
  10. No longer have to deal with the internal consequences of garlic fries.

Time to move on…

After six years and many, many friends, the time has come to say goodbye to Yahoo!

On November 29, I start a new job as a software architect for Rackspace, based in their San Antonio, Texas, office, and working for their Cloud Hosting division.

Changes like this are never easy, and I leave behind a wealth of experiences and friendships in California that I wouldn’t change for the world. While at Yahoo!, I had the privilege of:

  • participating in the redesign of Yahoo! News and rebuilding a new, PHP-based frontend;
  • owning the technical leadership of Yahoo! Tech, the first new property in the Yahoo! Media group in five years, and one of the first properties at Yahoo! to use an entirely webservice-based architecture;
  • helped design and launched Yahoo! Shine, a successful venture into the lucrative women’s website market;
  • driving Yahoo! News again towards the adoption of new technologies; and
  • helping to make the Media Group leaner, faster, and more nimble with the introduction of key processes and technologies, some of which are launching this week.

I’m also leaving behind some of the most talented and passionate engineers that I’ve ever worked with.

Pundits, please don’t misinterpret this: I’m not leaving from Yahoo! or because of Yahoo!—I’m moving on to a new job in a location (Texas) that I’ve wanted to return to for many years now. We left Texas in 1996 to work in Europe for a startup; we moved to Silicon Valley in 2000 for the opportunity. Now, we’re heading home.

I think that George Strait sums things up quite eloquently.

How to deliver bad news to your boss

AngerIt’s happened to every engineer at least once. You’ve finished the release build, you run a final performance check, and the numbers show that the site won’t stay up. Or there’s a particularly nasty bug that makes the device useless, and your team has already spent nights and weekends without finding a solution. In any case, you’re the manager or the team leader, and you need to let your superior(s) know that it’s not working out: it won’t ship on time, or it will be broken if it does ship. (You should be able to extrapolate from this to your particular industry or situation.)

How do you let your manager (or perhaps the Senior Vice President of your division) know?

In most cases, if you’ve given frequent, regular status reports, there should be no surprise. But we all know that we can’t expect every contingency, and something totally unexpected pops up from time to time. The first rule of status reporting is “no surprises,” but—whoops!—here comes a big one.

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How to write a performance review

We’re in the midst of annual reviews at my company; unlike some companies, which schedule an annual review on the anniversary of the employee’s hire date, we do ours all at once, at the beginning of the year. Part of the review process is “peer feedback;” that is, each employee has the ability to request feedback from co-workers on his or her performance throughout the year. In addition, each employee creates a “self-assessment,” where he or she analyzes his or her own performance over the past year. Having recently finished reading dozens of these, I’d like to share what I find most helpful in a well-written peer or self assessment.

(Note: your company’s process is most likely somewhat different than mine, so feel free to adapt this to your particular situation. I do think, however, that the general principles are common to most business settings.)

The first rule of thumb is: be on time! A review or self-assessment that arrives *before* my deadline for reporting on you is infinitely more valuable than one that arrives later. When I have to tell my manager about your performance, I’m going to have to rely on my (imperfect) memory about your work if you don’t give me your self-assessment to remind me. Six sentences scrawled on the back of an envelope (who uses envelopes any more, any way?) is far, far better than a dozen pages that arrive 24 hours too late.

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