Archive

ends and beginnings

Day 30 of 30. There's a song I grew up with called Closing Time, and it has some relevant wisdom here: Closing time, every new beginning Comes from some other beginning's end, yeah This is the last day of my blog-post-a-day experiment: the end of the beginning of my new

magic circles

Day 29 of 30. In discussions of play and game design, there's the concept of the magic circle. I'll defer to Johan Huizinga on the matter: All play moves and has its being within a play-ground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course.

snow and sandwiches

Day 28 of 30. Snow is on my mind today, and only partially because it's falling from the dark Copenhagen sky as I write this. This may sound like the most Canadian thing to say, but since we moved to Denmark one thing I've missed is snow. To me, snow

cognitive stopwords

Day 27 of 30. Back in my undergrad days at the University of Waterloo, I spent 4 cold, dark months at the Language Technologies Research Centre in Gatineau, Québec, working on statistical machine translation: the translation of human languages by computer. This was back in a time of transition from

advice from a lead engineer

Day 26 of 30. As a lead engineer, I often get asked what it means to be a lead engineer - and this mostly by senior engineers I work with, who are curious what the next step in their career might be. There are loads of fantastic resources out there

belonging

Day 25 of 30. As an expat in a foreign land several timezones away from family, and a weird geeky dude in a world of seemingly more normal, less geeky people, it can be difficult to find a true sense of belonging. This can be true even when surrounded by

focus and pairing

Day 24 of 30. I was recently reading Hyperfocus, in which the author talks about two complementary modes of attention that are useful in modern knowledge work: hyperfocus and scatterfocus. It should be noted that, as a concept, hyperfocus both predates this book and is in broader use as an

thanksgiving

Day 23 of 30. One thing that's strange about living in Denmark is the uniformity of tradition. There are specific beats in the year, marked with precise rituals and songs, accompanied by set menus whose dishes reach back into the nebulous before. Herring, for instance, a fish that also turns

time and money

Day 22 of 30. As a tech geek, I spend some time lurking around Hacker News, and like all groups Hacker News has a culture, and like all cultures that culture has its comfort zones and touchpoints. One of those is productivity porn: a particular type of content that valorises

D&D

Day 21 of 30. Aside from lead engineer and jugger coach / organiser, one of the other hats I wear is DM. Right now, I've got a Curse of Strahd campaign going with my partner and four friends. Here they are, having a good old time in Vallaki: And yes, I

edge cases

Day 20 of 30. I still remember some key advice one of the fine folks at Code for Canada gave me, back during our onboarding sessions: You know, when you dive deep enough, it's all edge cases - and each and every one of those edge cases is meaningful to

fidelity

Day 19 of 30. A while back, when I was at Code for Canada, I had the good fortune to work with Luke Simcoe on a couple of blog posts and presentations - he was their Director of Communications at the time, and whenever someone brought something to him for

november

Day 18 of 30. There's a famous Danish poem called Året har 16 måneder (The Year has 16 Months), and it goes: Året har 16 måneder: November, december, januar, februar, marts, april maj, juni, juli, august, september oktober, november, november, november, november. And sitting in the dark, cold, rainy Copenhagen

a culture of building

Day 17 of 30. I came across the article On Cultures That Build, which was written as a response to Andreessen's essay It's Time to Build, which itself was written in the early days of a pandemic that revealed many institutions, agencies, and systems across the Western world to be

alignment

Day 16 of 30. Like millions of other people on this big, blue ball we call home, my partner and I are playing Baldur's Gate 3, which aside from being an excellent game is also one of the first D&D-based games not to include the alignment system. But if

midpoints

Day 15 of 30. That makes this the midpoint of my month-long blog-post-a-day experiment. Unlike many real-world projects, the goal of this one is deceptively simple: write one blog post a day. No complex dependencies, no stakeholder meetings or sign-offs, just me and my editor (which happens to be Ghost)

do less, better

Day 14 of 30. I've received a lot of advice of the years from parents and teachers and mentors and friends, but one piece - this from one of my music teachers back in high school - sticks out to this day: do less, better. We surround ourselves in distractions

perspective

Day 13 of 30. I'm actually writing (and posting) this on Nov 14, which for those keeping close track is not the 13th day of November, and that's just fine. Back in my Day 3 post about habits and routines, I talked about being open with yourself, flexible, willing to

deckbuilding

Day 12 of 30. I've recently been diving back into a favourite game of mine, Slay the Spire. It's a deckbuilding roguelike: you ascend the Spire, fighting monsters using your deck of actions, and building that deck along the way. The monsters and paths through the Spire are random, and

pushing

Day 11 of 30. Chances are, unless you've discovered some 10-dimensional lifehack, there are things you feel pulled to do, and things you have to push yourself to do. It doesn't take a lot, for instance, to convince myself to take 30-45 minutes each day to write what has become,

forests and trees

Day 10 of 30. Working from home today, in my apartment near Amager Fælled, which is part of this massive park chain that runs 20-ish km down to the quaint fishing village of Dragør. There are forests and trees and lakes, and as I type this I'm reflecting on how

cross training

Day 9 of 30. I'm at that age where you're too young to consider yourself old, and too old to consider yourself young, which one could say is definitionally middle-age. So as a middle-aged guy, one who spends most of his workday sitting (or standing) in front of a computer

velocity

Day 8 of 30. So far, I'm successfully producing one blog post per day, often 500-1000 words of hopefully coherent text, mostly themed around a mix of tech and work culture and leadership and learning. Where is it going? What direction is this headed in? I've decided, in true NaNoWriMo

imposter syndrome

Day 7 of 30. Two of my favourite YouTube channels are Mind Your Decisions and 3Blue1Brown, both of which walk the viewer through interesting concepts and problems in mathematics. As a self-professed geek of many stripes, including the mathematical, I think there's something wonderful about problems where there's no One

to-do lists

Day 6 of 30. It's challenging to find time to sit down, think, put words to screen in the middle of a busy work week. Part of the life of a lead engineer is keeping track of everything to do. This isn't really a Lead Engineer Thing; it's more of

taylorism that cares

Day 5 of 30. It's Sunday, which in some traditions is a day of rest, but the exact day doesn't matter; the idea that we deserve time to slow down and take a break is enshrined in a wide variety of belief systems, both religious and secular. It's a good

the new old web

Day 4 of 30. Getting back into the rhythm of writing every day brings me back 14 years to when I wrote In Silico as part of National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo as it's commonly shortened. Back then, I wrote In Silico using Google Docs. Google Docs itself launched

habits and routines

Day 3 of 30. It's slowly becoming a habit: after work, take 30 min to write a blog post. Actually, the first two posts took 66 min and 36 min. I know this because I use Toggl to track time on both work and personal projects, this blog included. Tracking

coaching

Day 2: another day, another blog post. I might have mentioned before that this whole blog-post-a-day thing was inspired by National Novel Writing Month, but I didn't mention the other piece: I did NaNoWriMo wayyyy back in 2009, writing a vaguely cyberpunk-tinged exploration of persistent augmented reality gameplay called In

hanabi

So this blog post is the start of a month-long experiment. In honour of NaNoWriMo, I've decided to post here daily during Nov 2023. Short is OK. Semi-coherent is OK. Missing a day and catching up the next is OK. The goal is that, by 11:59pm on Nov 30,

true autonomy is a balancing act

So it turns out humans are, by default, pretty bad at nuanced thinking: we love all-or-nothing, black-and-white, good-versus-evil.  Feels nice and simple, refreshing in a complex world.  Too bad it's useless in most modern real-world situations. In the tech industry, one place this shows up is around IT centralisation. Enter

new blog!

Welcome to my new blog: candu can do.  It's my personal creative outlet.  I write for myself first and foremost, and if it finds an audience - well, that's OK too. I tend to write about technology and learning, with not-so-occasional detours into whatever else is on my mind.  I've