Posts

Writing on happiness seems hubris in the face of COVID, 2020 generally, and the possible existence of spiteful Greek gods, but even in the face of setbacks people often ask me why I’m happy, so a post on how that came to be seems topical in these times of needed resilience. It wasn’t always this way.

One of my life goals isn’t “to be happy”. You could argue I have an unstated meta-goal for me not be unhappy, but I’ve always thought being uncomfortable, frustrated, feeling stupid, unappreciated, or upset at times is unavoidable if you want an interesting life. Which is one of my goals. More on those later.

This is the first of a series posts on lessons learned in running large data teams and large-scale data projects in SE Asia. This first post focuses on organization structure, the second on foundational practices, and later posts will talk about way you can improve your own teams as they grow.*

Not too long ago, Data teams were a new, novel thing when suddenly everyone wanted to “do AI” and “Big Data” and no one knew how to hire or what to do. A common approach was to hire a whack of PhDs with quantitative backgrounds, put them off in a corner, and have them do “Data science” expecting magic to somehow happen.

I’m happy to announce the open source release of harsh today.

Harsh is habit tracking for geeks . A simple, minimalist CLI for tracking and understanding habits. Build great habits. Break bad ones.

Why? Habits, both good and bad, make us. We are what we do habitually. And what we do habitually ends up being what we accomplish .

You can grab harsh most easily via homebrew on OSX or linux with a simple:

Besides habits as a form of process-based productivity, ruthless prioritization, and limiting of work in progress (or scheduling) doing proper weekly reviews and planning has been the basis of the main GTD gains I’ve noticed the last 6 months.

I’ve started experimenting with a 3 daily slot system and a 7+1 bucket review method every week that has been unexpectedly more effective, and felt it might help others who struggle with similar problems (too much to do, a constant onslaught of new things to prioritize and do, and never enough time to do it). Plus, it involved a bit of code to help with visibility and tracking and a siple system that is portable across systems (or paper) so felt post-worthy.

I read. A lot. And, I’m often asked to recommend books. For business books, I find myself endorsing the same titles to people all the time. Books that give timeless advice, confer skills never learned, or have insights to deal with our rapidly changing business environments in practical ways. These are ones that made big differences for me in an overhyped landscape of business books.

What makes you effective in modern business environments? What skills were you never taught explicitly in school that you need to acquire? A good education is about learning how to learn. Most people reading this will have that. Most aspirants need guidance and material that is going to help them. This was the basis of my thinking on this list:

Tracking finances and budgeting is unsexy but is the base from which flows investing, capital, and wise use of credit. It clarifies activity, priorities, obligations, and opportunities. Making money work for you is a minor superpower. It, if you can excuse the pun, pays dividends.

And it makes most sense in your hands, rather than a SaaS or bank. Many apps and online services give financial visibility but ultimately tie you to a (paid) upgrade cycle, ecosystem, or upsell where you lack control of your financial data and insights. Most make it difficult to get your data out once it’s theirs.

With COVID-extra spring cleaning time, a PSA post on updating your security keys. We’re going to move your ssh and gpg keys from RSA algos to the more compact, efficient ECC (Elliptical Curve Cryptography) keys of ED59515. This is how you create them and how to swap them out on services and tools you use.

Most security experts now say to switch from RSA keys to using curves derived from the mathematical properties of elliptical curves, ECC (Elliptical Curve Cryptography). Increasing computing power, has made RSA style keys below 4096 bits vulnerable as well as their now being purpose-made tools around cracking passwords on those secret keys (there are countermeasures).

I’ve been using an early 2016 Macbook 12" for 4 years now. It’s been a fantastic laptop and my biggest issue has been not being able to find another piece of hardware I like as much. I finally had to replace it with a maxed out Macbook Air as the closest substitute, but still missing the Macbook. I decided to put Linux on it to see if I might still be able to resurrect it as a daily driver.

While I’ve been using passpie for some time as a CLI password manager, it lacked mobile and browser integration and an ecosystem for leveraging other tools. This is what I replaced it with duplicating the functionality range you’d see in commercial apps like 1Password and Dashlane, while being free, open source, cross platform, more portable, and developer-friendly.

Often, oldest solutions to problems are the best. They provide a common, battle-tested standard for everyone to work with. Pass, the standard unix password manager has been around for ages and follows the unix philosophy of a simple, robust tool which does one thing well and integrates with other tools for composable toolchains.

For those who followed my original post a year ago on how to get a site up with a static site generator, serverlessly, that is blazing fast, you’re going to need to renew your security certificate soon. This is how that’s done through Amazon Certificate Manager via Let’s Encrypt.

In truth, Amazon’s Certificate Manager (ACM) does a good job of taking something that used to be a painful, nail-biting, horrible experience around changing your web site’s SSL cert and makes it much easier. Especially if you’re running your own domain, ACM combined with the geniuses at Lets Encrypt , it’s now semi-painless (with a little knowledge) to secure your sites with SSL. It’s not obvious, however, how to change or renew once you’re set up, so we’ll doing the walkthrough.