Keeping track of your accomplishments

It's really valuable to keep an ongoing list of what you've actually been doing at your job. This is helpful for:

• writing the self-assessment part of a performance review at the end of a quarter
• help your boss make a clear, specific case for you to be promoted, and not rely on their distractable memory
• updating your resume/LinkedIn when the time comes
• reminding yourself that you have been competent and gotten stuff done before, if you're feeling frustrated or having a bad day

I just have a Google Doc called "Accomplishments" that I'll add things to every so often, including any kudos or compliments that I receive from co-workers. I'll also write up a short description of a project I worked on that succinctly describes why that project matters to the business and what was hard (and therefore impressive) about my part of it.

Example:

Trace Store Service Integration
Migrate from directly accessing databases through ActiveRecord to using a Thrift service instead, enabling our Data Services team to change storage backends without disruption to our end users.
Team size: 2

Don't forget to check if someone would still ask "so what?" at the end of your writeup!

Getting good feedback from practice talks

This is a collection of tips I've gathered over the last few years on how to get more from practice runs of a talk that you're working on. The first step, of course, is to run practices in the first place. These are optional extras on top of that.

Scheduling your practice

• I mostly run practices at work, so I'll book a conference room that fits around 10 people.
• In the calendar event, include the title and abstract for your talk, as well as any relevant details about the conference (when is it? what is the target audience like?) and target length of your talk.
• Select your practice audience based on people that you know to be supportive and skilled at giving constructive, kind feedback.
• Prior familiarity with your topic doesn't matter as much--maybe one or two people who could comment on "correctness", if that's something you're worried about, but getting feedback from people of "this part was confusing" is already very valuable.
• Invite ~3-8 people--enough for a spread of opinions and having at least a couple people that do show up.
• If your practice audience seems open to some coaching on giving feedback on practice talks, this old post of mine on giving feedback may be useful and this post by Lara Hogan on Giving Presentation Feedback in particular is excellent.

During the practice

• Turn on slide numbers in the footer of your slides, so that audience members can write down the slide number associated with the feedback they want to give. (instructions for Keynote)
• Thank your audience for coming and give them some context on the feedback you're looking for right now. I usually write down these points on a whiteboard in the room to remind them of what my focus is. 
• Could be: "overall flow and structure" or "do the technical explanations make sense for an audience of ____" or "physical or verbal tics" or "nitpicking on slides." 
• A sample set of questions from a friend who ran a practice talk:
• Are these helpful/interesting topics to cover?
• What else do you think would be helpful?
• Was the format understandable?
• Was the format entertaining?
• How could I add more funny pictures/entertain you more?
• Tell your audience what you aren't looking for feedback on right now (could be any of those items in the previous bullet too!) See this on the difference between asking for 30% vs. 90% feedback.
• If you're testing out timing, either set up your view so that you see a timer or ask someone in your audience to keep an eye on this. Recently when I was worried about the length of a particular talk, I asked someone to write down the times for each major section title as I hit it, so I could put those into my notes and see the breakdown overall.
• When you're ready to receive feedback, put your slides into light table mode and project that, to help your audience pick out which part of the talk they'd like to discuss.

• You don't have to make all or the exact changes that your audience suggests, but you should take the opportunity to ask questions and understand where they're coming from, in looking for improvements you can make.

After the practice

• Add their names to a thank you slide.
• Send the finished slides to the people who attended a practice talk, so they can feel gratified by the final, pretty version!

What I learned from considering buying a house

Long story short, I was visiting a friend and learned about a house across the street from her that was for sale, extremely close to a train stop to get into the city, and when I looked up the price, surprisingly affordable. We didn't end up making an offer, but I've spent the last 2 weeks frantically reading up on house-buying (in the U.S.) and asking all the homeowners I know for advice, so I thought I'd write up that a little bit.

First, if you're just like "wat is house buying process even", my friends recommended this home buying guide written by Redfin and this other house buying guide by Michael Bluejay (as my friend noted on the latter, it looks/sounds a little spammy at first, but the content and calculators seem well-researched and logical). Reading through those demystified many of the initial steps.

Second, it was a bit different for us because we had a specific house we were looking at, but I tried to set up some additional showings through reaching out to the agents listed for houses I found on Zillow. This did not work out very well, as there was a bait-and-switch on some of them where I had to talk to them on the phone first, only to learn that the original listing wasn't even available anymore. When I said I wanted to work with people that were really good at communicating over email and maybe text, this isn't what I'm picturing...

Incentives matter a lot, with such a large purchase. When we do this process again, I'll probably find an agent and schedule showings on Redfin, since their agents are salaried and only earn bonuses on good reviews, not on commissions. They make it pretty easy to request a specific time for a house showing. I also like that they host a review system for other people you'll need in the process, like lenders and home inspectors. Hopefully this would help me avoid people trying to make a sale based on emotions like "how do you feel when you walk in" as the principle guiding system, when we haven't had a chance to rationally evaluate the objective pros and cons.

Redfin's search capabilities aren't as sophisticated as some of the other sites though. I started off mostly using Zillow (though I learned that many realtors loathe Zillow due to their whole "Zestimate" algorithm projecting home values and such, but that didn't matter to me since I just ignored those numbers anyway) but now I'm trying out Trulia, which has some very useful filtering options, like filtering by commute distance on public transit to a particular address. Trulia also has Pinterest-like board for the houses you've saved to look at, which is cool for sharing with other people you might be searching with.

Finally, I learned that the most useful way to evaluate a potential house is in terms of what would be most difficult yet important to change, and prioritize lower the items that money and/or time could fix. This is why there's that old adage of "location, location, location" for real estate--because that is the one thing you can't change. From there, some other important things you'd want to consider are large trees on the property that are too close to the foundation, as well as the general condition of the foundation itself (check this by going into the basement and seeing if it feels damp, do you see mold/rotting, are things askew). You want to be situated on higher ground, to avoid flooding, and if you like bright rooms, you want your main exposure to be facing south. Stuff like that, versus renovated kitchens or bathrooms. As long as the infrastructure for whatever you want to do is there (plumbing, gas lines, etc.) you can probably make it happen later.

Another point regarding updated kitchens is that the owners have upped the value of the home based on their renovations, but they may have made decisions about layout/fixtures/finishes/etc. that weren't what you would have made yourself, so if that's something you care about, you have more flexibility in buying a house with a crappy kitchen and spending the different in price renovating it after you're the owner.

Of course, many people are looking for places that are move-in ready and don't need much, if any, additional work. That's a perfectly legitimate trait to value, as long as you recognize that tradeoff in cost.

Anyway, looking at houses and dreaming of the possibilities is pretty fun! I now have a bulleted and sub-bulleted list of my priorities that I wrote out, which will be a nicely organized way to score future house candidates :)

Best tip for writing status updates

I covered this in my "Be a Better Developer (no code required)" talk so I thought I'd finally get this blog post draft published. One of my old managers at Google had the most useful tip I've ever heard for writing status updates.

The tip is, at the end of a status update you've written, would someone reading this update go “so what?”

The exercise is intended to get you to make sure your status update isn't just a summary of the work done, which most people reading status updates (managers) don't really particularly care about. Rather, they are much more interested in the impact of the work that's been done.

HT Emily for that joke (the font is Impact, get it??)

Here's an example:

Before:

We changed email reports to be sent at 1am local time.

After:

We changed email reports to be sent at 1am local time, allowing customers to receive data in the correct local time window.

The before example has been translated into “here's why you should care” language.”

For more insights on making sure you're broadcasting information and sharing updates appropriately, see this post by a New Relic manager, "How to be an information flow superhero: beyond not surprising your boss."

Workaround for PayPal's preference for direct bank transfers

I had a very frustrating experience the other day while using PayPal to purchase an item from Woot; I wanted to put the transaction on a credit card to count towards a minimum spending bonus I'm working on. More and more, it seems that PayPal is intentionally designing their systems to pretty much trick you into paying for transactions using a direct bank transfer by obscuring how you can change the payment method. I understand why they do this, to minimize revenue lost to credit card processing fees, but it's very much not focused on the users of their product. A brief search for ways to stop this shows other people that are very frustrated with PayPal's strategy here as well, so I thought I'd share an idea I had for minimizing the impact to you as the PayPal user.

You more or less have to have some bank account that's directly linked to your PayPal account and set as the default, and then you can choose a backup source of funding if that bank account doesn't have enough funds for your purchase. I have existing accounts with ING/Capital One 360 and they make it pretty easy to open multiple accounts so that you can do things like have targeted savings accounts that don't have fees. So, I opened a new savings account and transferred just $1 into it. I confirmed with the bank that overdrawing on a savings account wouldn't cause a fee from them:



So, my thought is that if I accidentally didn't change the payment method when paying for a purchase with PayPal, it will always go over to the backup funding source since the linked bank account only has a $1 in it.

DISCLAIMER: I HAVE NOT ACTUALLY TESTED THIS YET, YOUR MILEAGE MAY VARY! (aka I can't guarantee that this actually works, but I'll update this post if I ever end up testing it and can confirm its effectiveness one way or the other.)