I haven't seen a majority of my coworkers off-camera for 559 days as of today. The mobile teams at Automattic got together in Chicago at the beginning of March 2020, right before the pandemic hit the USA. We continue to do things to help connect people together to accommodate that lack of in-person meetups. It's not the same, but it helps. Then yesterday, I got this in the mail. It's funny how sometimes the small gestures can have the biggest impact. I know I'm not alone. Getting this small physical item does help ground my mind a bit to realize I work with other humans, not just Zoom participants. 🙃

Unit tests are something that engineers write to test the work they've done in smaller pieces. Code that is tested tends to perform closer to expectations. Future changes to old code protect the way things work by causing unit tests to fail if something is changed unexpectedly. Passing tests are green checks ✅. Failing unit tests are red Xs ❌. Default behavior is to write your unit tests after you're done writing the solution. When an engineer sees all ✅, they call it a day and ship it. The funny thing with unit tests are ... they are also subject to being full of problematic logic or buggy code. How does the engineer know their tests are correct or cover all the scenarios if you've never seen a failure? ...

It me. What a funny (and accurate) way of describing the mental float during conversations when my ADHD is ramped up. This cracks me up! I feel like there should be some background sound effects with this. A nice animated parallax effect would finish it off. 🤪

I worry a lot. Let me rephrase that - I worry often. Additively I think my worry amount is low, as if there were any way to measure worry definitively. Having Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, to me, shatters my day into so many small moments of time. When I worry about something, it doesn't last long because my brain is moving onto some other concern or input. What do I worry most about? People and relationships. ...

That feeling when you have so many ideas for blog posts but never have enough time to put them into words for others. I do have one idea in-flight, and a coworker helped me copy edit. This is my accountability mechanism to get that post out there by the end of June.

I have memories from my childhood but most of them are fragmented with how my ADHD brain works. There have been plenty of times talking with family about things that happened when I was young and I have no memory of it. I suppose my crappy attention & focus made it hard to store contiguous memories. There are some things that are very clear in my head, though. One of those clear memories is of my dad and it lasted exactly 60 seconds. ...

The TL;DR is that Garmin's pace alerts seem to trigger on average pace but the alert on the screen shows current pace. It can be confusing especially early on in a run where the average is much more volatile. Garmin CoachI own a Garmin Forerunner 245 GPS watch and use it track my runs, bike rides, and any indoor activities. I also have an Apple Watch Series 4 with Cellular but don't use it for tracking any longer because of weird GPS behaviors. The Forerunner 245 has definitely been a superior GPS unit and their biometrics (especially with their heart rate strap and sensor package) blow the Apple Watch out of the water. ...

I attended The Lead Developer which is a single day conference for people leading engineering teams / teams of developers in Austin, Texas. I took notes on about ¾ of the talks on my iPad using Goodnotes. I'm getting closer to sketchnotes the more I practice this and I figured why not share what I took. Videos should be published soon by the organizers. Download the PDFDownload

I attended Swift by Midwest in Chicago (Elk Grove Village) IL this past week. The Klein family did another great job hosting an iOS conference and I enjoyed every minute of it. I recently bought an iPad Pro 11" and have been really loving using Goodnotes 5 to take handwritten notes. I thought I'd share my notes with you all in case you wanted to see some of the take-aways from the conference. ...

Working remote means I'm on a lot of video calls. I've come up with a bunch of little tweaks to help with attentiveness and mindfulness during the call. It is important to show you're listening. Look at the camera oftenWhen you're in person you look at people's eyes to show them you're listening. Doing that on a video call requires a bit of counter-intuitive body language by looking at the camera. You won't be looking at the person but they'll see you looking directly at them. It's a subtle difference but I've found it highly effective. ...