Every Good Manager Will...

Tue, 10 Jan 2017 16:49:40 +0000

This week Michael Lopp (VP Engineering @ Slack) posted a summary of Tweets responding to the question "Regardless of seniority every good manager will...".

I took that list and tried to correlate the responses into several buckets. I used Trello to visualize this.

https://trello.com/b/Wr78Mx6k/good-managers

I came up with five buckets:

Compassion/Empathy - Feel like a human and realize others feel too.
Give/Take Feedback - Listen to others, tell them what's going right & wrong, and do the same for yourself.
Filter/Map/Reduce - Take in the world above and turn it into smaller things that are important for your people to know.
Unblock - Don't be an obstacle for your people to succeed - and help remove obstacles from their paths.
Trust - Everyone is an adult and was hired for a reason - trust them in their decisions and make sure to gain your people's trust.

Software I Use Every Day

Fri, 04 Apr 2014 19:07:25 +0000

In the spirit of yesterday's post, I'm going to list out what I use every day in terms of software. This isn't exhaustive but it's pretty darn close.

General Utilities

1Password - Probably the best password manager out there combined with mobile apps
Cloudup - quick way to share images, videos, text (ask me for a referral code)
Coffitivity - coffeehouse sounds to help boost productivity
Cyberduck - SFTP client
DaisyDisk - finding where all my space has gone
Dropbox
Evernote - where I keep my larger notes, graphics, PDF files
Parallels Desktop - for the occasional booting of old Mac OS & Windows VMs
Radium - menu bar radio streaming
Rdio - monthly subscription-based song streaming
RescueTime - track my app usage to determine if I'm distracted
Simplenote - for my quick note taking needs
Skype - sadly yes
Slack - communication for our team - web socket-based system like HipChat but better

Graphics

Adobe Photoshop CC - go-to app for image editing
Aperture (more for personal use)
Balsamiq Mockups - easy mockups
Bartender - organize your menu bar extras area
Camtasia 2 - screen casts
Color Picker
Join.me - easy screen sharing - I use it more for helping people fix computer problems remotely
Pixelmator
SnagIt

Development - General

Base - for digging around SQLite files; especially handy debugging Core Data
Charles - proxying application for testing remote calls
HockeyApp - binary distribution for testing
Kaleidoscope - arguably the most beautiful diff tool - ignore whitespace is still not a feature :(
PHPStorm - for when I have to get into WordPress and WordPress.com API coding
TextMate - Still my favorite text editor
Textual - Mac IRC client

Development - iOS

AppCode - alternative IDE for Objective-C - I switch between Xcode and here for specific reasons (future post?)
iExplorer - could not live without the ability to dig around device filesystems
PaintCode - easiest way to get Core Graphics code from images or hand-drawn UI elements
Reflector - transmit your iOS device screen to your computer for recording
Spark Inspector - interactively debug your UIView layers & NSNotificationCenter calls
Xcode
xScope - helpful UI tools for your Mac

Development - Android

Android Studio
Genymotion - Android VM manager - lurv