Some coworkers of mine at Mass Relevance shared this Surge talk by Bryan Cantrill which I quite enjoyed and wanted to share some thoughts on. Since I also would like to blog more, it seemed like a perfect opportunity!

So here goes:

On Bryan Cantrill
This guy kind of reminds me of a more enthusiastic Ryan if he were to give a passionate/rant talk on something. =)

On Formal Reviews
I really enjoyed the part on formal annual reviews. The ones I’ve experienced have been at a more frequent cadence, but I have never once found them to be valuable relative to just telling me “good job, continue to get stuff done.” I don’t mean this as a knock on any of my past managers at Bazaarvoice nor that I view myself as flawless, but these types of formal reviews always seemed like a way to herd the B+C players at the cost of being an annoyance to the A-players (“superlative engineers”). Please never make me fill out a form asking for a “weakness I will work on in the following quarter.”

IMO, excellent engineers will naturally learn and improve themselves. Particularly in the context of being able to do their job even better. Making one write their own arbitrary weakness to focus on for some set time period just to tick a checkbox will be met with resistance or simply not taken seriously. I have never once felt like this part of my performance reviews at BV was ever directly tied to my actual performance nor that anyone actually believed I should focus on this versus just shipping a great product. It always felt artificial and a formality that was immediately forgotten.

Like mentioned in the talk, I agree that feedback is valuable and encouraging improvement is also positive. The formal methods I’ve had experience with have not been very valuable though.

Note: I’m speaking critical of Bazaarvoice on this topic as it is the predominant part of my professional career. There are still a ton of great people there, and learned a lot from my 6.5 years tenure that I am incredibly grateful for. Despite the great experiences I’ve had there, no company is perfect, and this is an area that resonated with me after hearing this talk.

On Management Staying Technical
An aspect I admire most of Mass Relevance’s engineering organization is that it’s very flat and everyone all the way up to CTO still actually get their hands dirty with code. I have all kinds of respect for our leaders here as I’m sure it is quite difficult to juggle everything they’re responsible for PLUS find the time to add new features, fix bugs, and contribute code. This talk really made me realize that because our leadership does this, it gives me a lot more confidence in their ability to make decisions and know that they’re empathetic to the challenges we tackle. There’s a lot more sense of working with my boss cooperatively, rather than for my boss and taking orders.

Catching Fire - pretty good. I enjoyed the second book the most, so I was happy they were pretty true to it.

Hobbit 2 - apparent money grab and not a whole lot happens since there’s no Helm’s Deep equivalent, but I’ll forgive all parties involved if the third one makes the build up worth it.

American Hustle - enjoyable. Great performances by a great cast. Heist was a bit underwhelming, but maybe I shouldn’t have expected better.

Frozen - I liked a lot and it made me all mushy inside. One glaring flaw is the absence of a “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?” Elsa reprise at an incredibly obvious point in the movie (you’ll know if you saw it). That said, had they pulled that off, I would have likely been a sniffling mess walking out of the theater, so there’s that. =) I’m disappointed they missed such a perfect opportunity to reprise the most powerful song in the movie (IMO), but despite that, it’s still a pretty high caliber Disney. Recommended!

Thanks to Slex for sharing the meme generator. =) Hover over…

I’m my sisters’ favorite brother.

Well October just kind of flew by and we’re nearing the end of November and my blog is severely neglected. Maybe next year I’ll try to do my once a week blog post thing again. I kept up with that fairly well back in, uh… 2011?

I’ve successfully moved into the new house and sold the old one. Yays! Antoinette was on the market for less than 24 hours and I got multiple bids and took one that was significantly over the asking price. It was sweet. So far I’m enjoying Mueller pretty well too. There’s a decent amount of construction going on around me, but once that’s done I expect it to be a lot better. It’s really awesome having an HEB super nearby. Also in a year or so, the town center area will be getting populated and that’s just two blocks-ish away.

Tomorrow, the family flies out to San Francisco to be with Olivia for Thanksgiving. It’ll be the first Wong Thanksgiving in SF since a very long time ago! TIME TO PUT YUMMIES IN MY TUMMY.

I will now leave you with a photo of Andrew and I from when I visited Dallas last month or something. People were taking pictures in front of this thing, so we joined the bandwagon. /shrug

Well, I guess I’m at a once a month cadence of blog posts. My builder is supposedly still on track for a September 30th closing date. cross fingers I’ll be picking up boxes and starting to pack this weekend. Wooo!

Mass Rel has “MR Nights” every Tuesday where a bunch of us (mostly devs, but not limited to) hang out late and we invite outsiders to join us at the office (or somewhere else nearby). A week ago, I had a bunch of my old BV team over and it was good to work late with them again, even if it wasn’t on the same stuff. =) That team meshed together in a way that will be hard to replicate and I’m starting to appreciate the experience more as I reflect on it. We’ve since scattered into the winds, so it’s likely to be a unique experience, though I’m optimistic to have other positive unique experiences in the future. =) That’s also not to knock on my time at MR thus far at all. I’m having a pretty good time there too.

I swear, it’s not me that picked the music:

I really want to make a duckling.js but I have no idea what to make it do so the minified version can be called ugly.duckling.js. Someone help me with ideas.

On the MTG front, I’m really looking forward to Theros. It seems pretty fun so far from the spoilers. I’ve been avoiding going to drafts of M14 because it’s so boring after having RTR block.

And… sibling hangout!

Dang, it’s August already. There’s a lot of moving going on (or about to be). Unless delayed again, it’s looking like to move to Mueller at the end of September and Olivia and Garrick are going to San Francisco. I don’t mind another reason to go back to visit that city. =) We checked out the new Mueller HEB’s cafe their opening weekend and it was decent enough. I could see myself talking a walk there with Mozilla frequently, especially once the weather isn’t so scorching. Viraj and I have some tentative plans to get wasted there cause it’d be hilarious.

Ryan’s decided to take a gig at Mozilla, which is pretty sweet for him, but it’s unfortunate that my time working with him again will only be 1.5 months. =p Right before I started at MR, I took a trip to San Francisco to do some hanging out with recent ex-coworkers and just chill. In a rare occurrence, I decided not to take my DSLR and man did it make a difference walking around. I felt so much lighter! I don’t think this means I won’t bring it with me on future trips, but I’ve pics of SF enough and plan on coming back many times in the future, so I figured I’d be lazy. Here are some randoms from my iPhone though:

Coffee time:

My parents used to own an ice cream shop around this area and I have multiple baby pics here. Always fun to return, and this time there was actually water running:

More childhood nostalgia:

Love this stuff:

Oriana recently got the dogs some cow hoof to chew on at Andrew’s suggestion and this resulted in the first time I’ve had to break up a Mozilla and Badger fight. I’m pretty sure Badger started it, but maybe I’m biased. =) They’re normally pretty good though:

This past Friday I went to Town Lake (yes, I’ll still call it that) with the MR crew for their “fantastic friday” and took Mozilla along with me. He spent a decent amount of time looking at some large turtles:

Alright, for better or worse, here’s my opinion on all the crazy. I may be wildly inaccurate on information that leads me to these opinions, so if you have points you think I should be aware of, don’t hesitate to enlighten me. =)

HB2 - it seems to me that if this bill went through and led to no clinic closures, no one would have an issue. Is that correct? On paper, the bill is focused on improving the quality of care and making it safer for women, or that’s the claim as I understand it. The issue is that this is seen as an underhanded way of closing down a majority of clinics because most of them will be unable to meet the bar set forth in the bill, right? I suppose my thoughts then are:

• How accurate is it that a majority of clinics will close down?




• For example, how influenced by profit are these clinics? Are they incentivized to claim they’ll be forced to close?


• Even if the ones do close down, is it unlikely that new ones open that do sufficiently meet the bill’s requirements?


• The math must be doable… has someone calculated the financial feasibility of running a clinic while abiding by the bill’s requirements?




• Which specific aspects of the bill are unreasonable? IMO, it seems that at least some of them are fine.

This bill’s gotten a lot of media/social attention by pulling in “women’s rights” into it and if it’s in fact true that the bar set in this bill leaves it financially impossible to offer appropriate services to women in need, then I don’t doubt that it ends up achieving something counter to what it’s supposed to on paper, and that would be bad. I’m not entirely sure if I’m convinced this bill is ALL bad though, but I can definitely see how it could be if it does in fact lead to an increase in illegal abortions from potentially dangerous sources. I feel like a lot of people jumped on the “protecting women’s rights” bandwagon (which is not a bad thing), but I’m curious… is there a version of this bill that would be deemed “good?” Certainly there’s a set of abortion sources that are currently illegal and dangerous and should remain that way. Or are there people out there who feel like even those should be legal in the name of “rights” and “choice?”

Zimmerman/Martin - Zimmerman’s verifiable actions (those backed up by his call to the police and eye witness accounts), though potentially deemed unwise, are reasonable for someone to take, especially given the history of crime in the area and that he was head of the neighborhood watch. Neither Zimmerman nor Martin did anything legally wrong until someone made the first move to assault the other. The evidence seems to shift against Martin at this point, but it doesn’t seem like anyone knows who “threw the first punch” conclusively. At the very least, there is not sufficient evidence to counter Zimmerman’s claims and his account of what happens seems at the very least plausible. It very well could be that he got away with cold-blooded murder, but “innocent until proven guilty” is what we generally run with over here. I don’t think anyone can reasonably say he was proven guilty with the evidence on the table. I also think this case is more racially charged than it needs to be and the media has made Zimmerman out to be more “racist” than the facts seem to indicate.

Snowden - Doesn’t seem so bad.

I’ve got two weeks off until I start at Mass Relevance, and it just so happened that Andrew is in Austin for the first of those weeks, so it seemed like a good time to have Meatcation III! Here are some highlights with the rest being here. Meatcation.com will get you to past Meatcations. =)

On Sunday, we had sliders:

…and bone marrow from Salt & Time:

On Monday, we made some crazy cryoseared duck:

On Tuesday, we made (way too much) pot au feu with veal shank, beef shank, garlic sausage, beef bone marrows, and an assortment of spices, veggies, and potatoes. This is a picture of one pot. We amateurily bought enough to fill three (a pot next to this one as well as a large crock pot, elsewhere). I’ve been having this for lunch the past few days…

Wednesday was quail enchiladas:

Then on Thursday, we went to the opening of Qui and were the first ones in the door!

Tomorrow’s Friday! Gotta get down on Friday.

Pics after it happens. =)

I’m moving to Mueller! I’m getting something that looks like this, but not as crazy (it’s the model home, so it’s got a bunch of the extra craziness in it). I’ll be pretty close to the new Mueller HEB and will have no more yard to maintain (yay!).

I’m a little worried I’ll regret not having a yard for the dogs to run around, but it will force me to walk them, which is probably a good thing. I’ll have to make some visits to the dog parks so Mozilla can get his sprinting on. Deciding whether I want to sell or rent my current home (leaning towards selling). Home switching is such a hassle! I’m pretty excited about my new location though.

In other news, I’m also psyched about this new Superman movie. It better not be a let down like the last one.

Dang, blog. Sorry it’s been so long. =)

I was holding off on mentioning this because there was so much I wanted to talk about, but I’ll just go ahead and throw it out there and if there’s anything else for me to say, I’ll do it another time. =p After about 6.5 years at Bazaarvoice, I’m off to Mass Relevance starting July 1. BV’s been such a great experience filled with lots of opportunity for me that it’s bittersweet to say goodbye. The team I’ve been on for the past year-ish has been awesome and I’d be lucky to experience that type of passion, camaraderie, and teamwork in the future. I’ll miss you guys!

That said, it’s time I start a new adventure, so I’m headed to MR where I’ll have the benefit of working with a lot of ex-BVers who I think highly of. If they switch to first.last email addresses before I get there I’ll be very sad! ;)

I added more to my nerd XP by going to a Magic draft with Jonney on Wednesday. Despite drafting what I thought was the worst deck I’ve ever drafted, I got second place with it, so that’s good I guess. I’ve always thought that Magic was a game I could be really competitively good at if I wanted to invest the time into it and “go pro” despite how silly that sounds (hey, some of the prizes are no joke though). =) That said, I don’t know if I can handle playing it for days straight.