On my tech problems talk & updates

Talk: How to approach technical problems #

I held a talk for a company internal event (dev week: talks and events focused around the development discipline). See the relevant page (I’ll make the recording available after I pieced it together). It completely took up my focus for Mon-Wed and some of last week as well.

I went with a very interactive format that asks the audience to propose how they would approach a given problem that I presented and then step by step revealing more information as they take the right steps and ask the right questions. In my mind that was the most effective and engaging way to show how you can solve real problems, having them do the thinking instead of just consuming an abstraction I prepared. It worked really well and I got a lot of positive feedback for the format.

Update for the No Complaints challenge #

This week I talked through, with the responsible person, some of the things I was complaining about prior. (The whole point of the challenge was to only “complain” to the people that can do something about it.)

Generally the volume of complaining dropped. Which to some degree depends on my sensitivity. I feel that have become less sensitive and am not picking up on some smaller discrepancies (mostly curse words in my thoughts) or choose to let them go. Especially when I caught and stopped the thought process.