Technicat

Topic

Management

A collection of 28 issues

Creativity, Inc.

When I saw Creativity, Inc. on the bookshelf, I thought it was just another business book on creativity — in other words, dumb. But this book is by Ed Catmull on how Pixar is run. I mean, this is the guy who invented texture mapping. The early part of the book

Canceling Stock

Somehow I've managed to survive self-employed (otherwise known as unemployed, freelancing, taking time off, and entrepreneurship) for nearly twenty years, a stint far longer than my salaried career. This despite long stretches of low revenue (otherwise known as app sales), whch I'd like to credit to my financial acumen, but

Vegas Ventures

All during this pandemic, I've been thinking Las Vegas is missing out on the move to remote work. I'm not suggesting they go as far as to pay people to move here, like Tulsa, but take me for example: I sold my condo in California, got a much cheaper (and

Nice Award

You don't get potentially lucrative stock options working on government projects, but they generally do a nice job of giving awards, like this poster I got from NASA commemorating the first Hubble servicing mission, including a patch flown on the mission! All just because I worked at the Space Telescope

I Misremember

One of my memorable career experiences was an all-day off-site conflict-resolution gathering held at a nearby hotel conference room. The coworker who somehow was allowed to put this thing together instructed us to take turns confessing what we could have done better (a practice I hear they adopted in North

Don’t Juke the Stats

Imagine a police department that closes a case if they figure they can’t solve it. Say this department tosses away criminal complaints if the suspect is already accused of another crime. And they upgrade misdemeanors to felonies to make sure they get solved. That would be one messed up

All I Got Was This Lousy Stock Certificate

Back in 1999, I joined a wireless internet startup in San Francisco called Neomar. I left about seven months later after we released our WAP gateway and browser for the Motient service and the company decided to pivot from consumer to B2B, which was what all the VC’s were

The Open Open Office

I wrote this in 2016, so here's hoping post-pandemic we won't go back to packing programmers in like caged hens. I don’t want to be one of those who go on about the good old days, and for software development, there’s a world of difference today. As I

Work and Play

After reading the first edition of Richard Rouse’s Game Design: Theory and Practice years ago, I wondered if the game design principles he listed could be applied to “designing” game dev itself — hence, this essay written some years back) As a break from the usual advice on how to

Software Remodeling

Just before the last dot-com crash and housing recession, I decided yeah, sure, my home value has gone up awfully fast, but instead of selling immediately, I’ll plunk down a big chunk of cash on a home remodeling project. So I ended up waiting another six years to sell.