Category: General

Lessons from 2015

Lessons from 2015

In taking some time to look back through my 2015 calendar and flip back through all of my posts for the year, I tried to sort things into two piles – things that went well, and things that didn’t go well.

Broadly, in my own life, I’m trying to focus more on things that are created, that move from the world of the mental into the world of the actual. I’ve tried to keep my went-well and didn’t-go-well piles limited only to that sort of thing, since it’s hard to say whether an idea “went well” if it did not result in any type of action or tangible outcome.

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Work Remotely: Shrink Your Office

Work Remotely: Shrink Your Office

I love working remotely. Working for Automattic is especially solid, since our entire company is distributed. There is no office anywhere, although we do have a building in San Francisco for events and visiting Automatticians.

Scott recently tweeted about one of the advantages that working remotely offers:

He’s absolutely right. Over the last two years I’ve shrunk my required inventory to be productive down to a pretty tiny footprint. Check it out:

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Quotes from Deming

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On Focus:

The average American worker has fifty interruptions a day, of which seventy percent have nothing to do with work.

On Expectations:

It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and then do your best.

On Customers:

No customer ever asked for the electric light, the pneumatic tire, the VCR, or the CD. All customer expectations are only what you and your competitor have led him to expect. He knows nothing else.

 

All from W. Edward Deming

Playing with d3.js

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One of my ongoing projects is helping my dear friend and colleague Daryl brainstorm on how we can most effectively translate our goals into simple, pretty, and actionable visualizations – I always harp on the import of actionable visualization.

In spending more time with modern visualization tools, like everyone, I’ve come across d3.js – a JavaScript library dedicated to Data Driven Documents (d3 get it?)

I read a blog post or two (Mike Bostocks is amazing) and dove into messing around with the library. For fun, I used d3.js to turn an empty pair of body tags into an SVG assembly of the Automattic logo, as you see above. As deep as my affection is for ggplot2, this is still pretty neat.

It was fun, and I’m especially excited to see how d3 plays with live data!
The above is a screenshot – here’s a gist of the code itself.