Two years ago, I worked on a guide that I called the Hitchhiker’s Guide to Meetings. This guide highlighted many of the lessons I had learned over the years involving meetings at work. I have found having this guide to be a helpful reminder on things to continue to practice with the goal of optimizing time in meetings. With this year’s change of virtual meetings being the primary means of engagement, I wanted to make an update to this guide to highlight some of these newer lessons with the virtual format.

I recently listened to a talk that reminded me of some core lessons on how we can view “human error,” and how it can help us both with our work and personal lives. From that talk, the content from The Field Guide to Understanding ‘Human Error’ by Sidney Dekker is referenced. This book continues to grow as the cornerstone reference on building a safety culture. I wanted to share a short blog post as a refresher on this content, and how we can improve our systems by not looking at “human error” as the cause, but as the symptom of a larger problem.

IntroductionI recently tried a new experiment at work which I’m calling “The CHANGELOG.” My goal with this experiment is to improve the communication within my team and with all the product groups I routinely work with. I thought it would be helpful to share some of my notes here on what and why I decided to do it. The NameYou may be wondering why I’m calling this “The CHANGELOG.” There is of course a reason, and it isn’t to convey that I’m yelling due to the capitalization of CHANGELOG.

Time is a one of your most valuable assets. As engineers grow with their skills and past contributions, they get invited to participate in more meetings within their day. These meetings get scheduled in time slots that show as available on their calendar, or sometimes even when they are already shown as busy - posing as a conflict. This can commonly result in their day being broken down into many different meetings, with small windows of free time on their schedule.

This was my first time attending QCon, and I was really impressed with the quality of the conference. I have been a long time consumer of content on InfoQ, so it was great to be there in person and meet more practitioners that are working on interesting problems. This blog post will be a brief recap of my experience and the notes I took from the talks I attended. OverviewQCon is a conference which organizes its talks into specific tracks.

The TalkBack in June, I gave a talk at Cerner’s DevCon conference on decision making, called: Decisions: The Pursuit of Options. The talk has been published on YouTube for your viewing pleasure: The GuideHere is the guide that I produced for this talk, which is designed for a 11x17 print-out of the notes that were covered in the slides. You can find the print-out version and references in my Guides section.