This post is the second part of my series that breaks down my guide on decision making. I wanted to briefly share our natural tendency to favor novelty and how that can introduce challenges when assessing technology in our systems. The goal is to ensure we are aware of this attraction, understand its power to feed learning, and to make sure we balance our motivations with safe introductions of technology.

I recently built a guide on decision making, which included several different elements on how we form ideas and decisions. The purpose of this guide was to highlight common areas that typically cause strain on us humans when we are in the act of technical decision making. I plan to author another series of blog posts, that take each part of this guide, and expand it with some added dialogue. For this first post, I’m going focus on Murphy’s Law and its influence on our ability to make technical decisions.

Over the past few weeks, I have been on a hiatus from my normal work at Cerner. During this time, I have been working on several home repair and improvement projects. While I have been doing this work, I was reminded of something that I like to do which helps illustrate progress achieved in projects. In this short post, I will share a few things that I think are important to capture which leverage the power of contrast to highlight progress.

Last week, I had the honor of attending a preschool class to share the topic of software development. In order to explain this subject matter, I decided to prepare a few items and have them paired with a theme. I thought it might be worthwhile to share what I used, as it seemed to work well, and I found it exciting to see young minds interested in the topic. Since this was going to be a short exercise (20 minutes of their time), I wanted everything to be simple with no electronic screens.

Here is a short post on the importance of thanking people, and a common way I achieve this through email. This is also the final part of my trilogy on guidance with email (Email Trilogy blog series). Throughout our work, we are continuously challenged with newer problems to solve. As we encounter these obstacles, we realize we can’t do it alone. Consequently, we routinely ask others for help. In my experience, I found I was often asking other engineers to present in a technical meetup that I was helping organize.

I previously posted a set of design principles about building presentation slides. In this post, I shared how you can improve the effectiveness of your visual aides, by authoring your own images. This post is going to be a simple starter of how I began including images in my presentations and notes. Equipment RequiredFor this tutorial, I’m using the following equipment: Dry erase whiteboard and a black marker iPhone (can be pretty old like mine) and using its built in Camera app Preview app on macOS You can of course use other equipment to do this tutorial, but I wanted to share how I started capturing my images in a very basic way.