My wife and I started a habit a few years ago called “three happys.” We don’t go to church so we didn’t have the built in evening prayer as a moment of reflection. I felt having something like that to ground our evening family interactions would be nice though. Three happys gives us that. Shortly after packing up our loft and moving out to a nice house with good schools in preparation for anticipated daughter, I listened to the book How to Have a Good Day.

LinkedIn launched a new career advice feature about a month ago. It prompted me to join recently and I figured why not. I’ve given a lot of advice in person, so let’s add another avenue. I just received my first request from someone who’s just starting out in technology as a data analyst. She wanted some feedback on her profile and how to go about applying for a job. I’ve been meaning to write about both for awhile, so here ya are.

So you’ve added the Growbot Slack bot to your team because it seems like a good idea. It can be. And it can be really annoying. Once you’ve added it to a channel, it’s not immediately obvious how to remove it. Searching Google turned up nothing, so once I finally figured out how to do it I figured I should share it. First, you have to determine what @growbot’s real username is.

I’m happy to report that this blog post was written on my iPad Pro using iA Writer and published using Pythonista. Through a bit of experimentation this morning I got Travis CI building my website whenever I push a new commit and using Pythonista’s app extensions allows me to hook up some Python code to share the finished work. You can see the build log here if you’re into that sorta thing.

Or… Pulling the plug… for now This is a hard post to write. I have to admit defeat. It comes at the hands of circumstance. No one thing did it, but they all piled up into the perfect storm. For the second time in a row. I’ve decided to pull from Ironman Texas. This is the second full Ironman I’ve entered and circumstance has led me to have to pull late in the game.

I’ve been mountain biking for a decade and a half. Seems crazy, but knobby fat tires have been a part of my life since the early 2000s. When I started, 29ers weren’t a thing, single speeds were the province of those crazy few animals who needed an extra challenge, and there was still a debate between full-suspension and hardtail bikes. Sure, having a spring – remember, this is the dark ages the air suspension setups weren’t common yet – helped smooth out the trail, but the loss in efficiency slowed you down.

Let’s run a thought experiment. Imagine submitting a scientific paper for publication, then getting an email that reads something like this back: Thank you for your submission to the Journal of Online Thinking and Futurism*. Your paper has been processed, but before we can proceed further with publication, please submit verfication that you have properly accessed the following cited papers: … list of every cited work Or what maybe it’s even more insidious.

I recently started listening to Deep Work by Cal Newport. So far, I feel like I can sum up the book with this statement: Focused work provides more value. Focused work requires effort. It’s full of tips and tricks on how to get the most out of your concentration. Many of them are things you’ve probably heard of before or at least intuitively know. Things like keeping track of how you spend your time.

How The Iron Yard fits in with all the code schools in Austin The Iron Yard has historically been in places that are not known as tech hubs. It was founded in Greenville, South Carolina and its early expansion was in North and South Carolina and Georgia – not areas known for as bustling technology sectors. Austin is different than most of the other communities that The Iron Yard is a part of: it’s a tech hub with everything from startups to Visa, Oracle, and Dell and everything in between.

Ok, not really, but JavaScript is the best place to start programming. I can hear the sound of the “true” programmers whipping their noses into the air as they read that last sentence, but hear me out. JavaScript started as this quick hack to add a little bit of inteactivity that was needed for the browser, but now it’s deployed around the world on several billion devices. And it’s not a bad language.