Doing What Counts
Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live. – Dorothy Thompson One of the greatest obstacles for learning is fear. It can be the fear of failing, fear of being laughed at, or just a fear with no apparent reason. Usually I’m a person that doesn’t fear many things and it’s [...]
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Have you ever been in a situation where you honestly don’t know if you’re doing what you’re expected to do or not? You don’t have a clear picture about what you boss wants you to do, or what are the criteria he’s using to track your successes and failures. Chances are that they are a [...]
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Like just about everyone I need to get a hair cut every now and then. No matter how hard I try to slow down the growing of my hair I always find myself sitting in the barber’s chair a month after the last time. And I always get the same unnerving feeling that I have [...]
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I’m a big fan of Scott Ginsberg, the guy who wears a name tag 24/7 to make people friendlier. His ideas about maximizing your approachability and thus improving your odds of getting to know people, find new business opportunities and to make a name for yourself resonate very well with me. Lately I’ve been thinking [...]
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Learning is at the same time one of the most natural things and one of the most difficult things there are. Organizational learning is even harder. It’s easy to learn things when you want to learn them, but it requires a tremendous amount of work to get someone learn something when the inspiration doesn’t come [...]
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A few posts ago I talked about finding out what your customer really needs. But there is more to it: When choosing a product, most people rely more on emotions than rational thinking. We use rational thinking to justify the decision, but usually it’s the decision that comes first and not the other way round [...]
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For the past few days I’ve been struggling with a moral dilemma: I’m attracted to the idea of test driven development (TDD) and writing unit tests before actual code, and it’s great whenever I do excercises to try it out. My problem is that although I’d like to work in a completely test driven way, [...]
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A paper free office is a great idea. It’s friendly for the environment, it’s less cluttered, it’s “web 2.0″ and it makes us feel like early adopters. Unfortunately the modern computer based tools are not always as efficient or user friendly as their old-fashioned paper based alternatives. So (this may sound strange coming from a [...]
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In software engineering communication plays a very big role. It could even be argued that software work is more about communication than it is about programming or design. The biggest reasons for software project failures lie in the communication between the team members than in any technical aspects. Usually when talking about communication problems people [...]
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Hello, it's me:
I explore life with my two boys.
I create.
I live with less.
I dream big dreams.
I blog to think.
I hope to do things that matter.
If it's your first time here, check out my about page and this short list of favorite posts to read first.
To get in touch, send me a Tweet, I'm @jalaine.
I have written a free e-book on creating with small children in the house.