I have started this post several times over the past few years. Some of the hardest decisions I’ve faced as a manager have been directly related to the structure of my team(s). These are the people that you support, work with, collaborate with, and will survive crunch time with. Having the right mix of skillsets is equally important to having the right mix of personalities.

One of the many things I enjoy is playing tabletop RPGs. Since I wanted to utilize secret messages containing information and clues, I decided to write a quick program to do it for me. This puzzle_script program encodes messages using substitution ciphers, which are easy to decipher with or without the key, and should be a fun addition to the game.

The reference to Michael Scott’s blank self-help book, titled Somehow I Manage, from The Office TV show is intentional. I’ve officially been in a management roll for just over a year and I regularly feel like I’m winging it. On any given day it has been challenging, good, hectic, stressful, frustrating, rewarding…pick at least two.

Do you have your camera on in remote meetings? What’s in your background? Do you blur or use filters?

With working from home being the new norm, I made a small upgrade to my home office.

The latest change is the addiition of category links in the site header. This improves navigation and allows all related posts to be displayed on a single page. To support this, a significant portion of the site had minor edits to fit the new format and provide necessary metadata.

I recently tasked myself with finding a better way to be organized, both personally and as a family. Over the years I’ve used (and actively use) a variety of programs to take notes, sync across multiple devices, and share information. Each has their uses, but I wanted a dedicated application that’s lightweight, easy to setup, free or reasonably priced, and quick to explain. My mind immediately went to the task tracking and ticketing software most software engineers and IT goons (loving term) are familiar with and I set out to find something similar.

The following code snippet is a quick way to format raw ellapsed time (ms) into a readable format.

This post contains information that I’ve found useful when planning to take the next steps in my career. I’ve personally gone through this process several times, have interviewed a wide variety of candidates, and assisted friends and colleagues with their resumes and job searches. Most of my experience is working with STEM candidates, however, the information in this post is fairly general and should be helfpul to a wider audience.

Up until now, I’ve predominately used Python as a scripting and utility language. My current reading topics include how to structure python projects, ensure that they’re self contained (refuse to add the project filepath to the system PATH), add testing, refresher on coding standards and conventions, etc.

The last several months have been incredibly busy and there’s a noticeable lapse in my posting. While this site is mostly an ‘online diary,’ my goal is to practice posting regularly as mentioned in Staying on Top. My focus will be on dropping quick posts containing usefull topics/research and eventually I’ll get through the list of post ideas and projects that I’ve kept on the side.

I’ve had several post ideas over the last few months, but have been swamped with a few major life events. The biggest being relocating across the country a second time in the span of a year and a half. My goal was to find the ‘perfect’ position that would drive my career forward as well as facilitate a move back to the Greater Boston area.

This month’s meetup was hosted at MaidBot where their sculpture of discarded parts was on full display.

I live in front of my computers and my home office is setup with three displays. The difference in heat emitted by the two older LCD monitors is significantly higher than my LED monitor and creates a pocket of warm air over my desk after a short amount of time. Most often people think of advances in technology involving faster processors, better graphics, and thinner phones (just give me a bigger battery, I don’t care about thickness). However, a significant portion of the industry is dedicated to reducing power consumption, reducing heat production, and increasing durability and longevity. Just something to think about as I search for a fan.

One thing that’s been in the back of my mind is “how to stay on top of my career?” More importantly, what should I be doing or could be doing better?

Beer, robots, friendly faces, etc. Seems to be a recurring theme!

I was recently discussing my resume with one of my good friends and he mentioned how he used LaTeX for formatting. It was a pretty easy sell over fighting with word processors to maintain alignment and spacing every time I make a small update. I also decided that it’d be a lot easier to keep track of different versions of my resume by giving it it’s own repository. It’s nothing fancy and I haven’t mastered LaTeX’s ability to display complex regions and equations, but I’m off to a solid start.

Last week I made two mistakes. First, I asked my boss what the offsite training he attended was. Second, I asked “What is Six Sigma?” which prompted him to point to a stack of books. Being a smart person, I picked the slimmest one possible.

I had a great time at this month’s meetup, hosted by Maidbot. I saw several familiar faces, met new people, and jumped in and out of conversations covering a variety of technologies. Plus, there were food trucks and plenty of beer.

Are you developing a C++/Qt GUI and need to display data using analog dials?

Maintaining the style of your code is manageable if it’s just you, but how do you handle commits from an entire team? If you haven’t used a code beautifier, such as Uncrustify, they’re extremely useful tools that keep your codebase consistently formatted.

I have several projects coming up and finally decided to upgrade from a cheap soldering iron to a proper temperature controlled unit. I read way too many reviews, watched comparison videos on youtube, and finally settled on the Hakko FX-888. We’ll see how it handles!

This was the first time I managed to attend the Robotics & AI Meetup hosted by Diligent Robotics. I had a great time, met a number of extremely creative people, and learned about a variety of projects and interests.

Welcome to the new patrickhenson.com!