Practical Technology

In the fall of 2022 my boss asked me to take on the lead/eng manager role for the platform/infrastructure team I was a part of.  I'd just joined as an engineer, but - why not?  After all, I have been studying management concepts and theory for some time now as my job-hobby, surely I was ready to practice what the theory said would work! Well, it has been a rewarding year, but a hard year. Rewarding, because my time in the role confirmed what I had strongly suspected - the socio is in fact more important to spend time on than the technical, that management is indeed all about redesigning systems.  The year was hard, because - by all accounts - I experienced many of the difficult and uncomfortable parts of management in a very short period of time. It's difficult to share the experiences while keeping a certain level of discretion, so bullet points will have to suffice. Persevering in storytelling/making information visible does indeed yield results. Applying Cynefin, I believe,

The journey continues ( see previous post for more info... )...  This post is really just for a few folks who had asked for updates. I have learned a few more lessons: Expect it to take 3-4 months ( 100-200 hours ) per full board build - a long feedback loop is just the nature of the game, especially with my availability Expect to get some crucial feature wrong - design for design failure Expect to break parts or have bad solder joints - design for repair Expect to be tempted to rush things If you want to follow along or look for more detail or laughs or horror, I keep a build log in a google doc here:  It's super long, but often updated daily What follows is a brief summary of the keyboard development work between July 2022 and April 2023.  I'll leave out the business analogies ( continuous improvement aside ).  For the curious, the 'mk13' ( mark = old British engineering thing, I think? ) indicates the thirteenth time I started from scratch - and the maths-inclined am

tl;dr Built a custom keyboard cuz I have weirdo nerve pain issues.   Learned a lot cuz I failed a lot.   Maybe 'do it right the first time' is a bad frame of mind.   The keyboard ended up being kinda nifty.   It has lights, and a trackball, and QMK, and it helps my issues.   \o/ ( tl;dr is internet lingo that means, too long; didn't read ) Pain as a key ingredient An old proverb says, 'necessity is the mother of invention', and that is how this story begins. Over the last few years, age or stress or something has caught up with me and I developed the need to change my human-to-computer interface.  Mousing changed to trackballing.  The traditional keyboard was swapped out for an ergonomic, and then split keyboard.  Complicated multi-finger-and-hand key combinations were replaced by single keypress macros.  And yet more was still needed. It's often said that change only happens with pain - indeed, the organizations many of us work in seem to apply this as law - an