To Live & Learn

A workplace disagreement became much larger than it needed to be because management changed a process without meaningfully including me, refused to discuss the consequences, and then preserved the same management structure after I reported that trust had been destroyed.

The original disagreement was manageable.

What happened

I saw project work that needed to be captured, so I added stories.

I believed I was following the team’s working process and helping move the project forward.

Another senior engineer and management saw it differently. They believed the work should have gone through that senior engineer first.

I understand that perspective.

Maybe the other engineer felt bypassed. Maybe management wanted clearer ownership. Maybe they believed centralizing the work would reduce confusion.

Management had the authority to change the process.

The problem was not that they made a different decision.

The problem was how they made it.

What changed

Management decided that, going forward, the work needed to go through the other senior engineer.

I was told about the new process after it had already been decided.

I was not meaningfully included in formulating it.

I was not given a clear explanation of what part of the previous process I had misunderstood or violated.

Management also did not define what needed to go through the other senior engineer.

That left basic questions unanswered.

Did every new story require approval?

Did every clarification need to be reviewed?

What decisions could I make independently?

When was consultation required, and when was approval required?

The process changed, but its boundaries were never made clear.

Why I disagreed with it

I had two concerns.

The first was about autonomy and professional development.

As a senior engineer, part of my role was learning how to identify gaps, exercise judgment, make decisions, and help move work forward.

The new process restricted that autonomy.

It transferred judgment and decision-making from me to another senior engineer without clearly defining which decisions I was still trusted to make.

That affected my growth.

Judgment develops through use. Decision-making develops through responsibility.

If those responsibilities are restricted without clear boundaries or a path forward, development slows.

My second concern was operational.

If engineers do not know what requires review, the safest response is to route everything through one person.

That creates a bottleneck.

I would have gladly discussed both concerns.

What happened when I tried to discuss it

Management did not want to have that conversation.

They refused to hear anything I had to say.

My continued attempts to discuss it were interpreted as resistance, argument, or an attempt to win.

That created a trap.

If I stopped raising the issue, management’s interpretation of what happened remained unchallenged.

If I kept trying to explain, my persistence became evidence that I was the problem.

I thought I was dealing with a communication problem, so I kept trying to communicate better.

But the problem was not that I had failed to explain myself clearly enough.

The problem was that management had decided the conversation was over.

What I learned

The original disagreement was not too large to repair.

Teams disagree about ownership, workflow, and decision-making all the time.

What made this irreparable was the process used to resolve it.

Management made a decision that directly affected my role without meaningfully including me.

The new process restricted my autonomy and created an undefined dependency on another engineer.

When I tried to discuss those concerns, my attempts were treated as resistance.

When I later reported that the process had destroyed trust, the same structure remained.

My mistake was continuing to treat the situation as a communication problem.

I kept searching for a clearer explanation.

I should have recognized sooner that the refusal to engage was itself the answer.

The lesson is not that management must agree with every concern.

The lesson is that fair leadership requires a real opportunity to raise the concern before the decision is treated as final.

Expectations should be clearly defined.

Restrictions on autonomy should have a clear purpose and scope.

Dependencies should have a fallback.

And when an employee reports that trust has broken down, requiring more communication through the same structure is not repair.

The original conflict was manageable.

Being excluded from the solution made it larger.

Being treated as the problem when I tried to discuss it destroyed trust.

Preserving the same structure after I reported that trust was gone confirmed the outcome.

I was not being heard.

I get asked a lot how I lost 20+ pounds. I'm still in the process of losing 10 more pounds for a total of 30 pounds (or 13% of my body weight).

I very much like the phrase find out what the cost is, and then pay it. Please understand that my perspective is from a man in their 40's that swims 4 times a week for 45 minutes each time. I burn around 700+ calories per swim. I also do an optional pushup, pullup, situp, and squat routine (without weights) once a week. If you workout less per week, this method will help you either way. You just have to adjust the math to account for your net calorie burn.

The point is that for me, the change was mainly my diet. I'm a very pragmatic person. So for me losing weight is hard yet simple. It's basically another way of budgeting. To lose a pound per week you need to burn 3500 calories per week. I'm 6'2" in height and weigh 210 pounds to date. To maintain my weight I need to eat around 3000 calories per day when I workout, or 2300 calories when I don't workout. That means my net calorie intake per day needs to be negative 500 calories. In other words, my 2500 calories when I workout or 1800 calories when I don't workout.

When you factor in drinking wine and eating with friends on the weekends you have to add another 1000 calories per day (I'm including the alcohol calories). I found it very difficult to eat less than 1800 calories per day, so my solution is to add a fasting day or broccoli monday (see more info below) as an alternative to fasting. The point is to account/burn that extra 1-2k additional calories you consumed on the weekend.

Here is the cost:

I lost around 14 pounds (or 6.1% of my body weight) by meal prepping twice a week. I researched and selected about 10 meals of around 500 calories that I could prep within 45 minutes. I make about around 5 meals during each meal prepping session. i.e. Breakfast burritos, chicken/black rice/broccoli, salmon/black rice/broccoli, and fish tacos.

For breakfast, I prep a half a cup overnight oats or muesli. I warm these up with blueberries in the microwave or have them cold with a half a cup of greek yogurt.

For healthy snacking, I'll have popcorn (i.e. Himalayan Pink Salt Lesser Evil Popcorn), lara bars, nuts (cashews/almonds), or a couple of pieces of healthy bread slices (i.e. Dave's Killer Bread) with almond butter.

I also have a 35 calorie green juice from Clean Juice nearly every morning.

To lose the rest of the weight (the other 16 pounds or 6.9% of the weight) I'm relying on what I call Broccoli Mondays. This is an alternative to a 24 hour fast, due to wanting to workout that day. I eat as much steamed broccoli with lemon as I want until 5pm. This is 12 hours from the time I wake up. At 5pm I'll eat a full 1000 calorie meal (equivalent 2 two of my prepped meals).

Important to note, that the first month of doing the meal prepping I was hungry all the time. This is why healthy snacking is critical. After a month, the continuous hunger went away. I've always loved to eat, so eating less was a struggle at the beginning. My advice is to go all in for a month and watch the results. After a month decide if you want to continue. I'm 99% confident this will work for nearly everyone.

Once I reach a morning weight of 200 pounds. Morning weight is weighing yourself first thing in the morning when you wake up and haven't had anything to eat or drink yet.

Further Context of Why I decided to lose the weight:

I went to a consult with a surgeon concerning my umbilical hernia on July 27, 2022. Surgeon stated my hernia was small at the moment and could wait for probably another 5+ years before it would have to be removed. But, that I was obese at 6'2" and 230 pounds. He was concerned that mesh used to repair the hernia would tear at my current weight. He advised I lose 30 pounds, but that the mesh should hold at a weight of around 215 pounds.

I've never been called obese in my whole life, so this news came as a shock. I've always been somewhat on the thin side. I swim 4-5 times a week and I'm 44 years old as of this post.

Expert Opinions:

Warren Buffett thinks investing in S&P 500 over 30 years is a good idea to be completely hands off.

Michael Burry of "The Big Short" warned the boom in index funds and ETFs is a dangerous bubble. Not sure if Michael Burry is right, but the US equity market is getting crushed this year. S&P 500 Will probably see an additional 20+% drop in 2023.

Burry said the passive-investing trend is hurting small-value stocks and shareholder activism.

Passive investing has removed price discovery from the equity markets.

So much money going into index funds leads to unsustainable valuations. In other words, price setting without fundamental security analysis means those stocks are overvalued on price and risk.

Ray Dalio thinks stock market will probably see an additional 20+% drop in 2023.

Wall Street legend Peter Lynch said passive investors are missing out on market-beating returns.

Can I use these expert opinions to my advantage?

Do I know with data what general economic cycle we are in (Growth, Recession, or transitioning to growth/recession)?

Can I use the economic cycles to adjust my investing strategy?

Will these adjustments result in better returns?

Why:

I want to be able to retire quicker. I only want advice from people with lots of skin in the game and a long successful track record (someone like Buffett). Being aware of Loss Aversion Bias (losing hurst more than winning), I don't want to lose 25-50% of my total portfolio value during downturns/recessions.

How:

Medium term investing strategy (3-5 years) and pivot depending on medium term market conditions. Medium term takes advantage of Michael Burry's concerns. It invests in small and large caps during growth periods, and sells most index funds during plateau periods. Medium term investing is better than hands off investing because it will provide better returns and has a feedback loop. That feedback loop will help adapt/adjust methodology.

What:

Uses only Vanguard etfs. Uses my modified DCA strategy to buy more during downturns and less during upturns. When the equity market is over-leveraged, ladder selling most of your growth portfolio and pivoting to defensive etfs. When in Growth stage pivot to US small and large cap growth etfs.

What this strategy doesn't do:

This plan/strategy will not protect you against Black Swan events. The only thing that can protect you against Black Monday or unpredictable (and perhaps catastrophic) events is betting against the market on a regular basis. I considered double and triple leveraged short etfs that bet against S&P 500. The problem is that you can lose a lot of money holding these etfs waiting for a black swan or recession event. I thought the equity market was overvalued since 2018. We had a Grey Swan event in 2020 (aka pandemic), and a recession in 2022-2023. That's 2 years of negative returns to pandemic and 4 years of negative returns until recession. It's too long to be holding put/short positions.

It doesn't invest in international stocks. Vanguard has large cap VSGX and small cap VSS international funds. I will keep an eye on these, but they haven't performed very well when compared to their US counterparts ESGV and VBR/VBK

What this strategy does do:

You don't have to become an active investor. Meaning, you don't have to dedicate tons of time reading and doing financial analysis on stocks. On the other hand, it does require a bit more time invested understanding economic cycles. You have to recognize White/Grey Swans, and economic downturns on the medium term horizon.

Feedback loop. Track monthly performance. Re-evaluate and adapt every few years.

Be flexible: In practical terms, an investor should always be ready to sell if an investment thesis is broken. The way a bull case fails to deliver can take many forms and should be based on the original thesis. Let my losers become a small part of my portfolio by not adding to them (doing less of what doesn't work). And I let my winners compound into a large part of my portfolio without interruption and add to them (doing more of what works).

Will lose considerably less money during correction/bear/recession/depression economic environments. During bear markets or recessions the S&P 500 will lose 25-50% of its value as the market corrects from overvalued to fair value. (i.e. 2008-2011, or 2020-2023)

Will make better average annual returns than S&P 500 during growth years (i.e. 2012-2018). During growth stages the majority of your portfolio will be in small and large growth cap etfs (VBK/VONG). S&P 500: The average annualized return since adopting 500 stocks into the index in 1957 through Dec. 31, 2021, is 11.88%, Adjusted for inflation, the historical average annual return is only around 8.5% (using CPI)

Will make less returns during transitionary years (i.e. 2000, 2007, 2019). These are the years that you're transitioning from aggressive to defensive portfolios. From Small Cap etfs to defensive etfs (Utilities, Gold, Energy). Not all recessions are the same so only shift to oil/energy if the recession has strong inflation characteristics (i.e. current stagflation recession versus real estate crash of 2008).

Risks:

Black Swan events. Unpredictable and perhaps catastrophic events. Small caps will lose a higher percentage than big caps during catastrophic events.

How do I make this investment resilient and then anti fragile? How can I better tolerate volatility?

Keep cash. Feels great to buy during recessions. Also, buy dips during growth periods. Feels great to have cash when the market is going down.

Use modified DCA.

Let my losers become a small part of my portfolio by not adding to them (doing less of what doesn't work). And I let my winners compound into a large part of my portfolio without interruption and add to them (doing more of what works). Feed the etfs that do better than other etfs.

Be flexible: In practical terms, an investor should always be ready to sell if an investment thesis is broken. The way a bull case fails to deliver can take many forms and should be based on the original thesis.

What do these stages look like:

Growth - 45% Small cap growth VBK, 45% Large cap growth VONG, 10-15% in Cash for investments.

When coming out of recession (think 2011 or 2025): 80% VBK, 20% VTEB

When growth is in high gear (aka Buffett indicator hits 1st overvalued standard deviation) (think 2015 or 2028/2029): Ladder sell half of VBK (up to 40% of total portfolio), sell half of VTEB (10% of total portfolio), then use cash for modified DCA buying VONG.

Growth to Defensive Portfolio

Buffett Indicator severely overvalued (two standard deviations out or more than 145%): Sell all VBK, Ladder sell most of VONG (Place VONG limit sell at 20% loss, just in case). Keep 10% of portfolio total in VONG. The VONG position is to take advantage of the dumb money during transition periods. Sell VTEB if interest rates are low and fed is expected to raise them. Don't sell VTEB if interest rates will stay low. Only Buy/Sell VTEB in non-retirement accounts.

With cash proceeds, buy VPU (up to 40% of total portfolio).

Recession - 50% in cash, 40% Utilities (VPU), 10% in VONG.

When Buffet Indicator is fair to undervalued, use modified DCA to buy VBK (up to 80% of total portfolio). Keep 20% in cash.

Alternatives:

Why not invest in Berkshire B stock or Vanguard total market index fund(VTI)? S&P 500 index had done better than VTI and Berkshire in the past 10-20 years, and then you're investing in a lot of companies you don't want to invest in: Tobacco, Kraft, Oil, McDonalds, Coca Cola, See's Candy. Do you trust Buffett's successors to be as good as Buffett? Buffett has also said that if he had less money to manage he'd invest in small and micro caps. He's stated he could make 30-50% annual returns at that level.

How about the Golden Butterfly Portfolio? Excellent defensive portfolio, but lags behind during growth years.

Instead of a portfolio that does all in all market conditions, you need one that adjusts to the specific conditions.

Sam, from the Financial Samurai wrote an excellent blog on how asset allocation depends on risk tolerance. I highly encourage everyone to read it. It'll give you an idea what your stock to bond portfolio ratio should be according to your risk tolerance.

Synopsis of Sam's Article. Bonds have returned an average of 5.4% annually over the past 90 years. Bonds are considerably less volatile than stocks. During corrections, bear markets, and recessions, stocks generally drop between 10-50%. As you get older you may become less and less comfortable with the risk of your investment portfolio losing 50% of its value. For this reason a good stock to bond mix will help curtail some of that volatility. Your annual return will be smaller, but you won't lose as much in the recessionary years.

There's an asset allocation rule of thumb for people that have a set it and forget it attitude towards their finances. That rule is that your allocation should equal your age. So if you're 40 years old then your investment portfolio should be 40% bonds and 60% stocks.

In addition to Sam's article, there's been a lot of talk about the Golden Butterfly portfolio. This portfolio allocation is 20% each into Total Stock Market, Small Cap Value, Long Term Bonds, Short Term Bonds, and Gold. Data on this type of portfolio is very interesting because it seems like the Golden Butterfly gains nearly as much as more risky portfolios while at the same time protecting you from the downside risk/loss.

I've recently started investing using a strategy that is similar to the Golden Butterfly portfolio. The main difference is that instead of investing in Gold, I'll invest into fine wine through Vinovest. I'm also planning on investing in RE rental properties, once the eviction moratorium and mortgage forbearance programs expire.

Questions:

Am I getting the most out of my investments?

Are my investments making more or less than the automatic 401k's in the S&P 500?

Should I self-manage or robo invest?

Story: What is Dollar Cost Averaging - DCA ?1

It's an investment strategy where you make equal monthly investments/payments into an index fund (or a few index funds).

The concept is that the money buys more stock when the price of a stock or fund goes down and less stock when the price goes up. As an example let's say you invest $500 a month, every month in Vanguard FTSE Social Index Fund Admiral Shares

This strategy is great for smoothing out volatility in the market.

Referenced Info:

The idea for this blog came from Putting Dollar Cost Average on Steroids (It's behind a paywall)

Better DCA

Putting Dollar Cost Average on Steroids (aka DCA Plus)

The stock market generally goes up 68% of the time, and goes down 32% of the time on a quarterly basis.2

The MDCA strategy is to invest 2-3x ($1000-$1500) your normal investment amount during down months.

On up months you could skip the investment until you catch up, invest the original amount, or invest less. (i.e. $250)

This strategy benefits the most from volatitility in the market.

It's difficult to predict how much better MDCA will perform as it depends on the time frame chosen.

Better DCA

Sam from financial samurai blog describes a modified DCA where in addition to the monthly investments he will re-invest when the stock market is down more than 1% in a day or down 1% from his last monthly investment.

He will also lower his monthly contributions to be 50% less when the stock market is up from month to month.

Analysis

Using data from a long running S&P index fund, SPY, I was able to ascertain that Better DCA outperforms DCA Plus by about 3-4% and DCA by about 6-7% over the past 20 years.

From 2018-2020 the year over year return on your money was 1-2% in the SPY index fund. This strongly suggests that money invested in SPY (or SPY like investments) should be re-allocated to higher yielding investments and/or cash.

Asset Re-Allocation

The Buffett indicator measures total market capitalization to GDP. It used as a broad way of assessing whether the country’s stock market is overvalued or undervalued, compared to a historical average. Latest Buffet Indicator Data

In combination with implementing a better DCA strategy, I also re-allocate a percentage of my assets. Since 2017 I've been selling 10% of my market investments every year that the Buffett Indicator3 states that the stock market is significantly overvalued.

I re-allocate that money to either paying off debt/mortgage, real estate investments, or fine wine investments. Sometimes I'll move to cash so I have dry powder for implementing the better DCA strategy.

Chen, James. Dollar-Cost Averaging. Investopedia (accessed 2021) ↩︎

Carlson, Ben. 2015. Playing the Probabilities. A Wealth Of Common Sense (accessed 2021) ↩︎

Startling percentage of the adult population literally has no smart friends to help them in their quest for success and happiness. 1

What I learned:

Success causes passion more than passion causes success.

Manage your energy instead of being passion driven.

Systems over goals.

Adopt a practical illusion (Author chose to imagine that the book would do well because that illusion was highly motivating. It increased his energy.)

Guidance:

The most important form of selfishness involves spending time on your fitness, eating right, pursuing your career, and still spending quality time with your family and friends. Exercise, food, and sleep should be your first buttons to push if you’re trying to elevate your attitude and raise your energy. taking care of your own health is job one. your second-biggest priority—is economics. That includes your job, your investments, and even your house. the third ring: family, friends, and lovers. Good health and sufficient money are necessary for a base level of happiness, but you need to be right with your family, friends, and romantic partners to truly enjoy life. next rings are your local community, your country, and the world, in that order.

The best way to increase your odds of success—in a way that might look like luck to others—is to systematically become good, but not amazing, at the types of skills that work well together and are highly useful for just about any job.

The smartest system for discerning your best path to success involves trying lots of different things—sampling, if you will. For entrepreneurial ventures it might mean quickly bailing out if things don’t come together quickly.

There’s one more pattern I see in successful people: They treat success as a learnable skill. That means they figure out what they need and they go and get it. failure is your friend. It is the raw material of success. Invite it in. Learn from it. And don’t let it leave until you pick its pocket.

Author states: Affirmations only worked when I had a 100 percent unambiguous desire for success.

Happiness formula: Eat right. Exercise. Get enough sleep. Imagine an incredible future (even if you don’t believe it). Work toward a flexible schedule. Do things you can steadily improve at. Help others (if you’ve already helped yourself). Reduce daily decisions to routine. 1

I'm committed to inspiring others to evolve so they can live happier and healthier lives. I will measure my success by the amount of happiness I can create for everyone around me (including me).

Jim Rohn said:

Happiness is not something you postpone for the future; it is something you design for the present.

I'm putting in a lot time to learn more about my definition of success, becoming more fulfilled, and accomplishing my goals. My main goal in the next 5 years is to be 10 times happier than I am today (January 17, 2017).

Will I be satisfied once I get there? Yes, but not due to achieving my goal. I will be happy/fulfilled that I've evolved into the person I wanted to be when I started this journey. That won't be the end of my journey towards success but today that seems like an excellent milestone.

I've always enjoyed learning and growing. I'm a bit peeved that I hadn't really looked into developing as a person. I've always worked at developing professionally, but never personally. Perhaps because I thought that personal development just came naturally through experience (which it does albeit slowly). I realize now that this kind of thinking is primitive because evolving personally would've made me more successful professionally.

Today has been very revealing. My thinking that knowledge is the meaning of life has been turned on its head.

How do you grow as a person?  How do you become the person you want to be? How do you make an idea come alive?  How do you achieve your purpose?  

“You must first be able to imagine it.  What kind of attention do you place on your desires?  Imagination is more important than knowledge.  Knowledge is limited.  Imagination encircles the world.1  Logic will get you from point A to B, but imagination will take you everywhere.  Make your future dream a present fact by assuming the feeling of the wish fulfilled.  

That which you feel yourself to be you are.  And you are given that which you are.  Assume the feeling that would be yours were you already in possession of your wish.  And your wish must be realized.  So live in the feeling of being the one you want to be, and that you shall be.  If this assumption about what you’d like to become is persisted in until it becomes your dominant feeling then attainment of your ideal is absolutely inevitable.  

You must first assume the feeling of a wish fulfilled in all aspects of your life.  Don’t allow anyone else’s influence to tell you what is possible or not possible for you.  If you advance confidently in the direction of your own dreams and endeavor to live the life that you have imagined.  You will meet with unexpected success.  It will chase after you.  

If you can place into your imagination what it is that you’d like to attract and begin to feel it.  You will start retraining your unconscious mind.  Your subconscious mind responds to what you suggest to it.  96-97% of everything that you do is done as  result of your subconscious mind.  And when your subconscious mind gets programmed it responds to whatever it is your conscious mind has placed into it.  This is the secret and the mystery.  You are the creator.”2

Albert Einstein. 2016-04-10. Retrieved from http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/01/01/einstein-imagination/ ↩︎

Being in the software development you often hear some type of O expression when someone is talking about an algorithm.  Given that I don’t have a computer science background I always seemed to ignore what it meant.  Recently I decided to dig into the topic and get a better understanding.  Turns out it’s a fairly simple concept.

This is how I learned it:

- What log in math means: https://www.mathsisfun.com/algebra/logarithms.html

- Video explanation with examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6mKVRU1evU

Something that I've encountered over and over in my life is misinterpretations of my words or intentions.  I used to think this was because I wasn't from the mainland US, but I've now seen how it's not a mainland thing.  People misinterpret things communicated to them all the time. One of my defining traits is I'm into personal and professional growth so I wanted to write down and learn from an argument I got into recently with a friend.  

Over dinner my friend shushed me because she was upset that I said "I'm going to put that one in the vault" meaning I would remember this moment.   The moment was amusing to me because we both talked or referenced a specific food on the table and we interpreted it differently.  I’m a very independent person so being shushed didn't sit well with me (this caused the argument).  I don't like anyone to dictate when or where it's appropriate for me to talk/speak.  I'm not a child and I refuse to be treated as a child.  Unfortunately she interpreted my "I'm going to put that one in the vault" to mean that I was going to remember something she said and make fun of her at a later time. 

One of the reasons she formed this thought is because the previous evening she had said that "you don't want something if you're unwilling to pay for it" in this case referring to sports and/or ESPN programming on TV.  The next morning after her "you don't want something if you're unwilling to pay for it" comment when I'd had time to think about the logic of that statement it hit me how deeply flawed it was or could be.  I decided to point out some flaws of her statement by making a joke out of how they'd received an expensive wine cooler for free and that they wouldn't have purchased it otherwise.  During that time period I had also stated that "I was going to put that one in the vault" which I'm assuming she interpreted as something I would remember and make fun of her.  My wife pointed out to me that my snarky comment could’ve been seen as giving her a hard time.  That’s exactly how it was intended as I thought she was giving us a hard time with the "you don't want something if you're unwilling to pay for it” comment the previous night.  My philosophy on giving shit is you should be able to take it in return.  

Let me start by saying I’m Puerto Rican.  I’m brutally honest and that can sometimes piss people off.  I thought it was just me at first, but my sister and people I know have confirmed that they have the same talent.  

Most businesses see diversity as good/important until they realize what that entails.  The biggest mistake businesses make is that they add people of color to the workforce and expect all new people to adapt to the company’s culture.  The issue with this is that if the culture was built by mostly white people then it’s going to be very different than if the culture was built by a diverse group of people.  In turn, new people of color are asked to adapt and behave similarly to the white people in that environment.  

This quickly backfires as most people of color have different values and cultural norms which can be seen as aggressive and combative by white people.  Conflict can be healthy if the emotion is taken out of it and it’s used to achieve results.  I’m used to arguments and conflicts as it’s part of my cultural norm.  In puerto rican culture there’s no pink elephant in the room.  Everyone speaks their mind. If it causes friction so be it.  

In my experience this tends to make white people feel like they are being attacked or accused of something and that the problem is me.  I can be seen as combative and aggressive.  Usually what happens is most people play the blame game instead of taking responsibility and fixing the issue (which is what I’m looking for).  I’m assuming this is because of the self imposed fear that making a mistake or not knowing how to do a task effectively means they are incompetent (impostor syndrome).  The other outcome is they blame me and assume that I don’t know how to tactfully work out my differences.  Again a mentality of the people of color should act or behave like the rest of us.

The other issue I face is connotation.  It’s hard for people from other countries to understand connotation because phrases that mean the same thing can have different connotations.  For example these phrases all mean the same thing to me: 

childish vs childlike

low standards vs easy to please or low maintenance

judge a book by it’s cover vs perception is reality or personal brand. ( Perception is reality doesn’t sit well with me as it feels like you’re spinning something inherently bad into something good )

I’m working on understanding connotation and ask the people around me to ask questions in order to clarify what I’m trying to say.  This helps me represent the connotation I’m trying to communicate.

Wanted to share something I keep re-learning.  

My wife used to come home stressed out from work all the time.  She would always say “There’s not enough hours in the day to get all the work done I need to do”.  This is code for you have more work than you could handle that day/week.  This should not stress people out, but it does all the time.

On occasion I stress out for the same reason.  Too much to do and not enough time.  In my experience this usually leads to a terrible day.

What I ask my wife and myself in these situations is “Are there any babies dying because your work didn’t get done today?”.  The follow up question to that is “Will the world or the company you work for continue to function if you got hit by a bus today?”.  If no babies are dying and the company will continue without you then you’re ok.  Don’t worry about what’s out of your control.  You’ll make it up on the weekend or next week.

Simplest explanation I’ve heard of the decorator pattern is it’s “used to extend the functionality of a single object without affecting any other instances of the same class.”  The decorator pattern is used to achieving a separation of concerns and is essential tool in the Open/Closed principle.

Here is an example:

require 'delegate'  class Person    def speak      'hello'    end    def age      30    end  end  class LatinDecorator < SimpleDelegator    # modifies existing functionality    def speak      "'hola' means '#{__getobj__.speak}'"    end    # adds new functionality    def dance      'cha-cha-cha'    end  end  person  = Person.new  wrapper = LatinDecorator.new(person)  wrapper.speak # => "'hola' means 'hello'"  wrapper.age # => 30  wrapper.dance # => 'cha-cha-cha'

Most of the information from this blog post came from this blog post.  Writing it in my own blog post helps me reference and learn it a bit faster.

We've all heard the saying:

Good service cheap won't be fast. 

Good service fast won't be cheap.

Fast service cheap won't be good.

This saying fits the software development world like a glove.  Recently ran into one of my mentors who said that his opportunity with a startup didn’t work out because they were looking for a cowboy coder.  This is not a knock on cowboy coders as I’ve been hired to produce features cheap and fast in the past (it didn’t work out well).  Now I know that experienced programmers don’t do cheap and fast.  My mentor handled the situation by stating he was a craftsman and would not compromise his process for speed and business deadlines.

From a business perspective I completely understand that you have a limited budget to survive.  I can’t count the times I’ve heard “Tests, Refactoring, and development of employees doesn’t matter if the company goes out of business”.  This is true, but what happens when you’re still in business.  I got news for you barely surviving means you’re still in business.  There’s obviously a delicate balance on how to operate a business so this blog is not about how to run your business.

In January 2015 I decided to stop paying Comcast for cable TV that's full of commercials.  I know there are tons of articles and reviews on how to cut the cord, but I keep getting asked how I did it.

Here it is (all prices include tax): 

Wireless Routers: Two ASUS (RT-AC68U) Wireless-AC1900 Dual-Band Gigabit Router for $180.00 each ($360 total) from Amazon.  It's works like a dream and it's superfast.  It's fantastic for HD video streaming.  I bought two routers because wireless signal from one room to another greatly diminished.

Cable Modem: ARRIS / Motorola SurfBoard SB6183 DOCSIS 3.0 Cable Modem - (SB6183) Retail Packaging - White from Amazon for $130.  This is so I don't have to pay Comcast $10.00 to lease their cable modem.

HDTV Antenna: Winegard Company FL-5000 FlatWave HDTV Indoor Digital Flat Antenna - Made in USA from Amazon for $40.  This is so I can watch the major sporting events (March Madness, NFL Playoffs, World Series). 

Stream HD Video to TV: Two Chromecasts $35 each ($70 total) for TV in living and bed room.  This is so you can stream HD Video to your HDTV wirelessly.

TV Programming: Netflix and HuluPlus subscriptions.  Netflix has House of Cards and a lot of TV programming from previous seasons.  Hulu Plus has current season programming for most shows.  Both are $8.00 a month each ($16.00 total).  HuluPlus is a better alternative than streaming shows through apps like ABC because there is are less commercials and you don't have to wait a week (vs 1 day) for the show to be unlocked for viewing.

WatchESPN app has an ESPN3 channel that you can stream to your Chromecast.  The Live programming is crap, but you can get most games on replay (which is what I was doing with TiVo anyways)

I was paying an average of $190 a month for Comcast Cable, Internet, and TiVo.  Now I'm paying $75 a month, saving $115 per month from the previous setup.  Since I spent $616, my break even point is 5.4 months (or July 2015).

Blocks are very handy and syntactically simple, however we may want to have many different blocks at our disposal and use them multiple times. As such, passing the same block again and again would require us to repeat ourself. However, as Ruby is fully object-oriented, this can be handled quite cleanly by saving reusable code as an object itself. This reusable code is called a Proc (short for procedure). The only difference between blocks and Procs is that a block is a Proc that cannot be saved, and as such, is a one time use solution.

Procs in Ruby are first-class objects, since they can be created during runtime, stored in data structures, passed as arguments to other functions and returned as the value of other functions.

When you pass a block to a method such as &block below: 

def variable(&block) puts 'Here goes:' case block.arity when 0 yield when 1 yield 'one' when 2 yield 'one', 'two' when 3 yield 'one', 'two', 'three' end puts 'Done!' end

What is actually happening is the block is being converted to a Proc object (using .to_proc) which can be passed as a parameter.

This conversion of a block to a Proc for passing a block to a method using &block is expensive and inefficient.  It is better to use yield within the method or use Proc.new.call when block_given?.  See example below:

def sometimes_proc_new(flag) if flag && block_given? Proc.new.call end end

Conditionals such as if block_given? ensures that the Proc is only created when you actually need it (aka lazy loading). 

I've been diving into the JavaScript world recently.  Today I realized that JS functions are not like instance methods in Ruby.  They are actually more like Ruby Proc objects that you can pass to methods and other blocks.  

Procs like functions are bound to a set of local variables (aka Closures).

On first look, lambdas seem to be exactly the same as Procs. However, there are two subtle differences. The first difference is that, unlike Procs, lambdas check the number of arguments passed.  

The second difference is that lambdas have diminutive returns. What this means is that while a Proc return will stop a method and return the value provided, lambdas will return their value to the method and let the method continue on. Confused? Lets take a look at an example.

def proc_return Proc.new { return "Proc.new"}.call return "proc_return method finished" end def lambda_return lambda { return "lambda" }.call return "lambda_return method finished" end puts proc_return puts lambda_return # => Proc.new # => lambda_return method finished

There's rich teams, then there's poor teams, then there's 50 feet of crap, and then there’s us.  If you play like the Yankees in here we’ll lose to the Yankees out there.

This is my favorite line in Moneyball.  It's when Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt) tells his baseball scouts that the Oakland A's can't think like the Yankees in acquiring/developing baseball talent.  It's interesting that Billy Beane is seen as this visionary who revolutionized baseball.  What I saw was a man who's team was being gutted and was desperately looking for anything that would help him level the playing field of an unfair game (Oakland A's budget is about 20% of the Yankees budget).     

Social enterprises, nonprofits, and bootstrapped businesses are at a similar disadvantage when it comes to hiring tech talent.  We've all heard the chatter that top tech talent is very difficult to acquire and retain.  So how is a company who can't or shouldn't pay $100k+ to their software and hardware engineers supposed to compete with the likes of Google, Facebook, or other venture capital backed companies?

Easy, stop looking for tech talent that is valued by other companies at $100k+.  In other words stop evaluating talent on their experience and likability.  What a nonprofit or social enterprise should be looking for is a band of misfits that is undervalued by the other companies for some reason.

Instead of looking at experience you can look at compatibility.  Instead of looking at "the right fit" you can look at the individual's motivations.  

The first step is to measure your organizational culture so that candidates can be funneled on culture compatibility.  Human Synergistics and RoundPegg provide software and services for this purpose.  My MBA thesis was on the organizational culture of one of the banks where I used to work.  This research gave me some insight into how organizational culture can be measured and analyzed.

The second step is assessing the candidates individual motivations and self awareness.  Why does this candidate wake up every morning and come to work?  When this person looks back how will they measure their life?  Does the candidate's motivations align with the company's vision or are they in it for the money?  What work would you do for free if money and time wasn't an issue?  What are his learning style strengths (auditory, visual, or kinesthetic)? 

Here is an idea on hiring developers who can do the job for cheap: Hire a junior developer (between 1-2 years programming) at $25 an hour and hire a knowledgeable part-time mentor for 4 hours a week at $80 an hour.  Total combined salaries for the year would be $68.6k.  The junior developer's production would increase significantly every month for the next 24 months and he/she would no longer be a junior developer.  One of the most talented programming teachers I've ever seen is looking for this kind of opportunity to mentor apprentices without having to be at a specific location.  Everybody wins!