Career

Changes In Latitudes…

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Last week was a good week. Given that I was on vacation with my family in Florida, that statement is pretty much a given, but it was still of note. This vacation was our annual week in South Florida at a timeshare we’ve had for years. I have often worked some portion of the week when we’ve gone and I did the same this time. Since I’ve been doing independent consulting, I tend to be hyper-vigilant about time off versus time working. I can’t spend hours on end at the beach without turning into a lobster, so I got in some work during my time back at the room.

I have worked from home for seven years, but have recently gotten more in touch with the value of a periodic change of venue – whether that’s going to a WeWork up in the city or a coffee shop closer to home. It’s a good mental jolt to change my surroundings and have a little background noise. In our post-pandemic world, I think a hybrid work arrangement would be ideal for me. Last week helped solidify that.

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Organizational Muscle Memory

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I’ve had plenty of opportunity to tell my “story” lately. After my initial post that my current position is ending, there has been a pleasantly surprising amount of interest and activity. Others have told me that I shouldn’t be surprised, but I feel like I’ve been fairly heads-down the past six years so it was … Read more

Turning the Page

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It is rare that I use my blog to explicitly blow my own horn. I prefer to write about technology, leadership, and the good works of others, but I find myself in different circumstances now. I learned this week that my current position will be eliminated as of 31 December, 2022. After that, I will be available for my next role. Until then, I am actively looking in addition to winding things down where I am now.

Regarding my next role, I have taken nothing off the table. I am open to consulting engagements or full-time positions. I am also considering starting my own company, which would be a consulting firm with the intent to grow rather than remaining a one-person outfit. I am writing this post because LinkedIn profiles and one-page CVs rarely paint a complete picture, so this is a companion piece that is intended to fill in the gaps.

I have been in my current position for nearly six years. Given the size of the company, it has been a mix of leadership and hands-on technical work. Since we have always been eyeing growth, I skewed toward leadership, because it is important for a company to avoid single-threading functions through individual people as much as possible.

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Life and How to Live It

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I finished my MBA work this week. Grades won’t post until next week, which means my completion won’t be finalized until next month sometime, but I am done. Approximately 18 months of graduate level work done all online, mostly during a pandemic, has come to an end. I have learned a lot that I will put to use in the next chapter of my life and career.

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A Programming Life

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To say that programming saved my life would be overly dramatic. Given that I started programming at an age where most of us are prone to drama based on the ebbs and flows of hormones, a dramatic reading of my first forays into programming would be forgivable. But, while programming didn’t save my life, it … Read more

Hello, Discipline, My Old Friend

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It wasn’t that long ago that I was “always on” in terms of work. There is a certain ethos in the DC area that rewards that outlook and I was fairly good at it. This was compounded by the fact that I was a partner in my company and the buck always stops with the owners. Therefore, you always answered the phone/email/text/DM. A few years ago, I began to realize that this approach wasn’t serving me well over the long haul, especially in terms of my health.

What I needed to do was get reacquainted with discipline. Because I had fully bought into the idea that a business owner is never “off,” I had allowed discipline to atrophy. When all 24 hours of each day are available to accomplish tasks, then “close of business” means “before 11:59pm.” If you make your deliverable before the person you have committed to shows up for work in the morning, it counts.

There are obvious problems with this approach. First, work is always lingering in the background. Second, you are never fully engaged in any activity (including work). I coached soccer games, ran practices, and many other similar activities, but the block of code that I couldn’t quite finish before heading out to practice, or the proposal inputs due by midnight were never far away. Conversely the practice, or board meeting, or dinner party was always lingering in my mind when I should have been focusing on a proposal or my code.

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Evolution and Leadership

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My first management position was at a restaurant. It was a chain steakhouse in a one-horse town in Maryland. A few months into that role, I was the sole manager on duty for a weekend night shift that was going poorly.

Feeling my frustration mounting, I did the most mature and leaderly thing my 19-year-old mind could think of – I tipped over the break table, causing everything on it to crash loudly to the floor.

I felt a momentary rush of power as people scurried away from my obvious anger, setting off to do whatever they could do to right the sinking ship that was this shift. Word apparently spread quickly throughout the staff because, before I had walked another ten feet through the kitchen, I was confronted by a member of the waitstaff.

Louvre Museum [Public domain]

I forget her exact words, but they boiled down to “You’re being an idiot. This is your shift. If you want it fixed, go fix it or find another job.” She was right, and jarringly so. I’m pretty sure I didn’t fix that shift, but I never flipped a break table again in my restaurant career. Thus began a lifelong interest in leadership and management.

I should also note that, several years later, the woman who confronted me agreed to marry me and we will celebrate 25 years of marriage next year.

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Miles to Go

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This blog started as my lifeline. Fifteen years ago, I was working on a project that wasn’t particularly compelling in an environment that wasn’t conducive to collaboration. I wasn’t doing geospatial work and I was worried that it would slip away. This blog was the mechanism that motivated side projects that kept me in touch with geography.

It started out as a technical outlet, with the intent of being the kind of blog that I often found myself searching for. From there, it evolved over time, though I fought that evolution for a while. Motivated by the same fear of losing my technical edge that caused me to start it, I kept a technical focus here even as my daily work became less technical. Eventually, I let that struggle go.

Perhaps because I know what my own thoughts were as I blogged, I can see that evolution unfold. Inadvertently, I ended up documenting the arc of a career in the geospatial technology industry.

And then it just stops.

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