It counts! I remember finally deciding to invest in headphones that I could easily replace the cables first.

Bluetooth for music is great. Bluetooth turning into “why does my headset change to cruddy codecs 20-30m into a meeting” … no so much!

What’s a technology or process change that you’ve really appreciated making everyone’s life easier?

My #1 recommendation is reading https://staffeng.com/book. There’s so much variance between orgs at this level (or worse, implied during a reorg).

One of the things that book helped me with is understanding the lens others view this level as four separate personas. That unlocked for me that you might be getting advice from people expecting something other than you’re going after.

Another lens is the product engineering v corp/cloud security world. They can act very differently and you often find these roles straddling 2-3 unique orgs.

1. Services / customer experience of what your org delivers
2. Threat modeling mindset: look for the big picture so you can help make sure you can help put emergencies and day to day stuff in context.
3. Get real feedback from others to put that judgement in perspective. Sometimes they are missing your perspective and other times you are off base!

Just remember there’s a lot of variance in higher level processes. Read the book above, then read 20 job descriptions for these titles. See if you can understand what they really want from the role.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApPl6ETDr_o

I think it’s amazing how grounded Dave stayed. It also really helped that you could sell records and make $ then.

The closest I ever got to this story was working help desk in 1996. A user called up saying they had deleted the Internet.

Took me a while to understand he dragged “the Internet” to the recycle bin on the desktop.

IReal pro for chord charts and backing practice.

Chord AI is good for “what’s the chords in this YouTube video”

https://www.sheetmusicscanner.com is useful for I have sheet music I want to put into guitar pro on the desktop.

Scan; export as musicml; import on desktop. Cleanup.

8Strummer - getting new strum pattens down can be a challenge and this gives a useful visual

Read, reproduce, understand. Think of how the programmer was solving a problem and left a problem. Did they probably didn’t understand the problems. The synthetic challenges are often a skill to themselves.

Re attention span, consider different expectations. Professional product engagements are often 2 ftes/2 weeks. Getting a few good findings out in that time is the goal.

Sometimes they run out of time on a thread they are looking at. Sometimes they pull on a thread only to find out there’s no way from here. Sometimes years later there’s an insight that x could work.

Building up that last skill is what makes you more effective. Find someone to bounce ideas off of that’s in the learning curve with you.

Cyclist?

You can shove a plastic bag into your jersey and your cash/cards won’t get sweaty. ID and snack cash.