Earned Lessons

One of the best things you can do for you career at any company and across all your companies is a keep a personal copy of every email where someone says “Good Job”, “Great work”, “Your absolutely right”, and “This team delivered the impossible”.

The purpose of keeping a separate folder for these types of email is two-fold:

1. Every year when you have your annual review its great to add direct attributions that come from your colleagues, peers, and manager complimenting your work throughout the review period. It especially helps if you can counterweight your inevitable mistakes with praises from the CEO on your work on behalf of the company. [1],[2]
2. Every once in a while you will have a difficult day for reasons you can control and many that you cannot. When those bad days happen, having a folder full of affirmations of all the spectacular things your have done before really helps. [3]

If you find you aren’t getting enough compliments and praise then you should either change your approach or change to a role where you can be successful.

[3] “You gave me some really great advice last year. I’ve been saving the praise I’ve received for my annual review. While it’ll be great for that, it’s also just great to have for the occasional work-related rainy day. Thanks, Ruben “  -kim.

Giving technical presentations to curious people is a joy. You work harder to get the facts correct and make it compelling. This is especially true if the audience is unfamiliar with the domain. This presentation was created for high school students who are learning programming

The hardest piece is explaining to them that getting them the “Best” result for a two word query is difficult as it depends on factors that most search engines can’t possibly know. The decision the search engine must make immediately is if my query for “bike repair” means that I want a local bike repair shop or a manual on how to repair my bike. Without the context of what I mean by “bike repair”, the search engine will have to make a best guess based on what other people think are good results. Fortunately, this is working ok now, but with the massive growth of data and types of data this problem will only get more difficult.

Digitizing the “ambient information” of my daily life would likely lead to better search results if the search engine could get the data ahead of my search query. Most of my search engine queries are actually rooted in a conversation I had immediately prior to sitting down at a keyboard to type in my query. If the microphone on my cell-phone, computer or Kindle could transmit that conversation to the search engine, the system may be able to guess what I am looking for before I type anything. A working system would likely return great results, and we would be one step closer to the creation of the science fiction artifact of the “Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer” as imagined in The Diamond Age