Building Project: Library Step and starting a Nightstand

My lovely wife mentioned that she would like another library step ( a small two step stool for reaching the upper shelves of libraries) for our library as she uses the existing one in her office. We have many many books and book shelves. Since we already had one, I stole all the critical dimensions off of it. It was 3/4” material, about 15 inches tall, two steps about 7 inches deep. I didn’t have any 3/4” material but I did have a bunch of 1/2” maple furniture grade plywood. For the first time, I cut out all of the blanks I needed from the 1/2” plywood doubled and glued them up into approximately 1” thickness though technically it was probably 3/4” since 1/2” plywood is really 3/8”… anyway… I was able to square up the pieces on the table saw and I taped the sides together and did the layout right on the wood itself. I cut most of the profile on the bandsaw, until I snapped the blade by turning too tightly in thick material. I finished the last couple of cuts with a hand coping saw… less fun than you think.

After lots of sanding and shaping I glued and screwed it together using countersunk screws and I filled the screw heads with stain-able wood filler. I stained the whole thing with a dark walnut stain and then clear coated it with a spray clear coat. I’m still getting the hang of stain and how to get it to be even, so in this case I sorta leaned into the flaws I saw developing and went for an antique distressed look. I’m happy with how it came out and it is very sturdy and useful.

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Following on that I decided to make a nightstand for next to our bed to replace a crude old shelf we’ve been using for 30 plus years… I decided that I wanted to make this one more based on joinery and so I designed a nice side table with legs, a drawer at the top, and a shelf in the middle as well as a top that was covered in felt. I did do some drawing for this one since the dimensions were critical and the joinery was going to be complicated.

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The frame is soft maple and the panels are furniture grade maple plywood, the shelf, drawer, and top will probably be sanded pine plywood with the top framed with soft maple. I’m in progress working on it right now, and I’m learning a lot. I’ve seen joinery and such done many times before but this is my first time doing it. I haven’t messed anything outwardly visible up yet which I’m very proud of.

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As part of this project I got a new high quality router and a router table. Excellent addition to the shop and it made a lot of the mortising much easier than it would have been. I’ve got some more wood on order and I need to do the drawer, shelf, bottom and back. I’ll report on progress as it happens.

Management: Change is the only constant...

I’ve been writing a series of posts on management based on my experiences. If you’re starting with this one, you may want to have a look at: https://www.jlgoodwin.com/words-pictures/2020/9/17/management-the-job-of-a-manager

Introduction

A former colleague suggested that I write a post about “change management,” which is a good suggestion. Like most business euphemisms “change management” as a term doesn’t really convey much about what it really represents. I would say it should be more like: “The company is going to do something profoundly stupid/brilliant/destructive/tedious/pointless to you and your team, and it is going to make many of your best team members upset, and you need to try and keep shit together and damp out the reaction as quickly as possible so it doesn’t fuck over the actual work you need to do to run the fucking business that makes the money.” The profanity comes naturally after the first time you go through one of these events. 

I’ll try and reflect on some of the things that seemed to help me when I had to lead teams through changes. Of course there are all kinds of situations that require change (e.g., gaining and losing large customers, growing out of your current process, merging with another company, etc.) that are perhaps less surprising or counterproductive than upper management whimsy, but my conclusions also apply to those situations.

Honesty is the best policy

My first real experience with poor change management was with the first “large” company (about 15k people worldwide) I worked for, after I’d been in my job for about two weeks. All of the orientation presentations had been about how awesome the culture was, how progressive the company was, and how excellent the people were. I attended my first engineering all hands which seemed pretty normal at first. However, the tone of the business presentation started to turn bleak, with phrases like “rapidly declining market share” entering the presentation. Then the head of the division got up and started their presentation; it was pretty unintelligible and it was unclear if it was positive or negative. The phrase “we’re not considering a layoff” was spoken and you could hear a pin drop. It reminded me of the Zen Koan: “Don’t think of the white horse.” How the fuck can you make that statement without having considered a layoff?

Needless to say, within that quarter, layoffs of ten percent were announced. The layoffs really freaked out the long time employees, who had worked there while it was raining money. People and projects just sorta disappeared without any comment or explanation. It took a toll on other projects that had been teetering near failure as well.

The first thing I would recommend is to share everything about the impending change with your team as completely and as soon as legally possible. Certain things like acquisitions and layoffs can have legal constraints, so do what you can, when you can. Don’t try to spin; tell your team what you know and what you don’t know. Tell them what you have been told about the justification for the change. It will be tempting to critique the change in front of your team, but I wouldn’t recommend that. You have a responsibility to the company to sign up and support the change. If it is really so odious that you can’t bear it, you should quit. 

Talk to the most important members of your team and get their perspective on the change. You should acknowledge their concerns and do your best to correct them if they are extrapolating future events or are attributing intent that they have no evidence for. If you see a trend in the reactions, you should address those in your next team communication. If there are concrete problems that need to be addressed, be open and direct about prioritizing their importance and fixing them.

Limit the blast radius

Work with your managers and/or senior employees to try and figure out a response to the change that minimizes disruption. If you can limit the number of people affected, limit the duration of impact, limit the product scope impacted, or all of the above, then you will help your team get past the change faster. In some cases where the change is really just tedious busy work, you may be able to come up with a pro-forma compliance response and save everyone a lot of time. Resist the urge to immediately restructure the team significantly to address the change. Be tactical at first and then, if the change looks permanent, make more structural changes.

If you have to cut, cut

Later in my career, I was working at a very small company after spending more than a decade at a very, very large multinational company (hundreds of thousands of employees). I was really enjoying having virtually everyone I worked with in the same room and just cranking out code. I came into work one February morning and I immediately knew something was wrong: My boss greeted me at the door. This was very unusual because he never left his crypt before ten or eleven in the morning, and I usually arrived at work somewhere around eight-thirty. And he was definitely not the type to greet you at the door. He summoned me into his office and informed me that they were cutting the company down to just an essential core, and that I was part of that core. I sat there all day watching people arrive, get greeted, taken to the office, and either stay or be walked back out.

In some ways it was fairly well handled; many of the folks that were removed from the engineering side weren’t really the best team members and I was sorta relieved to see them go. On the other hand, immediately after the layoff, on top of what we were already doing, we started working on random projects under the capricious leadership of our CTO. Regular projects started to drag out, the random ones went through a weird escalation of frantic activity followed by abandonment. I finally realized that they were some sort of corporate “forbidden dance'' with potential buyers for the company. It could have been made clearer what the CTO wanted because we weren’t a public company. 

Finally, we were acquired by a large multinational corporation in a deal where they wanted the engineering team but not the product. They sold the product and the rest of the company to a consulting company to help cover some of the acquisition costs. I came full circle through these changes right back to being an engineering manager at a gigantic company, except now my entire team was in another country.

In the case of a cost-based layoff, you should look carefully at your team and think broadly about who the team would be better without. In some cases it might be the very senior member of the team that everyone thinks is untouchable. In many cases these folks are trying to retire on the job and are actually a corrosive force on the team holding back newer, more productive team members. The point is to try and make your team the best possible team at the new size. Sometimes this is just a process of limiting the damage, sometimes it is an opportunity to make a needed change. You should aim to have your team be more balanced, more diverse and inclusive, and still effective after the layoff. If your team is too small to handle all of their projects after the layoff, you should work to kill some projects and reduce scope.

Use the disruption to your advantage

If the change is a large one then you should look at including changes that your team has been planning at the same time. Disrupting the team once is better than a chain of disruptions covering more calendar time. All changes tend to damp out in about the same time so bundling them makes sense.

It is not the stages of grieving

The first time I had to substantially change and reorganize a team was at a large multinational corporation, where I had just signed up to be the director of half of a large engineering team. The team was a little bizarre because it was made up of what looked to me like three duplicate product acquisitions of various sizes. We were still operating all of those acquisitions’ services, even though none of them was profitable or cost effective. So, I thought to myself, “Well I guess I’ll understand the business sense of this at some point, let’s use this to learn how to be a director…”

A few weeks after I started that job, I got a call while I was out of the office from my boss’ boss. They informed me that they needed to cut the division by more than half and refocus on just one product. They wanted me to lead it and lead the restructuring. I of course didn’t mention at that moment that I had never restructured a team that large, that I didn’t know any of the people, or for that matter, any of the products; sometimes you just gotta go with it. The total cut was from about 150 or so folks down to 33. After I finished freaking out about this mission, I began to figure out a strategy.

I connected with the couple of folks that I knew on the existing team, and asked their opinion on who was the most productive member of the engineering team. As usual, this wasn’t the technical leader or the most senior member of the team. I brought that person onto my restructuring team and we collaborated on selecting who we would need to stay in order to build and manage the new product. 

As soon as the reduction in force was announced, I gathered the remaining team together and we immediately started planning our short term actions and our first release. I did a lot of the planning with most of the team in the room, which a lot of folks thought was crazy and would never work. Well, in three months we consolidated and shut down all of the existing services. In one case, we discovered a whole data-center that had never been used since its acquisition, but was costing tens of thousands of dollars a month to generate heat. We launched a new platform on flexible technology that could be hosted in the cloud and the first version of our new product. The cost savings just from the shutdown of the redundant platforms and the shift of hosting covered all of our engineering costs for a year.

The team coalesced quickly because we had immediately established a release cadence, new leaders on the team had to step up and learn quickly, the challenges focused everyone, and there was very little wallowing in the massive change they had just experienced. Everyone was on the inside of all of our plans and requirements so they knew what had to be done. Most critically, they felt like they owned the plan and the goals.

Not every one of our choices for team members worked out, but in this intense release cadence it was easy for managers to see who wasn’t contributing. We made additional changes and hired new people to the team to fill gaps.

You’ll see advice that says there are stages to change management and the stages they quote are based on the apocryphal stages of grieving: “shock, bargaining, etc.” There are no stages. Every person will have their own reaction to the changes and will need their own amount of time to deal with it and in some cases, they won’t come to terms with it. Don’t buy into those platitudes. Your job as a manager is to move forward, be consistent, be positive, and establish new goals and focus your team on them. If people leave your team, you should support them and replace them promptly. 

A key point in explaining the actions of any company to a team: Do NOT personalize it. Even though the impact is personal, causing changes to their career plans, their job, their role, or even their compensation, the company isn’t doing it to them. The company isn’t their friend or family; the company is a machine that is trying to reconfigure itself to make more money. The perceived damage to the employee is an unfortunate side effect of this reconfiguration. And the company has factored this damage into its consideration of the cost of the change. This message can be complicated by flawed corporate culture that proclaims “we’re family” or ”we support you” or ”we value you as an individual.” These things may be true when individual humans say them, but they are never true when a corporation says them.

Don’t mistake team formation for trouble

After any significant change there will be friction and conflict as people negotiate new roles and new tasks. Don’t overreact; it’s best to let these things play out. It can be disconcerting to see people who you thought were reliable and settled seem to transform into problem team members, but that is just what happens when a human hierarchy is tossed about.

Return to steady state

In general when you’re communicating with your team, you should prepare them for change. Don’t create the presumption that things will stay the same for more than a quarter, perhaps less, in an early-stage company. Don’t make overly long detailed road maps with specific commitments going out for years. The Soviets proved that five year plans don’t work. Have high level goals that set a direction and that can be addressed by multiple responses over time. Make short road maps that fit into the planning cycle of the company. Reinforce the notion that these plans might change because the company is dynamic and may need to focus differently or these ideas might fail in the market. 

Within the planning cycle of the company, try to have a cadence and return to that cadence with a new set of tasks and with new goals and priorities after each change. With any luck, you’ll be able to carry forward important goals that you still own from before the change. For example, if your company likes to do quarterly plans, it would be good to make a new roadmap for one or two quarters (maximum) and to plan a couple of releases in the next quarter. The new roadmap might be related to your pre-reorg roadmap or it might be brand new, depending on what changed with your team. The fresh roadmapping process will help your team understand their new mission and begin to focus on it.

Part of the return to normal operations is updating your roles and processes if they’ve changed. Sometimes folks will have new responsibilities and new processes that they are now required to perform. You should as quickly as possible make sure they understand and accept these changes and that you document them and communicate them to the rest of the team. It is a good idea to have a “new organization” kickoff meeting to talk through the whole org and its goals and responsibilities so everyone hears it at least once. Reiterating these changes at future team all-hands meetings is also a good idea; people take some time to really internalize the details.

Summary

You should try to include as much of your team as possible in planning for changes, large or small. People in different roles often bring up key issues that you might not immediately consider in making the change go smoothly. If I had to summarize my approach it would be to communicate clearly, listen to feedback, follow through quickly on changes, and get everyone back to work as quickly as possible. Make sure to always be talking about the job ahead and not about what used to be. Getting your team oriented toward the future will have the best impact on morale and productivity post-change.

Building Project: Completed Library/Guest Room Sofa-bed with Cedar Chest Headboard

A week or so ago the mattress that I ordered for the Sofa-bed got manufactured and delivered. I was able to go on and do the adjustments and tweaks to the project with it in place. After establishing that it fit perfectly and that it would fold around the slat frame as designed I first worked on getting the alignment of the trundle to the fixed frame correct.

I had essentially guessed at the mounting position of the casters on the trundle based on pressing one into the carpet. I couldn’t press hard enough to simulate someone sitting or lying on top of it so I was off by about 1/4” and so the trundle was scraping the carpet after being pressed down with enough weight. I uninstalled it and flipped it over and added strips of 1/2” plywood under the casters and then I used the adjustable feet in the fixed base to get the perfect alignment so that the trundle slides in and out easily.

I then added the pins to the front of the trundle to connect it to the last section of slat frame. This worked great and keeps the slats aligned and they move consistently with the trundle when opening and closing. You can still raise and lower the seat to get into the storage in the trundle and the seat just drops back on the pins. I may epoxy the pins into the trundle at some point but it might not be necessary.

Next, I added the locks on the front of the trundle to ensure that it wouldn’t roll out when the sofa-bed was closed.

Finally, I installed the reading lamps with USB charging ports on either side of the headboard.

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The next thing was to attach the mattress to the slats frame so it would bend the right ways when we closed the sofa bed. I had thought that since it was a sofa-bed mattress it would come with some kind of straps or ties already attached to it, I was wrong. So, plan-B was to order a custom futon cover and my very talented wife modified it by making and attaching ties to the cover at all the positions we needed. I installed D-rings around the sides and top of the slats frame to tie them to. It works great, not pulling too hard but keeping the mattress in place and curved around the slats frame as it is closed or opened.

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So it is essentially complete and in use, we’ve put away the guest bedding in the headboard cedar chest, and some framed pictures and other stuff in the storage under the seat. I may come back and just round some of the outer corners of the slats frame and perhaps do more about the opening/closing process. I think we’re going to see how things go for a bit in order to decide.

I’m really happy about how this came out and how well the design plan worked out in actual implementation. That’s it until the next project!

Building Project: Library/Guest Room Sofa-bed with Cedar Chest Headboard

Whew this was the most complex project I’ve attempted to date, it has a bunch of engineering elements to it, and more requirements for precision. The goal for this project was to build a custom sofa-bed that would fit in the corner of our guest room/library and allow a queen sized bed. I also wanted to provide storage for blankets inside a cabinet in the headboard and also storage under the seat. Finally, I wanted to make it relatively easy to extend and then to put back.

You can see the design drawings that I made below:

The first project was to build the triangular cabinet which fits into the corner of the guest room between two book shelves and provides a head board for the bed as well as storage for bedding and other woolens inside. Note that we’re going to also put USB charging reading lights on top, one on each side. This was challenging to frame because the sides of the triangle aren’t the same length so the angles were 90, 42, and 48 respectively. Cutting these odd angles was challenging as was getting the dimensions just right. Because the case was so large I made it so that it could be built in the shop and then disassembled and then finally assembled up in the room. I’ll say that it is quite overbuilt as it has an internal frame of 2x4’s that are skinned on the outside with 1/2” sanded pine plywood and on the inside with chipped cedar paneling to form a cedar chest. The next project that I do I’m going to try and work on lighter simpler structure, but this is my skill level at the moment and it works for me. I put leveling feet on the base to allow it to sit nicely on the carpeted floor. I primed and painted the plywood panels before assembling them in the room and then I just finish-screwed them on and filled the screw holes and sanded/touched up those areas.

Cutting the hole and fitting the door for the cedar chest was some new router skills that I still need to work on. It came out ok, but I definitely need more practice cutting clean accurate holes and counter-sinks with the router.

Here’s the construction sequence gallery for the headboard:

The second project was to build the fixed base for the sofa bed. This is a U-shaped frame that sticks out from the headboard into the room. It provides the support for the upper part of the bed when extended. The lower end of the bed rides on a trundle that rolls out of the fixed base on one-way industrial casters. This part was relatively easy to build since it was all right angles. I did get a bunch of practice cutting panels out of sheets of plywood using a combination of hand held circular saw and the table saw. I got a lot better at it over the course of this project and I feel much more confident with this skill. I also shifted from painting the panels with a brush to painting them with a 7” roller and that was a huge improvement in both time efficiency and quality of finish. My next project, I’m going to sand the piece after the initial coat of primer since it raises the grain on the plywood and I think I’d get a smoother finish if I did this. However, it doesn’t look bad at all unless you really get close to it and compare it to the professionally built book cases in the library.

The next step of the project was to build the trundle that rolls out of the fixed base and extends the bed. Again this wasn’t too bad in terms of framing. The only complexity was that it is shorter at the back than the front to allow for it to pass under the stretcher that helps keep the base from bowing outward. It is also set up at the height of the casters, about 3 1/2” above the ground. I put in three one way casters on each side. Since they are in the same line they actually help make the trundle move straight in and out. The side panels are full height to hide the casters and make a uniform front on the sofa bed when it is closed. I put recessed handles into the front of the trundle to make pulling on it easier. There is a 2x2 cleat around the inside bottom of the trundle to support a plywood bottom making the interior into a large drawer for storage. The seat will hinge up at the front to allow access.

Finally I built the slat frame that hinges and supports the mattress ( on order, it takes a while to get one…). This was straightforward and constructed out of 1 x 4 pine stock. It attaches to the fixed frame at the top using some nylon webbing ( like what backpack straps are made of ) to allow it to be tethered in a flexible way when folded up but also to not slide off the base when extending or closing the bed. It is tethered in a similar way to the trundle and the back allowing the panel to act as a cover for the drawer that can be opened with the bed extended or folded. It is very firm and stable when deployed or folded and I’m really happy with it. It handles my considerable bulk without too much flex or movement.

I have a few things left to do. Once the mattress shows up I need to do any adjustments to accommodate it ( the mattress is a memory foam replacement sofa-bed wide queen mattress 60 x 72 ). There is currently and issue with the height of the trundle relative to the height of the fixed frame that makes it difficult to extend and close the bed smoothly. I have two adjustments I can make, there are leveling feet on the fixed base which I can adjust and I can also add a spacer under the caster bases to change the height of the trundle. I may also add some small guide wheels inside the fixed base front to help guide the trundle straight when you’re closing it.

I’ll install the reading lights last so that they’re not in the way in case I have to move the headboard case around or do any adjustment there.

I’ll post some final pictures when I do all of that!

Building Project: Shop Expansion

As I mentioned in my previous post I have a furniture project coming up to build a custom convertible sofa bed for our library/guest room. Before that I needed to add some new tools to my shop and give them someplace to live. One important feature is a sliding compound power miter saw station where the front of the bench provides the infeed/outfeed support for the miter saw. The bench will also have a ruler and an adjustable stop for the infeed of the miter saw. Because I was going to build new benches and such I also decided to add more storage. The storage is drawers, shelves, and pegboard to give everything I have a place to live, plus some extra capacity. I’ve never built or installed drawers before so this was also a skills upgrade. See the design drawing below for an idea of what I was shooting for…

Side, top, and front views of new bench design…

The first challenge was ordering all the stock and hardware for the new bench. I had two problems with my order. One was self-inflicted, I ordered the wrong length 2x4s due to clicking on an adjacent item in the online ordering system. The second one was the store’s problem, they omitted half my plywood and that was after a one day delay. The good news is that now I can go in person to the store and so I went and picked up the missing plywood and a bunch of additional 2x4s.

Some of my order…

I set up a temporary miter saw station and my new table saw in the garage which is attached to the shop. This is probably where the table saw will always be used just for space reasons. I got a folding and roll away table saw so it can be out of the way when I’m not using it. Also, the car needs to go in the garage most of the time.

Temporary miter station and table saw station in the garage

The first part of the build was to build the frame of the bench. I actually built it as three independent units and then connected them. Note the lowered section in the middle to allow the deck of the miter saw to line up with the surface of the bench. The miter saw made all the repeated cuts so easy and quick. Also it makes perfect consistent square cuts where I would probably have some “variation” using a hand held circular saw.

One unit of three…

Three units framed and connected… ooh and my first drawer…

You can see my very first drawer in the image above. It was so cool to have a table saw and be able to rip all the sanded maple 1/2” plywood to the right dimension and then to length on the miter saw. I also made the dado in the drawer sides using the table saw, just putting each piece of stock through with the blade set to about 1/4” height and shifting it 1/16” for three passes. I was able to cut the drawer bottoms by just ripping the panels to the right width ( the inside width of the drawer plus 3/8” so it sits inside the dado). I used a very simple butt joint with glue and pre-drilled countersunk 1” screws. The drawer slides are nice 24” full extension slides so it’s easy to get to everything in the drawers. I intentionally set them back from the front of the unit so that there are still clamping surfaces and to protect them from getting sawdust and such into them. You can also see the bench tops which are two layers of 1/2 plywood.

All the drawers installed and the miter saw in it’s new home…

The next part was to add the pegboard on 2/3 of the bench to hang up tools and some shelves on the last 1/3 of the bench to have some open shelf storage. There is also a shelf under the miter saw as well and floor storage under that. I also installed and set up the other tools: drill press and sanding station.

All the tools installed on the bench top, pegboard and shelves as well…

After putting stuff in the drawers and hanging up a bunch of tools, I installed the miter saw adjustable stop and ruler. I built a jig for my router and carefully routed a channel to install it after doing some work to level/flatten the infeed side of the bench. The stop came out great and it largely removes the need to measure and mark when I’m cutting multiple pieces.

Miter saw stop and ruler…

So that’s the whole saga… It took about five days or so end to end and I think it is a good representation of my original design. I’m very happy with the functionality, the machines, and the storage. I’m reviewing my design for the bed project and I’ll probably get started on that in a week or so.

Miscellaneous projects...

I’m about to start a new construction project and it reminded me that I’ve done a few random projects and not posted about them at all… So, here’s a rundown of the small stuff…

Fixed the dimmer that didn’t work well for 20+ years…

In our dining room there was a weird dimmer switch that had a touch plate that was supposed to adjust by sliding your finger on it or something. It didn’t work right for two reasons. First, if you tapped it it was supposed to just turn on the light, it would often fail at this or leave the light flickering on and off. Second, I could find no reliable way to control the dimming with it, it either went full on suddenly or off to flickering… We lived with it since we moved into the house and I kept meaning to have and electrician replace it. Finally I got the courage together to replace the damn thing. It was actually very easy and the instructions for the new dimmer were very clear. The new dimmer is the proper rating for the LED lights in the fixture and had a normal on-off switch and slider for dimming. The hardest part was finding the circuit that this light was on, it wasn’t on anything labeled in our box as “dining room” and turned out to be on the circuit with the basement and some of the outlets in the kitchen ( wtf? ).

A normal functioning dimmer for the dining room…

Fix the split in the front foyer door

Our front foyer door developed a split in the wood near the door knob a few ( 10, 15, who knows… ) years ago. And I attempted to glue it in the past and failed and had since just had some masking tape over it to prevent it catching on things. Don’t judge me. Recently, I cut out the damaged wood, made a patch and glued and fastened the patch in place with brads and sanded it flush with the original door. I even painted it to mostly match.

Got the paper towel off the counter

For a couple of decades our paper towel in the kitchen has been on a vertical dispenser on the counter. I’ve always regretted that dispenser since it was always in the way or behind something. Also, it would move when you tried to pull paper towel off of it. I built a dispenser that could mount to the underside of the cabinet to solve this problem. It is better ( not perfect ) for one handed use, and it solves all the other problems. I used some old book shelf material I had in the scrap pile to build it and I painted it to match the cabinets.

Converted Dana’s bike to grip shift

Even after the complete overhaul and rebuild last year, the shifters on Dana’s bike weren’t working correctly and they were making it hard for her to ride. I got some off the shelf grip shifters and replacement brake levers and replaced the original Shimano stuff. They work great and I was also able to adjust the pull on the brakes to make them a lot more aggressive. The shifters work with any Shimano drivetrain as long as it is a 3x7 setup. I also finally understood derailleur adjustment and was able to dial in the shifting. I got these cool purple grips as well that match the bike frame.

Converted all of the lights in the basement to LED from fluorescent and added a bunch

I have wanted to add more lighting to the basement ( where my workshop is ) and had been dreading trying to lure an electrician out here to do a small job. One day I noticed that there was an old dead fixture up in the joist bay and it was still wired in to the main light switch in the basement. I removed it and got rid of it and converted that wiring to be a switched outlet. I then got these cool four foot LED shop lights that can daisy chain. I was able to add a bunch of them with no issues. Now I can see what I’m doing in the workshop which is wonderful.

I also replaced the old fluorescent bulbs in the existing fixtures with LED conversion bulbs

Next project, shop expansion to do the next next project

After the hall cabinet project I realized that I needed some additional tools to do nicer and more precise projects more easily. I said that I would wait until I came up with a plan for another “upstairs quality” project and then I would expand the shop to do that one. The next next project that came up was to build a custom folding bed/couch for the guest room/library upstairs. It will have a storage chest as the headboard to store bedding and other linens and such. I’ve got the design drawn up and it will allow us to move from a “full” size futon bed to a “queen” size bed in our library. This will be nice for guests and for us since sometimes when one of us has a cold we sleep in there to let the other one get some rest. I’m also going to build some storage into the base as well.

But first I need to expand the shop so I got a nice sliding compound miter saw, a table saw on a folding rolling stand, a drill press, and a belt and disk sanding station. I’m going to build a miter saw bench that will also support the drill press and sanding station. The table saw folds up and gets stored across the room and most likely used in my garage since it won’t be much use in my shop space.

Picture a bench under these tools with a pegboard behind them and eight drawers underneath them ( I really need the storage ) and a nice 30x30 work surface at the end. The front edge of the bench will be kept clear and the miter saw recessed so that it’s deck is flush with the bench top and thus will form the infeed and outfeed for the miter saw. I’m even going to put T-track into the bench top with a removable stop and an embedded ruler on the infeed side for quick measuring and repeated cuts.

Ok, that’s the update, I’ll post about the shop project soon… I’m waiting for materials to be delivered today!

Computer Gaming: Oculus Quest 2

Since I retired I’ve had the time to return to some things that I enjoyed as a kid, one of those is computer games. Specifically VR games using the Oculus Quest 2 VR headset… This thing is impressive, it generates a very immersive visual, tactile and aural experience all in a wireless headset. The hand tracking, environment tracking and responsiveness is incredible.

My eye-hand coordination and reflexes are much slower than my arcade gaming days. This means I need to find games that are fun for a old slow guy. My favorite so far is Gun Club VR which allows you to shoot various kinds of targets in tactical scenarios with all kinds of various guns. The fidelity of the shooting experience is great ( I’m not a firearms person or expert but it feels right to me ) and since there isn’t too much moving around in their scenarios it’s good for an older person with less twitch available. You gain money to buy different guns and to customize them with better ammo, more capacity, stability improvements like suppressors etc…

My second favorite is Robo Recall , in this one you are a representative from the robot company who has to go out into the city and recall ( shoot, blow up, tear apart, throw into a collection vortex ) robots that have gone rogue and are attacking their former customers. This is a very nicely rendered game, the robot characters are really elaborate and the game physics are deep. You can grab robots and tear their limbs and heads off, steal their weapons throw them at each other, use them as a shield sometimes take over their workings and use their built in weapons directly… Huge fun… I’m a little too slow for this game but it is so much fun to play that I honestly don’t care that I’m doing poorly. Sometimes I just go re-play some of the challenges just to enjoy trying different things.

My third favorite is Space Pirate Trainer which someone likened to being a VR version of Galaga/Galaxians and I agree. This game would probably be easier to play if you have a big empty room to play in because you need to be able to duck and dodge a bit without smashing something. I make do in my office with a smaller play area and my scores show it… Each wave of training robots that attack the space platform you are on get harder and harder. There are multiple weapons and power-ups that you can use that help with the more powerful of the bots assuming you have them at the right time. They have a good restart from level function that lets you skip forward to the range of your highest achievement. At least for me it takes some experimentation to figure out which combination of weapons and defenses are going to work so I do end up playing some levels multiple times. But like Robo Recall it is just fun to play the game and the sequences are somewhat randomized so you don’t end up being bored doing exactly the same thing over and over.

I’m working on one other game that is called Apex Construct. I don’t know if I like it yet, it is a story based game and it is fairly difficult and at the moment I don’t know if I’m interested in investing that level of thought to a game in order to solve the puzzles as well as fight the robots… But, it is very pretty and the world is detailed and interesting… I'll report back after I spend more time with it.

Finally a completely different type of game Eleven Table Tennis which is an excellent table tennis simulation. They have AI players that are fun to play with or you can invite friends or find human players on the interwebs to play. I don’t play well with others so I like the AI players just fine. It is a nice workout and you can play it in a reasonably constrained space without anything bad happening. I’m up to the medium AI opponent and I really enjoy it.

I’ve bailed out of a few games along the way. Population One which I’m told is like Fortnite was much too multi-player-multi-tasking-ADHD-get-killed-all-the-time-while-people-talk-about-you for me… perhaps I’ll go back in years to come or not. Arizona Sunshine was frustrating because it was very easy to get overwhelmed and killed by the zombies just because the weapons operation was kinda awkward for me. Also the story was repetitive and boring. Probably won’t revisit this one. Shooty Fruity was a fun concept but the world physics seem broken to me, I’m a great shot in every other game and I suck in this one. If they fixed that I would probably continue to play it.

It’s fun to have some time to spend just messing around with computer games again and it is a great outlet for environmental stress ( you know what I’m talking about).

Electronics Project: (epilogue) IR Light Source for Time Lapse photography

I was able to build a battery pack using two three AA modules wired in parallel ( when you wire batteries in parallel they keep the same voltage but they sum their runtime at a given current ). I got a waterproof junction box to keep them safe outside and I mounted that on the back of the original light source case. I ran the wire through a hole between them and soldered them to the battery leads from the old flat rechargeable battery that was in the light originally which I had removed. The two boxes are screwed together with a couple of 3mm x 5mm (or so) screws with nuts and washers. I also sealed around the box with latex seal/adhesive so it is very secure. Here’s what it looks like inside:

Here’s what is inside the battery case… I attached the battery strap to the case with a small screw

With the batteries out to show the wiring holes and screws…

So, as usual with engineering, simpler is better. I ran a test over night last night and the light source ran all night and into the early morning, plenty of time for what I want to do. When I get an interesting video I’ll post it.

Management: Why become a manager?

I’ve been writing a series of posts on management based on my experiences. If you’re starting with this one, you may want to have a look at: https://www.jlgoodwin.com/words-pictures/2020/9/17/management-the-job-of-a-manager

Introduction

A former colleague who is considering a management role asked me: “Why did you become a manager? Why do people do it?” My first thought was: “Right?! I woke up many mornings and asked myself the same question with a lot more profanity involved.” My second thought was: “Good question. It’s complicated.” I’m going to talk about my reasons and their complexities in case it helps other folks process theirs.

It picked me

When I first got a management role, it chose me. I was nineteen years old and working on a team that was building a microcomputer frontend for a mainframe-based portfolio accounting system, the team lead left; because I was the only other microcomputer programmer at a Fortran based mainframe shop they asked me to be the team lead. To say that I was immature and lacked basic social skills is a colossal understatement. The thing that saved me was good mentors who patiently showed me what to do. All the same, my next several jobs were all individual contributor jobs and I was very happy. 

My next management role happened again in a similar way several years later when I was working for a company that did accounting and estimating software for construction companies. I was the only C/Assembly language programmer at a BASIC shop (yep, real software products were made with BASIC). I wrote the UI, database, and networking extensions for BASIC so it looked and worked better. Our manager departed and because I was the most experienced person I ended up the manager. At least by that time, I was a little more mature and less socially awkward.

I probably wasn’t the best manager in either of these positions, but I certainly learned a lot. Most importantly I learned that my engineering ability didn’t have a lot to do with managing people. I also gained confidence just by interacting with other people, which helped me as an individual contributor too.

It’s a control thing

I started thinking about management as a career path when I was probably fifteen years into my career. I had reached a point where I was a very good engineer (at least the folks paying me thought so) and even though the job wasn’t easy, there wasn’t much mystery or growth in it for me. I’d become much more aware of how companies and teams worked and I started to crave more control. The first few times I sought out management roles it was to obtain more information and to have more influence in order to protect myself and feel more comfortable. I think a thing to mention here is that I went back and forth between management and individual contributor and it didn’t hurt my job prospects at all. In fact, it actually improved them. I would however counsel you to avoid the hybrid role of technical leader and manager. I’ve been there, done that, and I ended up alternating between sucking at one role or the other. The best scenario for these situations is to help hire your technical lead peer and have it be someone you see eye-to-eye with.

I found out that I liked it

A side effect of working more and more as a manager was that I started to try and be good at it. I copied good managers that I had worked with or near, especially my older brother. I also started to enjoy the delayed gratification of team success. It made a lot of sense to use my experience to support a whole group of people with less years and to help them perform better and progress faster. 

It isn’t a coincidence that my maturing as a manager coincided with me becoming a more mature person. As a kid, folks had always seen me as smart but distracted, and never as the leader of anything. Actually, I’m not a joiner either: I’m more of a loner. I found that being a manager was actually the safest place for a loner/nerd/introverted person like me. It allowed me to control most encounters with other people and in the power dynamic I had the upper hand going in. I only had to do a few “performances” as the corporate version of a leader to keep the business folks happy. In reality, I did most of my “leading” one-on-one with folks on my team, which is the perfect-sized interaction for an introvert.

I enjoyed the more subtle problem solving required in management and creating organizations. I had always had a talent for keeping big complex systems in my mind and restructuring them. Human organizations felt very familiar and more challenging since people are less predictable than code. I also liked having the ability to help folks who reported to me to succeed and grow as part of the process. Mentoring is a very satisfying part of being a manager and an effective way to get better as a manager by listening to folks and having to reflect on your own experience in order to respond to them.

Money, power, and problems

As you get higher in level as a manager, your satisfaction from your job becomes more and more abstract. At the end, I did enjoy managing other managers and learning from them and making them into a team to support an even larger number of people. But as you get to that level, you become more and more split in your focus between your own team and servicing the needs of peers and higher level executives. It ends up involving more “performances” that essentially amount to making an executive or peer who is scared about something feel better, or at least feel in control.

Money is certainly a motivation for choosing to become a manager. Later in my career (as I started to consider early retirement as a viable option), I saw that I could level-up faster (and with a bigger total compensation) as a manager than as an individual contributor. I was getting older and the mental and emotional stamina that I could summon for coding under an intense workload (required to earn a lot of money) was definitely waning. There is certainly truth to the phrase “more money, more problems,” in that you trade stress about your individual performance for a lot of stress about the performance of other folks that you loosely control. I developed a good poker face to mask my internal stress about my position as I climbed the management ladder. It would crack every so often, but generally folks thought I had the ability to remain calm in the worst situations. Even though I still experienced a lot of chaos and churn, I preferred to experience it as a manager where I at least was in the room when bad decisions were being made even if I couldn’t prevent them.

Know when you’re done

I knew I’d hit my final level when I got to VP of Engineering. From that level, you can look into the abattoir of executive management without having to spend all day in it, and you either like what you see or you don’t. I didn’t, and since I had no desire to just repeat myself, I stopped. By that time in my life there were a lot of other things that interested me more that had nothing to do with business. I had been planning my exit for ten years and I was in a position to make the final moves to retire.

I hope these reflections help to give you some perspective. I probably should have mentioned earlier in this series that you should feel free to ask me any questions you have via twitter (@jpfxgood), https://www.linkedin.com/in/jpgoodwin/,or comment on this post below. I can’t commit to answer every one directly, but I will be writing more of these essays and I’ll try to address them there.

Building Project: Weaving note desk

My lovely wife Dana took up weaving a little more than two years ago. She is making more and more complex fabrics on her rigid heddle loom. She often needs notes available to follow the complex pattern and she asked me if I would make an add-on for her loom that would hold them in a convenient position. The constraints were to not be permanently attached to the loom and to not be in the way of any of the weaving or the mechanism of the loom.

I came up with a design where would clamp the desk to the leg of the loom stand and have a standoff that kept it away from the knobs and such on the side of the loom. I measured her usual working angle and matched that with the desk surface, about twenty degrees. I created a clamp out of three pieces of plywood and a t-bolt and knob, two of the pieces slot into the front piece and then the t-bold goes through them and pulls them together against the leg. The front plate provides a mounting surface for the standoff and the upright of the desk. I tripled up the plywood ( maple cabinet grade plywood I had left over from another project ) and created a mounting block at the top. I cut that at twenty degrees and screwed the desk surface to it. I added a bottom edge stop to the desk to allow for a tablet to be placed on it in addition to paper notes.

I made a chipboard template of the clamp parts and cut them on the bandsaw, the slots I cut with the forstner bit and a coping saw and finished the fitting with a wood rasp. I used screws to attach everything in case I needed to make additional adjustments in the future. I sanded all the edges and surfaces and put some paste wax on everything to protect it.

It got a test run tonight and it worked great!

Electronics Project: (part 2) IR light controller for time lapse camera

I’m going to call this one a successful failure. I managed to build a circuit that did exactly what I wanted.. Based on the signal from the camera it turned on the IR light source for a predefined period of time and then off again. The problem is that the signal from the camera doesn’t seem to be in sync with the shutter, or this circuit isn’t fast enough, so it doesn’t light the scene when the picture is taken. I tried a couple of other ways to try and make it work to no avail. I even opened up the camera to see if I could find a handy and obvious place to get the right signal. No dice. So, on to plan B which is to build an external battery pack with batteries in parallel that will last the night. I know that’ll work.

The components that I used in this circuit were the following:

• Mini Timer Time Delay Relay .1 Sec to 400 days. 3V 12V 18V 5A. Power on or Off Delay, Cycling and More. from the Timers Shop . This is a very cool component that has a microcontroller, a trigger, a timer, and a relay. It has a lot of modes to control the output in different ways, I’m sure I’ll find a use for it again.

• Taidacent AD620 High Accuracy Low Cost Low Power Instrumentation Amplifier Voltage Amplifier Module Differential Amplifier Single-ended/Differential Small Signal : I needed this to boost the mV signal from the camera to V so it could trigger the light.

• NOYITO Low Voltage MOSFET Switching Module 3V 5V Low Control High Voltage 12V 24V 36V Field Effect Transistor Module: I used this module in the first circuit to trigger the light assuming that the input signal from the camera was on long enough to illuminate things. It basically uses a trigger voltage to turn on another higher voltage circuit.

Electronics Project: IR light controller for time lapse camera (part 1)

I’m a software engineer, I’ve had no training in electrical engineering other than hanging around my electrical engineer brother more than thirty years ago. This has not stopped me from attempting to hack an electronic solution to an issue that I was having. The problem was that I bought a time lapse camera which was supposed to support shooting in darkness with infrared light. Which it does. However, it doesn’t have an infrared light source, so you have to provide one. Getting a battery powered IR light source that will last all night is more expense than I wanted. I found an inexpensive IR light source from Polaroid however it has a one hour run time. I noticed that the camera had a port on the side that looked like a flash control cable port… it was labeled as such in the documentation but there was no mention of how to use a flash, how to enable the flash, etc… writing to the company produced no response. I thought perhaps the cheap light source would last all night if it was only on when I was actually taking a picture.

So I got a cheap flash control cable and cut one end off and stripped the wires and using a multi-meter I found that indeed there was a signal there that was in sync with shutter. I remembered that a transistor could be used as a switch and I wondered if anyone made a module for that which I could just trigger using the output of the flash control wire. And thanks to all the STEM classes and such there is such a module and I was able to wire it up between the battery and the light and make the light go on and off using a 9v battery. However, the voltage from the camera trigger was 1000 times too weak to turn on the MOSFET so I then I remembered a thing called an OPAMP which could take a small current and multiply it by a gain. I got one of those and put it between the camera and the MOSFET. I needed a 5v or better power source for the OPAMP so I put two blocks of three AA batteries in series ( which gets you to 8v ) and the OPAMP board had a handy constant 5V out so I could power everything downstream off of that. This also converts the light into having replaceable batteries instead of internal recharging which is faster and easier because you can use one set and charge one set with no waiting.

I could show that the light was going on now when the shutter ( well really focus and shutter ) signal was on, which was great. I was so proud of myself. Then I did a test. I put the whole rig in sealed up box (no light) covered all the red/green led’s on the boards with a small cover box and set up a time lapse with IR of an old mechanical watch with hour minute second hands. I got…. complete blackness. Turns out that the signal to the flash turns off before the shutter actually opens, makes sense because flash units have a specific flash timing to be on for an amount of time after the trigger.

So, I needed a way to keep the light on after the trigger. I thought about perhaps a discharging capacitor? But it seemed like it wouldn’t have time to charge before the shutter? I searched around and found a cool universal timer module that has a trigger mode. It will turn on it’s output and keep it on for a programmable duration, exactly what I need! And it appears it will replace the MOSFET in the circuit I have. I’m waiting for it to be delivered to try again.

I’ll write up the results in part two.

Cheers!

P.S. I’ll share the parts and where to get them etc… IF I get this to work…

Building Project: Weaving work bag stand

My lovely wife Dana has taken up weaving and now spinning. Both activities require having a bunch of small tools and supplies near at hand. Dana came up with the idea of a collapsible work bag/work table that could sit next to her when she was working and then be closed up for storage. She asked me to make it for her and using some measurements from things that she was already improvising to do this I made a measured drawing to figure out the design.

I had some nice 1/2” cabinet grade maple plywood scraps from the cabinet project so I was able to create a chipboard template for the legs and trace them onto the scrap. I had a nice length of 1” dowel that was long enough to make the handles and pivots. I had also just bought a set of Forstner bits and had a 1” one already.

I cut out the legs on the band saw and they came out perfectly. I cleaned up the notches for the stretcher and drilled the through holes and partial holes for the handles and pivots. I clamped my belt sander in the vice and used it to do the rough sanding and knock off the edges, I’m still learning finesse with power sanders but it is getting better. I did the finish sanding with my palm sander and applied a nice wax finish to all of the wood. I assembled the frame with small screws and wood glue. I’m thinking I need a brad nailer because even the smallest screws are a risk for splitting thin material like this especially into the end grain.

Dana made a cool bag out of the top of a pair of recycled jeans from the collection of fabric she keeps for projects. She also made a canvas platform to provide a removable table top for holding tools handy. I created a simple hook on the band saw that rotates on the handle and keeps the bag closed when it is stored.

All in all I think it came out pretty well.

Building Project: Hallway Cabinet...

I was struggling to get up the enthusiasm to write some code for the Robot Project so I figured I probably needed a different kind of project. I have been looking at the empty alcove in our side hall off the kitchen for years thinking that the space could be much better used. I decided to build my first ever “upstairs” quality cabinet. This would mean having trim and doors and handles and getting painted… a lot of stuff that I just have never done. I sorta knew how to do it from years of watching carpentry shows, but there is a great deal of difference between theory and practice.

I made measured drawings of the whole project and compiled a spreadsheet with a complete cut list and list of hardware and other supplies for the project. I put in a big order from a local hardware store and then waited a week for delivery since everyone is doing home improvements during the pandemic.

I got started in earnest two weeks ago on Thursday with the minimal demolition I needed to do, removing an old shelf and the cleat that held it up and the old hanging bar that was under the shelf. I also threw out a bunch of dusty stuff that was hanging out there. Friday all the supplies came and I got started with building the frame for the cabinet. I now completely understand the face that most contractors make when they see the age of my house, I make that face now. A couple of right angles in that alcove and the rest not so much. It’s fun trying to frame something to be square and plumb so that doors and shelves will work in a wonky parallelogram of a space.

I got the framing done in a couple of days. I had started making lots of noises due to all of the muscles that apparently I don’t use in my other activities complaining. I don’t have a table saw so I had to cut the panels for the interior of the cabinet on the floor in the garage. My knees and back did not enjoy that activity. Also it is not so easy to cut a nice straight line even with a guide using a circular saw and trying to reach across a 4x8 sheet of plywood that is trying to sag and bow to grip your saw blade.

I built a cool jig to drill all the shelf pin holes so that they’d be uniform, I saw the trick on a wood working show and it worked very well. I drilled two panels at once for the facing sides of the cabinet so that they’d all be lined up. I was very scared that I’d have all my shelves wobbling or canted at some random angle. In the end it came out very well.

The trim was pretty straightforward. I did make one significant miscalculation, I bought stock that was about a half an inch less than the top and bottom trim needed to cover. Fortunately in my pile of lumber left over from professional woodworkers who have worked on the house I had some belly molding and was able to use that for the top and bottom trim. I think it adds a nice detail, just like software when you turn a bug into a feature.

The doors, wow, I did not think through the doors enough. I decided that I would do inset doors with concealed hinges because I liked the way that looked. I do not recommend that style of door for your first cabinet project. There is no hiding, it has to fit perfectly and have a consistent gap all around. It takes years of practice to make that kind of door with hand tools and hand held power tools. And most professionals wouldn’t do it that way in any case, they’d have table saws, power miter saws, a router table etc… In the end I made the doors as simply as I could with mitered corners cut by hand and a panel recessed in using my 20+ year old router for the first time. I struggled to account for the amount lost to the saw kerf and ended up with one door slightly small and one slightly big due to overcompensation. I was able to trim the big door on my band saw, the small door I just have to live with a slightly inelegant gap around it.

Painting, I hate painting, I did the sanding, priming, painting, patching the wall that forms the back of the cabinet, primed and painted the wall. I still hate painting, and technically I’m not done, I need to put water based polyurethane on the cabinet interiors when it gets warm enough to have all the doors and windows open while it out-gasses.

Concealed hinges, JFC, there are more flavors of these than grains of sand in the Sahara desert. I ordered one set only to realize that I needed a special version specifically for inset doors. The second set I ordered was even more diabolical, I had ordered three pairs not knowing if I’d need them for these largish doors. I grabbed one set of the three at random and was using it to mock up the installation and nothing was right according to the manufacturers cryptic guide documentation. I realized that they hadn’t sent me the hinges that I had ordered. I said “fuck it” and I created spacers to just make them work. Using an installation jig I got the mounting plates on the cabinet with my spacers. I was about to install a set on the door side and happened to take a second set out of the bag and noticed that they were different. Hinge sets two and three were the correct ones. I had to remove my spacers, recalculate where to drill the mounting hole ( wow Forstner bits, so cool). Fortunately the mounting plate distance was the same for both versions of the hinge. I got the doors mounted and adjusted to reasonable tolerances.

I made the shelves out of recycled shelves from years of old Staples book cases that we’ve since replaced. The band saw made quick work of cutting them to size and I grudgingly painted them.

So, I learned a lot doing this. For example, I now know the names of all the tools I’m going to buy before my next cabinet project. I also have a visceral understanding of the nuances of wood working that my shop teacher Mr. Hill was trying hard to get across to me way back in high school. I’m happy with how it came out and it fits into the house, fortunately I have an old slightly crooked house, so a rustic slightly crooked cabinet doesn’t look out of place.

Art Project: Berlin Blues

This is my second digital art project, with some images, words and music… About ten years ago I commuted to Berlin to manage a team there. I really fell in love with Berlin and I learned a lot there and I miss not being able to visit it. I’m getting better at the tools for doing the audio. I especially appreciate the auto-ducking feature that smoothly fades out the music to allow the spoken word track to come through.

Enjoy…

This piece was inspired by my time working in Berlin ten years ago. Just based on how much I think about it and respond emotionally to the pictures, it had a big impact on me. I wanted to mash up the electronica vibe of Berlin with the blues to try to express the feeling of being an alien there but also weirdly feeling at home.

Art Project: I remember every day

I’ve been working on combining images, words and some improvised music into a digital presentation… The whole process is a WIP but I thought I’d just share what I come up with as I go. I’m still figuring out the tools, the workflow, quality, etc…

This piece was inspired by a theme that I think about a lot, memory. I was looking through images I captured while I was commuting by train. The words came to me while I was looking at them. The music is a set of changes that I heard and then modified and a melody that I played while I was watching the sequence of images.

UPDATE: I thought it needed a bass line so I added one in, I like this version better:

Management: Things I won't miss...

I’ve been writing a series of posts on management based on my experiences. If you’re starting with this one, you may want to have a look at: https://www.jlgoodwin.com/words-pictures/2020/9/17/management-the-job-of-a-manager

Introduction

I’ve been retired now for ten months after a thirty-nine year career in the software industry. I’ve had pretty much every role from software engineer to vice president of engineering. Overall, it was an enormously rewarding career and I’m honestly not bitter or angry about any of it now that it is over. I’ve certainly had periods of bitterness and anger over the years, and there are definitely things that I think are systematically wrong with the industry that I found myself struggling against (especially as a manager). It can be a great career for anyone as long as you know what you’re getting into. Here’s the list…

Being between the team and upper management

I will not miss: 

• Waking up every day thinking about some executive’s expectations of me and my team, the problems I should solve, the deadlines I should pay attention to, the people I need to wrangle, my performance measured against an invisible changeable ruler.

• Having to get people to do things that they don’t want to do for reasons I don’t entirely agree with (or in some cases completely understand). Negotiating the “merely goofy” vs. “the actually stupid and evil” to figure out how much political capital to spend on any given act of inquiry, redirection, or resistance.

• Trying to deduce, from a cloud of barely differentiated requests for my time and my team's time, which actions will actually be valuable to the business if we do them. This is where actual management happens, and actual decisions, and actual risk… Some folks completely avoid this, but they tend to be crap managers.

• Facing my email with dread, waiting for the next capricious turn that will invalidate all of the planning and understanding and work me and my team had done for weeks or months before. Our decisions, supported by a lot of work and thought, undone by the sudden “pivot” supported by a rambling semi-coherent e-mail. 

Human frailty

I will not miss:

• Having to listen to other folks’ emotional outpourings, worries, freak-outs, paranoia, sadness, grief, anger, you name it. Having to absorb and understand that emotion and not respond in kind, and then talk them around to some productive direction that keeps them getting paid and us all doing what we get paid for. Hard to do and still have some personal integrity…

• Changing my entire mental focus an average of ten or twelve times a day… and not being able to focus afterward on anything that I want to pay attention to.

• Having people who pay me a lot of money for my experience and knowledge ignore or contradict my advice. The worst version of this is when they come back and tell me “You know, you were right…” after the debacle/or resisting me tooth and nail.

• Having to fire people either for something stupid that they did or failed to do or because the company did something stupid or failed to do something. Fortunately, if you are breathing in and out and have a good story about being a software engineer you can get a job in this industry. Believe me, I’ve reviewed a LOT of resumes and interviewed a LOT of folks, so, generally I don’t worry about people I’ve fired, It’s more the emotional impact of the moment that I won’t miss.

Male dominance behavior

I will not miss having to step on the neck of male bullies in the tech leadership because it's the only way they’ll “respect” me. This is one of the worst things about the industry, and it stems from overwhelming and systematic male dominance, and by this I mean, only hiring men into leadership positions, only listening to men, only valuing particular male styles of communication, having to dominate other people to show how “good” you are in a male recognized sort of way. Even in the very best of companies I was frequently confronted with men telling me about how women engineers were “too junior,” “didn’t communicate directly enough,” “didn’t communicate clearly,” or “weren’t organized.” What they actually meant was “They’re not aggressively suppressing all other ideas in favor of their reductionist linear version of what to do.”

All, and I do mean all, of the monumental software project failures that I’ve witnessed in my career were led by aggressive, opinionated, and actually under-qualified, men. They all went off the rails because these folks couldn’t allow consideration of alternatives or even whether the project had useful results. Their egos wouldn’t allow it; their entitlement wouldn’t allow it.

I never fit into male culture very well even as a child and male culture knew it. I was frequently the focus of a lot of aggression and bullying. I figured out how to survive by using my intelligence (and low animal cunning), and I never developed any sympathy for my abusers. In my personal life, I avoid folks who behave like that and now that I’m an older, bigger, more affluent man, they tend to avoid me too. 

I did my best to be an ally for folks who weren’t aggressive men during my career. I used my power and influence to counteract the default narrative and get more women into higher positions. It was a fucking struggle, even when overtly these same companies had “diversity” goals. I have to say that announcing “diversity goals” is mostly talk, because I did the awkward thing and actually hired the women and others. Most of my peers didn’t. I would provide them with excellent candidates who I vouched for; they would invent a reason not to hire them. They would be happy about my team improving the stats but they weren’t interested in helping.

Meaningless technical debate

I won’t miss having to explain why I don’t want to include all of GraphQL for one tiny feature because someone thinks it’s “cool.”

I also won’t miss Java, JavaScript, the C++ Standard Template Library, browsers as the worst runtime environments of all time, vim, emacs, the Windows API from any century, distributed object systems of any kind, micro-services and other overused flavor-of-the-year one-size-fits-all architecture patterns that substitute for actual architecture design, Big Company drive-by-do-nothing-take-no-responsibility software architects, the new language to end all languages (Golang, Rust, etc.)… I could go on.

The fact of the matter is that good engineering is good engineering and you can do good engineering in Assembly language if you have the skills and the discipline. And good engineering means that what you are engineering is appropriate to the problem you’re solving, the economics of the business you’re in, and is reasonable for the talent you have access to. You can even build good things out of imperfect pieces (and you often do for economic, social, and political reasons).

All failed software projects fail due to one or more of: poor goals, poor leadership, a bad business model, a lack of customer value, poor analysis of requirements, outrageous scope vs. capacity, and human frailty. Of course, the least valued skill in the software industry is management, and it is the skill that is required for success. 

Business travel

I love to travel for pleasure; business travel is the opposite of that. I won’t miss being forced to fly to places I’d never go on a bet, to talk to people I don’t know, about stuff none of us are interested in, followed by tiresome forced socializing. All of this happens in a dreary business hotel or some kind of function hall or closed down public venue or worst of all a fucking golf resort. Business trips often are scheduled so that you are “ON” for twenty-four hours a day and constantly in large groups of people you only slightly know. This is the very vision of hell for an introvert.

Even in the best case, where I got to go someplace I really wanted to and had some time to myself, the logistics of traveling efficiently so you don’t waste your own time and also have time to do the work ruin a lot of it. When I managed folks in Berlin, I visited about every five weeks. To assure I still had time for myself and my family, I would fly out late Sunday night, arrive on Monday morning, work all day, go out in the evening until my normal bed time. That first “day” was thirty-six hours long and by three o’clock in the afternoon local time I was almost hallucinatory. I made some great friends there and in the end it was worth it, but the travel was a huge drag.

I really hope for everyone’s (and the planet’s) sake that, when the pandemic is over, people realize that most business travel is just posturing and a meaningless, inefficient display of wealth and entitlement. It’d be great if folks would recognize that business travel isn’t a perk for an introvert; if you’d like to give us a perk, we’d prefer some free time on our own.

Finally

I sincerely hope that the other allies out there will keep working to reform the industry. It was a great career and I loved a lot of it. I’m glad to be done with these particular things.

Robot Project: Treat dispenser installed on robot

Huge progress on the robot and treat dispenser! They are connected and working together! Thanks to a very helpful suggestion from my wife I was able to implement a simple fix for the clogging problem. I cut some thin flexible plastic from the top of a takeout sushi container and cut one end into fingers. I attached it so that it reaches about one “treat height” above the belt. The fingers brush back extra treats that would get carried forward as a stack due to their stickiness but they don’t allow them to get jammed by the fingers because they are so weak and flexible. You can just see the fingers in this picture:

Detail of anti-clogging solution…

The fingers also make the kicker servo and armature more effective. I added a zip tie around the kicker servo to make it more stable and to transfer more of the energy to the treats. This works good and having run multiple full hopper tests I can confirm that it successfully clears all the treats without jamming.

The next thing I needed to do was to mount the dispenser on the robot and as part of that mount the servo controller and the servo batteries somewhere. I got some nice 1.5cm x 4mm standoffs and drilled and countersunk some holes in the treat dispenser base plate and mounted the controller behind the left side servo. I was able to cut a couple of slots and mount the battery pack using a velcro strap next to the controller.

Controller board mounted using standoffs and the battery pack for the servos mounted using velcro strap.

Two new tools made a huge difference in this process, I got a set of small metric wrenches and a set of coarse and fine files. The wrenches allow the tightening of these tiny fasteners so much better and more easily and the files allowed me to drill out the slots and then remove the rest of the material by filing to create nice clean slots without cracking/burning/destroying the acrylic.

File set, not an expensive one but it works great, the small files on the right are perfect for making slots or fitted holes in acrylic. Just use the brush regularly to clear the file when working with plastic. Also, go slow to not melt the plastic with friction.

Tiny wrenches apparently usually used for working on carburetors. The metric ones are wonderful for tightening the tiny nuts on the robot without mangling them.

I was able to use some of the existing holes in the upper deck of the GoPiGo robot to finally mount the treat dispenser on top of it just behind the camera. Handily it also centers most of the weight of the treat dispenser over the drive axles and it doesn’t seem to make the robot more prone to tipping. I was worried because this particular robot only has a single roller caster in the back.

Using the existing holes in the upper deck of the GoPiGo robot to mount the treat dispenser.

I ran a test with everything integrated this morning and the robot was able to move, turn, use it’s sensors and dispense treats with no problems. Here is the video of the run:

I’m really happy with the progress so far, the next step is to make the software part of this project more usable. After messing around with trying to make the robot autonomous I have decided that it just isn’t up to it in terms of sensors, steering and maneuverability. So, I’m going to implement a dashboard and keyboard controls so I can directly control the robot and treat dispenser remotely via an ssh tunnel.

Robot Project: Treat dispenser acrylic version powered test

I got the servos installed after some back and forth. During powered testing to find the right position for the servos I managed to have the servo lever arm push on one of the axles. This popped the entire feeder body off of the base breaking the CA glue free. I had suspected that it would have a hard time holding on that long narrow seam on the bottom with torque and a big lever arm. So you’ll see later that I fabricated a couple of aluminum mounting brackets and screwed the dispenser to the base. This is much stronger and I realized it may be useful to disassemble this to clean it at some point.

I figured out the range for each of the servos to power it’s part of the driving sequence. I wrote a little python program to just run through four cycles. I tested it with real treats. For the most part it works fine and the ramp inside performs as expected, it can clear all the treats now. However, the narrowed area where the ramp is causes the treats to bind up there. They are a little moist and stick together enough to get suspended in that gap. I’m going to have to put another small servo with a kicker somewhere in that area to twitch the food to keep it moving. But, overall it has been very sucessful.

Here is the video of the test run:

Next up is solving the clogging problem then mounting it on the robot somehow.

Management: Things I'll miss

I’ve been writing a series of posts on management based on my experiences. If you’re starting with this one, you may want to have a look at: https://www.jlgoodwin.com/words-pictures/2020/9/17/management-the-job-of-a-manager

Introduction

I’ve been retired (as of this writing) for about nine months and it is the end of the year, so I’ve been assessing my response to this new state of being. Overall, I’m very happy, and I’m a lot more relaxed. People see me on zoom calls and they comment that I look “better.” I have plenty of things to do, and I also have become comfortable putting any of them aside for weeks or months if I feel like doing something else, or nothing. Writing this series of blog posts about management has been an interesting project because it has caused me to stretch my memory back over the years to find stories that would illustrate my points. Back at the beginning of this process, even before I had formally retired, I started a list post entitled “Things I won’t miss.” My wife and most marvelous editor read it and said “Oooh, harsh, perhaps not yet?” and so I’ve been holding on to that one. But, the process also begs the question: “What will you miss?” I’ve been thinking about that too… here we go.

Stress

I honestly also enjoy not having work stress, despite the fact that I actively sought it through my entire career. You become addicted to stress over the years. There is a rush that you get when you sense that things are heading in the wrong direction and you need to do something. There is a “jumping out of the plane” sort of feeling when you embark on a project that you don’t know how to finish. There is a wave of relief when something you’ve been trying to steer in a good direction finally bears fruit. It is an element of my personality that I chose increasingly challenging work to amplify these sorts of feelings. I never had good luck trying to coast in a less challenging context; it’s always made me unhappy. My working-class background also reinforced this need in order to feel secure. I’ve identified all those elements and understood how it’s affected me, and I realized that I’ve had enough of that for a lifetime. Many of the projects I’m doing now involve learning stuff I’m not good at, which makes a good surrogate.

Hiring people

I used to hate interviewing people, being responsible for hiring people, and worrying if they were going to do okay. My last few roles were at a level where I had to do a lot of hiring and do it well or I was going to fail. I got a lot better at hiring and my perspective on it changed. I started to enjoy finding people who were great at what they did and needed to be given more responsibility to get to the next level and hiring them into roles that would give them that. I learned a lot about that on a project where we built a whole new product staffed only with me, a senior engineer, and a few interns (to start). I gave the interns that worked for us full responsibility for building the product (okay, I gave them architecture and some fundamental technology choices, and some guidelines). It was impressive to me that even though they had to redo some things and overcome their own lack of confidence in some cases, they produced what we needed and they became confident engineers at the end of six months. I think they got a lot out of it, and I enjoyed it. It strongly influenced how I built teams after that and what I looked for in candidates. The number one thing I looked for from there on was the spark of creativity and the drive to make things and share them with people. Hiring is definitely a management superpower and it has a huge impact on the people being hired and the team you hire them into. I’ve reshaped whole teams by hiring the right people into key roles. I’m glad that I got to do that and I’m not sure exactly what will take its place.

Collaborating

Being an introvert, I am not good at joining groups and I actively avoid it. The reality of the working world is that I had no choice but to overcome my aversion and join lots of teams, in lots of different roles. In the best case where the folks that I was collaborating with were all at my level or a bit above, and we all respected each other and delivered our part of the job, it was a great feeling. I’ve formed a few teams like that and I could always tell when they’d jelled just by the feeling they gave me. It is such an emotional support when things aren’t going well and there are a whole group of people who understand and are engaged in fixing things with you. I think I’ll go forward having a looser engagement with folks by sharing my projects and getting input from friends and interested parties. We’ll see.

Customers

I enjoyed seeing what customers would do with the software I helped create. They often imagined uses that I had never even considered. Working with customers gave me a fascinating glimpse into businesses I never would have seen otherwise. The people themselves were often brilliant, driven and creative. I would never have met or interacted with these folks had I not worked in the software industry. There is something very satisfying when you see someone use your software and get something out of it. The feeling was similar to when I was cooking for a living, and that was even better, because it was very immediate. Of course, this is another element of work that has a downside as well, but I’d say on balance it was a big motivator for me.

Finally

These are the big things. I’m not going to list all the minor items. I’m not going to include coding because I intend to keep doing that. I’m not going to say “the people,” because I hope to be friends with many of them for years to come. Okay, now I’m off to edit the “Things I won’t miss” post into a shorter, more focused list.