Lane Sawyer🌹

Write unit tests Ask others to review your code Review other people’s code Listen to programming podcasts Volunteer for work that makes you uncomfortable Learn something new every day Exercise regularly Get enough sleep Read a book on design patterns, code refactoring, or user experience (and take notes!) Have weekly one-on-ones with your boss Talk to your co-workers about things other than work Contribute to open source Practice mindfulness Use a personal task management system Write regularly...

For the last three months I’ve been traveling every other week to Denver for work. These trips last five days — Sunday to Thursday — and my team has asked me how I can last that long with a single bag. This article makes an assumption that you have some sort of backpack or messenger bag that can double as your luggage and your daily carry to the office. If you don’t have one of those, single-bag trips become a bit awkward — your coworkers might laugh when you’re wheeling your bag around the off...

The concept of retrospectives has seemingly permeated every nook and cranny of the IT industry. It’s a central concept to Agile, and is a phenomenal way to regularly provide a forum for the team to express concerns, recognize achievements, and ultimately improve the software product they are building. A cool tool I ran into a few months ago is “Fun Retro”, an online, real-time, collaborative retrospective board that makes sprint retros a breeze. Most retros I had been in previously involved st...

Nights like this suck. It’s late and my mind is racing with thoughts. Hell, I spent five minutes debating in my head whether I should report that time three months ago when the moving truck lady called me a liar. I told her some specs her company gave me — we called twice to verify the measurements. She said I was lying, and then dropped our stuff in an illegal spot on the street. I’ll probably end up sending that company a(nother) tweet complaining, because why not? I’ve got nothing better to ...

Man, oh man, do I wish I had looked at React.js a few years ago. I started a side project using it over my holiday break, and yesterday I got a React Native Android app up and running. Now I’m hooked. At first I was wary of JSX, but I’ve come to embrace it due to its ease of use and modularity. I suppose I never looked at React because I thought I already had my favorite front-end framework: Angular.js. But with the new Angular 2 using TypeScript, it almost feels like an entirely new framework...

The following article was what I wrote immediately after the election of Donald J. Trump as the next President of the United States. I wanted to sit on it until after the inauguration to see if I thought differently after the stark reality of a Trump presidency finally settled in my mind. Now that I’ve had a few days to digest the results of the election… I’m still outraged. How did the United States of America elect the misogynistic, racist, lying, cheating, anti-intellectual, never-held-p...

I recently took three weeks off work to move from Dallas, TX to Seattle, WA. Much of that was spent driving and visiting friends and family, but I also managed to squeeze in about 15 hours of programming. That’s right! I did what I do every day for a living during my precious time off. Over the break I started to create a website where I can track my 52 Things for the year. Right now I have an early alpha version that works well enough to actually use, as long as you don’t need to edit anythin...

The future is bright, if not a little blurry What a crazy year. If you would’ve told me that 2016 would contain the election of a reality TV star, countless celebrity deaths from music and movies I grew up watching, and the Dallas Cowboys being the number one seed in the NFC, I’d ask you what alternate reality you came from. At the same time, even with all the doom and gloom coming from partisan politics and a general feeling of unrest, 2016 was still the best year on record in many regards. ...

May your 2017 road be as breathtaking as this one Each new year I create a list of 52 things I would like to accomplish. I’ve been doing it since 2014, and it’s helped me do a lot more things than I would have otherwise. But before I dive into my goals for 2017, I need to take a minute to reflect on what I did in 2016. Last year I only completed 14 of the 52 things I set out to do — an abysmal result. It gets slightly better when you look at the 13 other things that I made progress on, but th...

One of the most important (and simple) actions you can take to advance your career is scheduling weekly 30 minute meetings with your manager. I’ve been having one-on-ones with my managers over the last two years and it’s made a remarkable difference in my ability to grow and take on new responsibilities at work. I’ve learned more about managing my career during these short meetings than from all the books and podcasts I’ve listened to on the subject. And when busy projects cause one-on-ones to ...

These rants from Baby Boomers about how entitled Millennials are, or how we need to grow up, or how we must work harder are getting annoying. I’ve seen them pop up occasionally over the last year or two, and frankly I’m sick of it. Baby Boomers complain that we Millennials are spoiled because we all got participation trophies. But wait, who gave us those trophies? THE PARENTS. Boomers can hardly be upset when they crafted the environments that produced the current Millennial generation. Do you...

How have I never managed to make it out to Denver before? I’m kicking myself because I had never stopped in what is now one of my favorite cities! I flew to Denver last week for a business trip and immediately fell in love. Why? I was able to take a train from the airport to the center of the city in just 30 minutes. The first thing I saw when I stepped out of the station was a bike-share program. The second thing were bike racks and bike lanes that were actually being used! Denver is walkabl...

I’ll admit it. Blizzard knows exactly how to get you hooked on their video games. I had never played a single Blizzard game until about a year ago when I gave Heroes of the Storm a try. It’s a much easier version of Dota 2 and League of Legends, which meant I could play with my wife and we wouldn’t get completely floored by the other team. After that I dabbled with Hearthstone, then purchased Starcraft II. And it was a lot of fun! But then came Overwatch. It’s like TF2, but tweaked to be ab...

We live in a world of a million passwords. There’s no getting around it if you have any sort of online presence. And yet, many do nothing to keep track of all those passwords floating around in their brain (or on sticky notes next to their monitor). Even worse, some people use the exact same password for everything. That’s a scary situation. If your Facebook password is the same as your email password and the same as your bank password, a breach in any one of those services opens you up to unto...

I love Ally and have been banking with them for over five years, so when they announced a credit card with 2 percent cash back on gas and groceries, 1 percent on everything else, and an extra 10 percent on any cash back you deposit into your Ally bank account, I immediately jumped on it. However, the experience has been far less than ideal. First off, the card is in a completely different account on a completely different website. I love Ally because all of my checking and savings accounts are...

Personal finance is a huge passion of mine and I’m often offering unsolicited advice to friends, family, and anyone else I can rope into the conversation. I’m surprised that I haven’t written about it yet on Medium though, so it’s time to correct that silly oversight! Americans don’t do a very good job at saving. In fact, the average American saves just shy of 5 percent of their income! That’s a paltry sum and is nowhere close to what is needed for a comfortable retirement. Common financial wi...

Over the last few weeks I’ve been focusing on building my self-esteem. It’s something I’ve lost over the last few years, primarily due to one nasty little habit: I’m extremely self-deprecating. Two years ago I made the transition from school to the workforce. It was rough. The business world is a completely alien world compared to the world of education, where I spent 18 years absolutely excelling. The educational world is my home turf. It’s where I shine brightest, with the best bang for my ...

Last week at work we landed on the random topic of “would you rather be blind or deaf” and out of everyone in the group, I was the only one to choose blindness. After glancing about on the Internet, my highly scientific perusal of the front page of Google lead me to believe that most people would choose deafness over blindness. It makes sense. So much of our world is focused on being able to see. In fact, we rely on our sight so much that we probably miss out on developing our other senses sim...

Overwatch is the greatest game to ever come out from any company in the history of ever. It’s full of watching and overing, and when you’re lucky, you can over and watch at the same time! The graphics are fanciful and great, like a puffy bunny smothering your face with love. The characters are cool and buff and all the things you would expect out of a superhero team that was disbanded due to people not liking superhero teams keeping the world safe (or something like that, I haven’t read the lo...

Early in the morning on June 12th, a new record was set. It’s not one to be proud of. At least 50 people who were alive just one day before are no longer with us. At least 50 more people were wounded, forever changed. As more details come in, it’s become clear that this was an act of religious extremism, of bigotry against the LGBT community. It was committed by a man filled with hatred, with a tool specifically engineered to make killing as simple as moving a finger. One deranged man ended o...

It’s time to talk about poop. We’ve been held hostage by Big Toilet for far too long, and now is the time to rise up, put the seat down, and expel the oppressors from our homes! Our toilets are not designed for pooping. Rather, they’re terrible porcelain thrones that keep us stuck there for a lifetime playing games on our phone. But there’s a better way: Nature’s way. Don’t believe me? Check out this cute video featuring the Squatty Potty. You don’t have to go out and buy a Squatty Potty (a...

Commutes suck. We all have them, whether it’s simply crossing the street or driving a few hours to a neighboring town. That time is often viewed as a waste. But what if it wasn’t? That’s where the power of podcasts comes in. My average commute lasts 40 minutes, which means over the last two years since I’ve started my career, I’ve put in a little over 300 hours in the car or on the train. And during that time I’ve listened to about 600 hours worth of podcasts (2x speed is humanity’s greatest ...

Go and delete all the games from your phone. Now, before you close your browser and whip out Candy Crush to spite me, please hear me out. I used to find myself constantly reaching for my phone to play games when I was standing in line, waiting for the microwave to beep, or any other myriad of situations that left me with a few free moments. But diving into the digital world meant I was completely engrossed in my phone instead of experiencing my surroundings and being present with friends and ...

May is Mental Health Awareness month. As someone who struggles with various degrees of stress, anxiety, and depression, I wanted to make sure I wrote about it. I honestly don’t know exactly what I have. It could be a mild form of bipolar disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, or full-blown depression. But regardless of what it is, it has had a profound effect on my life. And yes, I know I should go to a medical professional and get a diagnosis. I know that simply knowing what I’m facing will ...

The average person checks their phone 46 times a day, or about every 30 minutes. Often these checks are habitual responses to notifications, pulling up pointless games to pass the time, or (at least for me) looking up random pieces of trivia to satisfy an intellectual itch. Forty six glances results in a lot of time spent staring at your phone each day. Imagine if what you saw each of those times encouraged you to be a better person? Here's my current homescreen: All of these apps are one...

“Dungeons & Dragons” tends to conjure up images of a few pimply nerds hunched around a table in a dark basement, arguing over who gets to wear the enchanted cape they just found after plundering an accursed castle. But you couldn’t be more wrong. Dungeons & Dragons players actually come from all walks of life. Definitively cool celebrities like Tim Duncan and Vin Diesel love to explore dungeons and fight dragons when they’re not blocking shots or driving fast cars. What most people don...

Many of us consume far too much information every day. Not that information is bad, but our brains can only handle so much. I used to be gripped with the fear of missing out. I developed loyalty to podcasts and news sites, feeling like I had to listen to every episode and read every article. I wouldn’t stop scrolling on Facebook until I saw posts I recognized from an hour before. I was constantly feeding information to my brain, with no breaks for processing. It was overwhelming. A month ago I...

Writing is hard. And scary. Whenever you put hard and scary together, it turns into an insurmountable challenge. It’s the wall I’ve been facing for the last few months as I’ve written and re-written dozens of blog posts. It’s the lack of momentum I feel when trying to flesh out the bones of what could become three solid books. From what I’ve gathered, writing never gets easier. So then, I have make it un-scary. I have to face my fear of never measuring up. Of people laughing at my prose. Of...