Lane Sawyer🌹

Since we're in the midst of a global pandemic, I figured I should write my thoughts on it. This is a strange moment in world history that I hope we'll all never experience again, so keeping some record seemed prudent for future me to look back on. Working from Home It's day ? of working from home. Yup, I've already lost track of the days. I started working from home a handful of days before my company asked us all to do it as well, so I think it's been about three weeks? All the days blend tog...

I did it! I moved all of my past Medium posts over to my new blog. It took a couple months of chipping away at it regularly, but I got all 31,996 words moved over! Now that I can't get away with the excuse of having to move old content anymore, I supposed I should start writing new content. That's always the tricky part. But I do have a few goals that I'm striving for: Finish my guide to effective development teams Publish some of my learnings about the Rust programming lanugage Comment on ...

Work makes the world go round. Humans putting in time and effort to create amazing things is one of the reasons we have so much abundance in this world. But the same work we do to create all the cool things many of us on this planet enjoy also contributes to our rapidly decaying environment. In order to save our planet, we need both systemic and individual change. This list is compiled from my personal journey to reduce my individual impact, but it can also be used to create corporate policie...

Every day I come home to a mystery. Sliding my key into the lock, I pause to wonder what kind of apartment I’ll find. Some days I open the door and my home greets me with open arms. I smile, entering my sanctuary. Where there is a place for everything and everything in its place, even if that place is scattered on the floor or tossed on the table. Living on your own means you can build you own little world exactly the way you want. On those days my dog greets me with the wag of his tail and a ...

I’ve always loved the rain. I don’t really know when it started. Maybe when I was a little child, singing songs at church every Sunday. Songs about being cleansed from sin, just like the earth is cleansed after rain. Or maybe it was the hours spent splashing in the gutter whenever a heavy storm rolled through. Or the times I was caught without an umbrella, hurrying home to avoid getting wet but loving the feeling the rain on my face. Now I find myself living in the prototypical rainy city: Sea...

At the end of last year I changed projects at work, which allowed me to start commuting to my company’s downtown office instead of a client site. Since I live about a mile away from the office I started walking to work each morning. At first it was a little tough. The distance itself is doable. But the 25 minute walk isn’t any shorter than my previous commute, so during those early days I longed to hop in my car, crank up the A/C or heater, and be there in 10 minutes. The walk itself is genera...

Nobody will have noticed that I’ve started publishing content less frequently. That’s what happens when you’re inconsistent. There is no audience to care whether you write or not. Today I realized that I have almost as many drafts as I have published works on Medium. While I haven’t published a ton, I had kept a fairly steady cadence over the last few years until a few months ago. As you can see from the screenshot below, I start a lot of stories that I never finish. My stories page, with al...

Have you ever come across a line of code that made you pause and think WTF is going on here? You get in a huff because some careless programmer did something completely wrong and wrote poorly formatted, incomprehensible code. Then you do a git-blame and discover that you wrote the line yourself. Whether it’s poor logic, the use of tabs over spaces, or even a brilliantly crafted solution that is difficult to comprehend, reading code can feel like translating a cryptic language. When nobody on y...

It’s clear nothing will ever be done to stop mass shootings. Just read these again. No reason to write more on the subject. Nobody in Congress is listening. The Orlando Massacre Thoughts and prayers are not enough ...

You read the title. Now pull out your to-do list and delete five things from it. It doesn’t matter what they are. It doesn’t matter how many are “overdue”. It doesn’t matter if you don’t even have an actual to-do list. All that matters is that you relieve yourself of the need to do five things. Did you actually go delete five tasks? No? I can wait. … Done? Good. Now that you’ve deleted five items from your to-do list, listen to your body. How does it feel knowing those things are gone? M...

Have you ever done something radical? And no, I don’t mean hanging ten with Michelangelo, stuffing pizza in your face while you fight off Shredder’s minions (although that would be a wonderfully radical experience). I mean something out of the ordinary. Something unique. I’m not saying you need to go discover a new brand new human experience, like seeing a color no other person has ever seen. It only has to be something unique to you. Your uncommon, radical act could be as simple as eating o...

Another year has flown by. This year has easily been the worst best year of my life. Some of the best things in my life happened this year, but even with all that I had an awful year. Paying attention to Trump’s America has been terrifying. The vast majority of my empathetic and mental energy was directed towards fighting Trump in order to help the people he is screwing over. As a nation, we’re entering the midpoint of one of the worst presidents ever, and that makes this year awful. But since ...

Excess defines modern society in the United States. We’ve become so rich that we will soon spend $30 billion a year on storage. That’s $30 billion spent on hoarding. On tucking away our late grandma’s doilies. On letting mildew grow on our homework from 6th grade. On keeping our stacks of photo albums that we never look at. We spend an insane amount of money to keep everything around just in case we need it. Why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we carry around piles of junk every time we move...

The GOP’s inaction shows deep indifference towards stopping mass shootings. Another mass shooting happened yesterday. This time, it was the deadliest one in recent history, with at least 58 dead and over 500 wounded. A single armed man permanently snuffed out dozens of lives and profoundly affected thousands more. Don’t you wish we could get back to the good ol’ days of 2016 when the previous mass shooting record was only a paltry 49 dead and 58 injured? I wrote about that one too. It seems t...

What would happen if these two teams clashed? The Overwatch cast would dominate. For one, there are 25 characters in Overwatch compared to TF2’s 9. Sheer numbers alone would give Overwatch a clear advantage. They would swarm the TF2 cast using a well-defined plan (they’re a crime fighting super team, after all) and it would all be over shortly. That’s no fun though. Let’s say we were limited to teams of nine. That would mean every single TF2 character gets to join the fray. But which Overwatch...

At some point in the last fifty years the great American pastime pivoted from baseball to television. Ever since Philo Farnsworth invented the television (and gave my home state of Idaho at least one claim to fame outside of potatoes), the TV industry has exploded. Up to 97 percent of U.S. households have a television, and they are all put to use! On average, U.S. adults watch 5 hours of TV every day. That’s 35 hours a week! 🤯 Think of what we could be doing with that time. Developing a hobby, ...

During my first year as a developer I screwed up a lot. Unintended changes made their way into my files seemingly at random. My commits broke existing unit tests. Sometimes I missed entire requirements because I didn’t read the story thoroughly. In short, I wasn’t deliberate with my work because I did not have a definable, repeatable process. My lack of process cost my team time and money when they helped me fix things that I should have done correctly in the first place. What my well-intenti...

It happens every morning. You have the best intentions of waking up with your alarm, but forty minutes later you’re still slipping in and out of consciousness. The snooze button is mankind’s worst invention. But there is a simple way to always wake up when you planned: Get out of bed! You can’t fall asleep if you’re on your feet. So instead of reaching for your phone or for a book each morning, roll out of bed and shamble out of your bedroom. Do anything but stay in bed. Make breakfast, brew ...

Every team needs a written working agreement. Without one, there’s bound be chaos, bloodshed, and death. Or at least it might feel that way. Team working agreements are the first step to good team building. Without a concrete list of rules for team interactions, invisible habits will start to creep into the team’s workflow. Habits that aren’t always good. If you’re part of a team that doesn’t have a working agreement, read on. You’ll learn why it’s important, what it involves, and how to crea...

To be effective, development teams should—at a minimum—have the following processes in place: Team Ground Rules or Working Agreement Definition of Done Code Reviews One on Ones Static Code Analysis Style Guide Automated Tests Branching Strategy Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment What's your team missing? Over the next few weeks I’ll be fleshing out the why and how for each item in the list, so check back for updates! ...

Parking lots are surprisingly dangerous. One in five accidents happen there, mostly due to people relaxing their attention due to the low speeds. Blind corners and cars backing out just add to the chaos. The easiest way to stay safe (outside of simply paying closer attention and staying off your phone) is to back into your parking spot! I know, I know. You’re always running late and don’t have time, plus you’re absolutely awful at lining it up right and don’t want to embarrass yourself in fron...

Finding time to exercise can be tough. Every day seems to fill itself with work, work, and more work. By the time you get home, the comfort of the couch is overbearing and your best-laid plans to exercise vanish. But even on crazy days like that, you can find easy ways to get your heart pumping. One of my favorites ways to sneak exercise into my daily routine is to follow one simple rule: Always take the stairs. If you follow that rule, you’re bound to get some exercise at some point during ...

The rise of Trump and “America First” has shown us that tribalism still reigns supreme. All of recorded history is nothing more than our tribal interactions and the frictions that belonging to a different group can cause. Wars are fought for land, religion, business, and politics: all of which are an attempt to expand a tribe’s power. One of these days, tribalism will destroy us all. How close were we to a nuclear wasteland during the Cold War? How soon until the fail-safe systems fail and a s...

During 2016, in an effort to help boost my confidence and self-image, I changed one of the few passwords I actually know (use a password manager, people!) into an uplifting phrase: You@re@mazing! — or rather, something completely different but with the same general sentiment. Every day I had to type “you are amazing” over and over again. It made me happy each time, and it reminded me that I am worth something. I’ve kept this up, even as I’ve changed passwords regularly. Each time I type them,...

Can you believe it’s been almost a year since I last talked about poop? Last June, I encouraged everyone to poop better by using an improved squatting posture, and I had always meant to follow it up with another article to make your time in the restroom even more satisfactory. That’s right: it’s time to talk bidets. The first time I saw a bidet I was terrified. I was a young Mormon missionary living in Ecuador, and the thought of shooting cold water anywhere near my butt was far too homoeroti...

It’s okay to be lazy. Well… not all the time. Obviously. At some point you’ll just get bored. But when you need a break, take a goddamn break. By the way, this article is more for me than it is for you, dear reader. Dealing with anxiety and perfectionism can be a pain in the ass sometimes, and this weekend I was really feeling it. Today I felt like I haven’t been doing enough with my life, despite the fact that I’m currently doing a lot: Polishing up on Spanish Learning Portuguese Contribu...

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 ...