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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • Talent, dedication, and luck. Spot on.

    I am very successful in my career and earn more than my school-age self ever expected (tbf, I expected to be a teacher). I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for all three, though.

    Lucky points include:

    • Being the kid of small business owners who gave me/made me get a job with them at 16.
    • Knowing someone at a company who recommended me for an internship.
    • Working adjacent to a badass development team that made the best proof of concept to build a new app, so they brought me to their team to support it.
    • My Lead retiring so I was able to move to her level after only a couple years.

    I wouldn’t have gotten those opportunities if I didn’t also have the dedication and talent, but luck was a huge factor.

    I have tried the metaphor that luck opened doors for me, but I had to get to and walk through them. I will never take where I am today for granted.







  • It’s not uncommon for me to only have one or two 30-minute breaks between 8:30am and 5pm. I’ve gotten to the point that if I have over 2 hours without meetings I often feel like I get nothing done, because I’ve gotten pretty good at getting a few things (emails or messages, not deep work) knocked out in the 5-10 min in between calls. I can only really focus on deeper work at night after everyone else has signed off.

    Not really a sustainable way of doing work, I’m also not doing as much hands-on work these days. A lot of my meeting time is 1-on-1s with my team and making sure they have what they need to move forward, make decisions, and get work done or with other people to try to remove barriers to help the team be able to move forward. So in that sense, the meetings ARE the work.



  • My partner and I have a theory that MacFarlane pitched The Orville as “Family Guy in space,” and he got to make it because of his success with Family Guy. But the actual goal he had all along was to make Star Trek.

    In order to keep the game up and get a second season, he had to sell the pitch at least a bit. So the early episodes are like Star Trek with cringey Family Guy-esque jokes. But as the series goes on, the cringe stops, the jokes slow down, and the plots get deeper.

    I can’t stand cringe humor and did not consider myself a fan of MacFarlane, but The Orville changed that.





  • I prefer spelling it with an ‘e’ so I always do that (probably because my name has two common spellings, one with an A and the other with an E, and mine is the latter).

    But if forced to identify which is which color-wise, I’d say “grey” has cool undertones while “gray” has warm undertones. Really no reason to think that, but it’s right in my brain.


  • Requesting one small caveat to your thinking: your friends with chronic health issues (physical and/or mental) may bail more often than others but still love you.

    My partner has lost friends over them thinking he uses his migraines as an excuse to not show up to things. They feel hurt because he bailed one too many times for them, and he feels hurt because they diminished his disability and didn’t believe him. It’s hard to see the additional toll it takes on him.

    (I also have my own chronic issues but thankfully have been able to suck it up often enough to not have it come in the way of friendships. Sometimes he and I are intentional about making sure at least one of us attends something even if we both feel like shit in order to not alienate people we care about.)