Hey there! Happy new year, we are already up and running. I hope you and yours safely made it. Joy Thompson, my Sierra Leone sister and name twin, asked me a great question the other day which sparked this post. We watched The Emmys while writing it, so this post is also going to celebrate a legend of TV whose confidence I hope to have an ounce of one day. As always and first of all, a qualifier: Someone is going to look at this and say, huh? Fair. This doesn’t apply to everyone. I remember once asking my teammate four jobs ago if he ever had confidence dips and this man was confused. He taugh ..read more

This is going to be fun. It is a jetlagged response to one of my favorite people on the planet :joy:. Mark Thompson, a very talented and kind human I have the honor of calling my big brother, who asked this question a few weeks ago. I think there's an interesting shift between "I want to be the best" (comparing to others) vs "I also want to be really good at this" (still comparing to others, but not in competition) What do you think? Is one better? Is there room for both? — Mark Techson (@marktechson) December 5, 2023 It immediately sparked a jumble of thoughts that a tweet would not captur ..read more

Hey there! It’s been a hot minute and a lot of life happened. File this under the scary ones to write (you’ll see why); but it feels worth sharing for others to learn from my mistakes. We’re talking false promises and promotion evaporations at the workplace. To start, this post was inspired by this tweet from one of my favorite leaders, Taylor Poindexter, Engineering Manager II at Spotify. I recently heard a story of a young person being gaslit into taking on the additional work that comes with a promotion, but without ever receiving the promotion and raise that was verbally promised to them ..read more

First things first, hi there! It’s Tuesday when this post started. One of those middle of the road days that we made it through and considered a win because that’s life. A bunch of random Tuesdays with some high highs and low lows. Hopefully laughter in the middle. But I digress. This is very much a plateau kinda post, not about the climb. I’d like to talk about the no man’s land that is a mid to senior part of your tech career where you’re not really trying to get in, but working to understand why you’re still there and where you fit. Maybe you have some deferred dreams or you’ve surpassed yo ..read more

Hi hi hi, This is moving from the scared to share folder into the Nike just do it check. Please note, I’m still on a journey and sharing what has helped so far. A special thanks to my community - they have my heart and I am eternally grateful for helping me get this far in my career and life journeys :blue_heart: Speaking of moving - I recently got the push from Will Davis to finally write about how I changed career courses and it paid off (so far). Why is that people dont talk about taking a step back in their careers to position themselves for better opportunities in the future? — Will (@UX ..read more

This was originally published as an internal company blog post on June 17, 2022. It has been reworked for a public audience and updated July 2022. Two (really six, but I was scared to share this) weeks ago some Spotifiers along with 1400+ people from all over the world went down to Atlanta, GA, USA for the RenderATL 2022 conference. Ask anyone who was there, it was more of a cultural experience - a goal the founder and CEO, Justin Samuels, dreamt up when he first came up with this idea for a Black-centered React conference around 2019. Now let’s just get out the way that yes - if you were not ..read more

So about that job hunt. It’s a trip! Michelle Visage Rupauls Drag Race GIFfrom Michelle Visage GIFs I’m writing this while surveying the new housewives of Atlanta season so let’s see how it goes. Sanya Richards-Ross not on a track is a new look, but I digress. I’ve been on a five month (!) job search. Not fun. However, there has been some good feedback throughout, and we took it and moved. One of the things I knew to do going in is interviewing the interviewer to determine what was important to me and if what they need and act like aligns with me. I’ve come up with my own lil formula for doing ..read more

So a rare data-ish post not in Deepnote. STORY TIME!! The TLDR version of this story is we’re writing this down so we don’t forget what to do like we did this time. I’ve decided to write a what could go wrong edition (#WCGW) everytime I get stuck doing something software-y so here goes number one. Yesterday, I wanted to write a bash script to backup and restore a PostgreSQL database instance. Part of my process included wanting to test this out on a local server (because we don’t want to make a mess). What should have been an hour at most, took me about three because though I’m well versed in ..read more

Happy 2022, e-friendlies! :tada: :tada: Hope the first nine days are great or at least hopeful :crossed_fingers: This morning, a friend, Zanade - the one who gave me the first pandemic opportunity during a long job search, was checking in about how life and career are going in a Black Women Chat (she started it, hit her up if you’d like to join!). Some shared about how their businesses and opportunities to grow are changing, how raising funds is challenging, the loss of clients and need to look in unconventional recruiting spaces, all that. Me? I talked about immigration. Why are we reading th ..read more

That title and this post are inspired by two of my favorite people in the whole world. We were having a conversation about life and everything else, and I was trying to explain my job and what I enjoy doing. In the last year at BlueLabs Analytics (check them out, they’re hiring!) I was lucky. After starting out on a data analyst contract, a promotion to a senior analyst with a full time role followed. A few months after, I became a data operations lead and also people manager. It was quite the year and a lot of people sponsored this journey. I thank them dearly :heart: But I digress. We were g ..read more