If you’ve seen Mythic Quest, you already know what episode I’m talking about. If you haven’t, Mythic Quest is a comedy on Apple TV by the creators of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia that takes place in a game studio. It’s sort of like if The Office took place at the game studio for World of Warcraft instead of at a paper company.

And much like The Office, I’ve been impressed by Mythic Quest’s ability to pack jokes into every episode but also have a deeper, more insightful level too. …

When I was about 25, I played outdoor football/soccer once a week. I remember one day someone passed me the ball right in front of the goal and I refused to take the shot. Insetad, I passed it. Later, the guy I passed to jogged by and said “You’ve gotta take that shot.” I responded “I’m a defender!” And that was that. I play defense, and I don’t take shots.

It’s always been this way. When I play World of Warcraft, I’m a healer. When I play Overwatch I’m a tank. And when I play football, I play sweeper. I…

Working at Twitter was a great experience, but one aspect of it was really strange. Every time someone heard I worked there, they’d get the same bashful expression and say the same thing. “I’m sorry, I don’t use Twitter.”

“Don’t apologise!” I’d say. “Most people don’t use Twitter. It’s actually a pretty niche service and that’s something we’re working on.” Then, convinced I wasn’t going to get mad at them or proselytise, they’d all say the same things. They tried it, but it was confusing. Or none of their friends were on it. Or they heard it was toxic.

“But…

On my first day of work in New Zealand, my company asked me to play a game with my coworkers to introduce myself: two truths and a lie. I’ve played two truths and a lie before, so I came up with a little list in my head. I was born in Germany, I once got an email from Steve Jobs, and I I was going to lie that I can do a Rubik’s cube in 45 seconds. Sorted!

The big day came and I was introduced to the rest of the company. I managed to capture a photo of everyone’s…

Imagine you’re speeding down a 4-lane highway and you spot a merge sign. In a mile or so, 4 lanes are going to turn into 3. So what do you do if you’re in the soon-to-be removed lane?

1. Move over as soon as you can so you don’t cut in line.
2. Wait until the last possible moment to merge and cut in like a jerk.

I used to think #1 was the polite thing to do, and I got irrationally upset about people who were driving down the soon-to-be-closed lane in order to jump the line. It turns out the…

I worked at Microsoft ten years ago, and quickly got familiar with how a company that large works with distributed teams all around the world. One thing that struck me as I worked in Redmond, Microsoft’s headquarters, is that distributed work had the potential to accelerate progress or slow it down. It just depended on communication and expectations.

One day, two days of results

9am in Redmond is 9:30pm in Hyderabad. So if we had our communication straight, expectations aligned, and people working hard, we could get two days of work in one. I’d work all day, hand off my work by 5pm my time, then…

I haven’t been up-to-date with web development since about 2006 or so. I’ve continued writing code this whole time, and in my day I was pretty cutting edge. But now I’m rusty and confused by most things happening in the space.

But over the last year or so, and especially in the last few months, I’ve dived back in. I work at a really awesome startup called Replay.io that is making amazing tools for developers. We let you record your webpage and play it back later in a visual debugger. It’s great technology, and it’s my job to make it…