Links: 1-27-2015

What I did this weekend: 01/25/2015

Has been awhile (almost 2.5 months!) since I wrote a “What I did this weekend” blog post. This weekend was pretty great.

  • Date night Friday night at Rogue Distillery and Public House
  • Saturday was sunny and beautiful. Karen made apple pancakes and Grandpa came over from breakfast, then we went on a walk up to the top of Sexton Mountain (very close to our house) where we found two geocaches and all the little people got some wiggles out. After that we decided that wiggles were still in order and went to a parking lot down the street so that the middle one could practice on his bike with no training wheels, which took him about 5 minutes of practice to completely forget about the training wheels and he took to the bike like a fish to water, so 2 out of 3 are good with bikes now. Littlest one practiced on the scoot bike, which is amazing. Made homemade meatballs (out of the Bobby Flay’s Throwdown! book) and spaghetti for dinner
  • Sunday: I got up at 4am, ate some breakfast and packed by bag to be at AE’s house in PDX by 5am, picked him up and then made it to Mount St. Helens by about 6:45am, got on the trail shortly after with our crampons, snowshoes and iceaxes (not all of which we used) and headed up the Worm Flows route. 11.9 miles, 5,800 vertical feet and about 8 hours later we made it back down. Was a PERFECT day on the mountain, we could see Mt. Rainier to the north, Mt. Adams to the east, Mt. Hood to the south and all the way down south to what was probably Mt. Jefferson or Broken Top. Sunny the entire way, it was probably 60 degrees when we got to the bottom, cold at the top though. Garmin tracked my heart rate / time / elevation here: http://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/682899739. Will upload pictures to Flickr soon.

Links: 1-13-2015

  • Several People Are Typing — Building the Workplace We Want
    Great list: " Diligence: We know that the success of our product will likely not come from unpredictable lightning strikes but from grinding hard rocks against other hard rocks day after day. To build a product that works well and is magical comes out of effort that looks very non-magical. It is easy and sometimes tempting to say “good enough” but after this is where the best work happens and what makes Slack special. This is also where your best work happens. Curiosity: We are building something that most people don’t know they need. Every day, we are venturing into unknown territory. Thriving at Slack means recognizing this forward position and that you may not know the best direction to head. This means you ask good questions at the right time to the right people. It means being curious about how things work and what our customers need. Curiosity is not being satisfied with the status quo and looking at every problem deeper and from a multitude of angles. Empathy: Building things for others to use is an act of empathy. Every decision made about how a thing is built and how it should be used comes from the worldview of the maker. How well they can see things through the user’s eyes determines the value of their work. No one person can see the world through another’s eyes. It’s all approximation and guesswork. Thus the only way for us to broaden our understanding of our users, to see things the way they do, is through hiring people with as many diverse experiences and backgrounds as we can."
    (categories: culture empathy diligence curiosity work values )