Blog, News, and Articles
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Hitting a roadblock, and getting past it
A few months ago I started writing on this blog with a weekly cadence. I was publishing an essay every Wednesday morning. I established a routine for it. I had my draft ready by Monday, review it for a couple of days, and then I’d hit publish on Wednesday. It was working pretty well, and […]
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Avalanche Week: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Skiing at Forty Years of Age
As I’m packing my gear and getting ready to spend eight days skiing in the Alps, I want to reflect on the series of events that took me, born and raised at sea level, to get on the slopes and enjoy this great outdoor activity with my family. “Come on, go faster! You need speed […]
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On Privacy, Transparency, and Trust
Transformational leadership inspires positive changes in those who follow. Transformational leaders are vibrant, enthusiastic, and inspirational. Not only are these leaders committed to the process, but they help every member of the group succeed as well. In modern organizations, especially in distributed environments where most work happens online, we cultivate transparency as a crucial cultural […]
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What Really Drives Us
When I was in my twenties I spent a couple of years at the ticket office of a dance club. Young men and women ready to sweat their Saturday night off used to line up in front of me, and purchase their entrance to the hall. Every Friday, the owner of the club used to […]
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Decide Fast, Revert Faster
When I was 25, I accepted a job at a local company as a software developer. I had a desk on the ground floor of a condo that served us as our headquarters, and it had reinforced windows with steel bars. I remember spending 8 hours at my desk looking at those bars and asking […]
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On Being Human
The global pandemic hit me while I was visiting my spouse’s family in Udine, Italy. At that time we were expecting a baby and we decided to stay put near our family, rather than going back to Vienna, where we used to live, and being on our own for the following months. In 2020, Italy […]
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Elevate your appreciation and deliver better feedback
A couple of years ago, my engineering team, which happens to be distributed over four continents and works asynchronously around the clock, was struggling to provide valuable weekly updates. Most of the updates were too generic, some too specific. A few were too verbose, and others were too superficial. Shall we write down every single […]
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Getting Rid of The Plastic Hairball
It’s a giant hairball made of old cables. It lives in every household, and it sits in a drawer somewhere. It’s made of old phone chargers, USB cables, a couple of obsolete adaptors, a few rubber bands, a hairpin for sure. I have it, you have it, everyone has it. In my case, it fills […]
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How to ROLL through stressful times
A hundred thousand sharp pieces to pick up. That’s what’s left of that Ikea plate. On top of that, a once delicious sandwich is now bleeding mayonnaise on the tiles, as the final act of a tragedy that started on the countertop and ended too early, on the floor. Any other day it would be […]
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The Stone of Clarity
When I was a kid, I used to live on a farm with my parents and grandparents. My grandfather worked the fields. Every day he left early in the morning only to come back when the sun was setting. My grandfather had lived through the hardness of World War II. He had to leave his […]
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