Frank Contrepois

Category: learning in public

Vote then discuss

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If in any meeting the higher in rank talks first, the others will follow, and this kills initiative and creativity. Next time you have a meeting with a team, ask the person in charge to follow this process: ask a question have everyone vote secretly (write on a paper) their answers reveal all the answer and have a discussion For example: Are we ready to ship the product? (open questions are better, but for the sake of making a simple example I go against my own rules) People write their answers If the answers are different then have a chat, possibly with the leader staying silent, unless a final word is needed. Read more...

How to keep working if Internet is not there

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Would you be able to work if Internet was down for any kind of reason? To make it possible to at least survive you should consider using tools that keep offline copies (on your computer) of the data. For example Mail if you use gmail, you can keep a copy of all email (and reply, write, etc…) by using a mail client like Thunderbird or Apple Mail or Microsoft Outlook Documents: Google Docs offline Home finance: GNU Cash Read more...

Boost your efficiency and well being

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Do you ever feel that after a full day of work you have not done anything? This feeling is often due to being busy doing tasks on other people todo list. The only way I found, to protect me from a wasted day (at least it feels like this) is to have one or two Most Important Tasks from my todo list and do them first thing of the day, even before checking email. Read more...

AWS Pricing anomaly

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As you can deduce from recent articles, I’m playing with the AWS price list. The research is about decomposing the cost into infrastructure, os costs and software cost. During the research I came across a negative value for a software cost. From my data it seems that in certain regions, the r4.2xlarge with Windows AND SQL Server Web, costs less than the same instance without SQL Server Web. So I did a fast check with the AWS Simple calculator (great tool) and voila Read more...

Chocolate Cake recipe

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Today, with some Chocolate lovers in the team, we created the #Chocolate channel on Slack. Here is the first recipe (mine) The thin (dense) chocolate cake 70g of dark chocolate 70g of butter 125g of sugar 65g of flour or maizena 2 eggs separate whites from yolk melt chocolate with the butter mix sugar, yolks, melted chocolate, flour (optional) for some fluffiness bring the whites to snow and mix with the above 25-30 minutes not-pre-heated 180 degrees (if not fan add 5 minutes) Bonus: to share the cake correctly you give a slice to each person and keep the rest for you :P Read more...

Using stress as a positive force

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Stress is always seen as a negative, but it does have some moments when it is useful. When you are stressed your body switch to combat more, providing more blood, adrenaline and other hormones I do no know about. How to use stress in your favour Do the two minutes brainstorming. Think about a topic, set a timer to 2 minutes, and start writing as many things on the topic as possible. Read more...

Windows pricing on AWS

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There is also a version of this article on Strategic Blue blog Intro At Strategic Blue, we care about the money, and we’ve been collecting prices of AWS and other cloud vendors for a while. Another characteristic of Strategic Blue is that we are curious and love digging into the numbers, checking common assumptions, and find new ways to save money. This article is one such analysis done to understand how much a Windows license costs on AWS and understand if Azure Windows Licenses are cheaper (as per common assumption). Read more...

Why are kids asking why?

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I don’t know, but what I know is that having my kids starting the why period brought three interesting thoughts: I really understand the power of the Five whys It gets annoying after 3 whys and very annoying after 5 It is very powerful to formulate answers that a 3 year old will understand (kind of) Note: the less I am able to answer the more annoyed I get, so maybe it is proportional to the ego Read more...