As IT professionals, we deal with quantitative information quite a lot — on a daily basis, literally. Many of us present numeric data to colleagues: be it a report, forecast, or information dashboard. However, only a few possess the basic skills to present numbers well. Most of us have never been …

To better understand my expense habits and overall spending, I used to track my financial transactions in a mobile application. I would manually put data after each payment. I was doing it for a couple of years until I realized that it didn’t quite help me. First, since most …

In Digital Minimalism, Cal Newport argues that, through sophisticated algorithms exploiting our psychological features, social media and Internet services have successfully grabbed our attention and made us dependent on them, forcing us to spend a huge amount of time there. The situation has been especially exacerbated with the advent of …

These are the books I liked the most in 2019: Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method by Gerald M. Weinberg Free Will by Sam Harris Fathers and Children by Ivan Turgenev Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management by Scott Berkun Information Dashboard Design: Displaying Data for At-a-Glance Monitoring Hardcover by …

When you manage several projects simultaneously, you have to switch context quite a lot. It's important to have a tool that helps update awareness of the current situation on a particular project. You need a dashboard. Information dashboard, when well designed, is a good means to update situational awareness at …

When you face a problem in your project, don’t get frustrated. Take another perspective: It’s an opportunity to learn, an opportunity to improve yourself or your team. Failure, however painful and stressful, is a resource, so embrace it. Of course, in order for problems to benefit you, you …

As well known, human beings are bad at predicting the future. Having worked on different kinds of projects, I can say that engineers who are supposed to do the project work are reluctant to schedules. Their attitude is rather skeptical. Why trying to predict if the schedule will slip regardless …

We failed to review one piece of the project with a customer before proceeding to the next step, not believing it to be necessary since the project was just beginning and actual deliverables were yet to come. The customer took some time to inspect a deployment model we prepared, because …

UPDATED: 12 Oct 2020 Here's my mindmap on the very helpful book "How To Make Meetings Work!" by David Straus and Michael Doyle. Click the image to open a mind map hosted on the XMind website. Or save the image as a file on your local disk. Steps to a …

I had never been to Portugal before this travel. I knew little about the country, and had no clue what to expect. As a result, my expectations were easily exceeded. I really liked what I saw and experienced there: places, nature, local food, and people! In this post, I'll share …