Posts

Almost 13 years ago, my life changed. I had recently left Motorola after Google acquired us and was looking for my next opportunity when I found a company called Cabulious, which was pretty quickly renamed to Flywheel. When I joined, they asked me if I’d be interested in working on the mobile team, specifically iOS, despite having minimal experience in Objective-C. When I joined the company, they sent me to New York to work with our Pivotal Labs Team (we could only get the team in NY, not the one in California, because they were too busy). The leader of our project, Adam, was one of the maintainers of Cedar, an Objective-C Unit testing framework that Pivotal Labs used to build TDD code. Cabulous had just hired a new leadership and was taking the existing product that had been written in some language that could be ported to both iOS and Android and shifting it to native products to increase the reliability and stability of the project. ...

A friend gifted me a banjo a few months ago, and I’m obsessed with it. I have tried a bunch of musical instruments in my life but stuck with none. I did the viola for a year in fourth grade. I tried piano for a semester in 10th grade, and I’ve picked up several ukuleles in my time. None of them have gotten me to practice. The Banjo is a different being. I want to practice it daily. I want to hear the single strings being plucked one at a time and practice my finger rolls. I’m practicing the four chords I know (yes, one is entirely open). ...

It’s only 22 days into the new year, and I’m already failing at my habits. This happens to most people who set up New Year’s resolutions and start trying to execute them. Where I often fail is that missing any number of days will cause me to challenge the point of making the habit. So far, I’m tracking four habits: Doing 425 active / 500 total calories on the Elliptical Writing somewhere public (sharing instead of consuming) Reading for at least 10 minutes (not on a computer) Practicing the Banjo I started before the end of the year but haven’t recorded every day in my chart. I have made the Elliptical goal daily, but the rest often get missed. Sometimes just one of them, sometimes all of them. In the twenty-three days I have marked, I have hit all four goals only six times. ...

I love my dog. I spend a lot of time thinking about what I should be doing for my dog. One of the things I do is get my dog out twice a day, and usually to the dog park. In Newport, RI, that is hard because no dog parks exist. The closest is in Portsmouth, about 25 minutes drive each way. If we stay for about an hour, that is double the time when you include driving. Too much. ...

Someone recently asked me to paint rocks with them. In typical Zack fashion, I went off the deep end and invested in learning about painting rocks and creating art out of rocks. You can paint the rock and let it go somewhere so other people can see it. Some have pictures; others have motivational words. This leads to the question of how one paints rocks. I got together my art supplies and have tried several different approaches. I brought acrylic Posca and Krink Markers, Sharpie oil markers, and one shot paints and brushes. ...