Today I started a new 12+ month contract as a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) at Adobe. Yup, I am back after almost 13 years. As an FDE my primary responsibility is developing proof of concepts (POC) for customers using Adobe Firefly AI services (and related). I am incredibly excited!

Acronyms are everywhere in tech. As I have been putting together a blog series on my approach to being a manager in tech, it occurs to me that there are management-specific acronyms that have served me well over the years. Here are some of those terms that have helped me the most.

I recently upgraded my laptop to a MacBook Pro M5 Pro from a MacBook Pro circa 2019 - still an Intel CPU. I am not sure what I will do with this new found power, but the machine is very fast. I thought it would be interesting to track what I install as I set it up for development.

Today I wrapped up a 3-month contract with Tekizma, focused on bringing their Datanyx BI (business intelligence) product to market in North America. This involved creating product messaging, sales enablement, and a new website built from the ground up with localization in mind.

Python ships on MacOS, which makes it very handy. Sometimes I need a quick, simple web server to work from. This script lets me do just that. I drop it in my user root, and can spin it up with one line from any directory - turning that directory into a web server instantly.

I have been playing with the Bun runtime lately, and, well, I think I like it! Bun ships with functionality you would normally have to chase down if you were using Node. S3? SQLite? Image processing? Server? They are all there and more - with easy to use APIs. Instant productivity.

When you are presenting at a conference, the last thing you want to show is your messy desktop. Files everywhere. Maybe some revealing. I use this little shell script on MacOS to hide all the files on the desktop. Run it againt to bring them back. Also good for recording videos.