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Tomorrow is the BAA 10K, the second in the BAA Distance Medley. I am excited as the weather is supposed to be nice and my friend Marco is coming up from Connecticut to run it with me. It is also one of the fastest 10K courses in the country. So I should be able to make a good time on it. My hope is that I will beat the time that I made in my Salem 10K last summer. Given that this race occurs earlier in the season that may be tough, however.

The best piece of writing on the 2018 Boston Marathon I have read:

A deluge of icy rain drenching the 26.2-mile route to Copley Square, the relentless 25-mph headwinds, and the temperatures hovering in the high 30s had already made the 122nd running of the prestigious road race historic. It was clear that 2018’s Boston had a late entrant to field: Mother Nature.

One of the ideas I picked up from our colleagues at the NYC Planning Labs while we were at the Code for America conference was to build a ritual of spending one day a week where we show off our work. The idea behind this ritual is to give us something to strive toward. We want others to understand our work better so we are planning to open up our Friday demos to the rest of our department after we have done them a couple times. Instead of having big deadlines at the end of a project we can now triangulate our work towards these smaller goals.

As part of being on the core team at Code for Boston we have a monthly meeting. The core team meeting happens on a Thursday night. This regularity enforces structure and accountability in moving things forward. We share a Google document that allows any member of core team to propose an agenda item for the meeting. We enforce a meeting time limit of 90 minutes because any meeting that goes longer than that will suffer from lack of attention. We have a time keeper that enforces sticking to our agenda and a note taker that records next steps. This meeting is not brunch, we get together to focus on important things and we get them done.

I do not remember when I became a user of Slack but it has been one of the more transformative applications I have used. The setup and design of Slack is sticky. Technical and non-technical folks generally do not struggle to onboard to Slack. It keeps things separated and has lots of tools for keeping track of conversations. Slack is not perfect but it seems to be the least worst solution to email and communication overload. However there are some Slack things I struggle to understand.