April 2024

  • I’ve made no secret of my love for Obsidian, the free-form, loosely-organized, markdown-based notetaking tool. I use it for everything. I use it to organize work, I use it for drafting blog posts, and I use it when I need to get something out of my head. One of the super-powers of Obsidian and the Zettlekasten notetaking philosophy is the concept of writing stuff down now and organizing it later. Obsidian provides many different views to explore and navigate between notes.

February 2024

  • (This is the first in a series about Rawk-it.com, my passion project about music trends) For the Love of Music Music is a passion of mine. I’m one of those people who is extremely moved by music. There’s nothing better than experiencing the expression of feeling through music. Whether it be my kids practicing an instrument in our house or an arena show in the city, I can’t get enough of it.
  • I picked up The Creative Act because it is Rick Rubin. I was intrigued because it isn’t a memoir of his career in the music industry. The Creative Act is Rick’s take on the act of creativity. It is his advice and approach to the creative flow. With such a heady concept I figured I could find inspiration in it and apply it to my life. Rick Rubin is a music icon.

January 2024

  • My Love of Notes I take notes…lots and lots of notes. As my responsibilities have grown throughout my career so has my need to keep track of more things. I have a shelf of moleskin notebooks filled with notes. I find documenting helps me retain information so the act of note taking has benefits. But the notes themselves? I’ve hardly referenced. They are disorganized, unstructured, and lack context. Now they serve mostly as a catalog for my doodles.
  • BAPO Jan 15, 2024
    Decomposing a high-level strategy is hard. Immediately we want to know “When is it going to be done?” and “How much is going to cost? (In effort, time, and/or actual $$$)” It’s a fair question to ask because in tight times we want to make sure we aren’t wasting effort (and $$$). We spend days and weeks debating who to move to which team and calculating budgets requests to increase staffing.
  • I purchased the Computerjargon.com domain name back in 1998, shortly after I started my first job as a “web programmer”. I was working for a now-defunct company called Moore Data Management Systems in Minneapolis. The internet boom was just starting to take off and I was trying to ride it’s wave. I had been developing web pages and perl scripts since 1993. I remember updating HTML to be compliant with Netscape 1.

December 2023

  • I recently read Shape Up based on the recommendation of peers at work looking to iterate on their product development life cycle. Like many companies we follow scrum loosely. Scrum works well once an initiative moves into delivery but we struggle with the upfront discovery, definition, and design phases. Historically we have done annual planning, spending countless months to create outcomes, debate initiatives, and adjust the organizational structure only to realize 2 months in to the new year we need to pivot.
  • Paralysis Dec 15, 2023
    I get stuck in starting on the most basic tasks. This blog is a prime example. I have so many lists in so many different tools of topics that have been rattling around in my head for years. When my daughter gets stuck in her own analysis paralysis I tell her to just start, take a first step, just do. I’m going to take my own advice. Here’s a nonsensical, non-prioritized, non-complete, brain dump of topics that will blog about at some point:
  • Hello Dec 12, 2023
    Hello there. Let’s get a few basics out of the way: Name: Jason Motylinski Profession: Software Engineering Years of experience: 25 Current Role: VP, Engineering Previous Roles: Way too many to list. Started as an engineer, moved into leadership and people management about 12 years ago. Technologies: I’ve been all around the tech stack: backend, frontend, and APIs. I’ve been in the cloud and on-prem. I have built solutions from scratch and I have contributed to mature platforms.