Archive (Page 3) • Oscar Funes • Buttondown

Do the work, talk about it

September 25, 2023

Hey! Welcome to another week. I hope you had a great weekend. I spent my weekend planning some vacation time with my wife and family. Was this forwarded to...

September 18, 2023

Hello! Welcome to another week. I hope you had a great time resting. Last Saturday we went with my wife to watch Ed Sheeran live! It was a fantastic show and...

Who's doing your job?

September 11, 2023

Hello! Hope you had a great weekend! I could rest a bit more than usual, which is always a good thing. The question for this week was put on my mind amidst...

Reorganizations

September 4, 2023

Hello! Hope you had a great weekend! In the US, we have a long weekend due to Labor Day. For all you know, I might be having brunch somewhere instead of...

Are you happy where you are?

August 28, 2023

Hello there! I hope you had a great weekend. I had a pretty chill one. We had some visits, and we played board games for a few hours. This week's topic has...

August 21, 2023

Hello, Hope you had a great weekend! I'm writing this on a plane and didn't have the time to write this week's issue entirely. Was this forwarded to you? You...

August 14, 2023

Hello! I hope you had a wonderful past week. Last Thursday, we celebrated our 4th wedding anniversary by going to dinner, and we had a wonderful time! We've...

Hey everyone! I hope you had a great weekend. I've had this topic in draft and keep trying to write about it but never fully finished my thoughts. I thought,...

Maker vs Manager Time

Hello! Welcome to another week! I'm writing this before leaving for a concert in a few hours. I plan to write what I want and ask myself why I plan my posts...

Experimentation

Welcome to another week! I hope you had a good weekend and got some rest. Writing practice is always good, and in general, it has helped me understand what...

Ownership Hello! Welcome to another week of this newsletter. For the past couple of weeks, I've been thinking of challenging myself by doing a daily...

Sharing as networking

Hello! Welcome to a new week and the second week of July. It's odd because we are past the year's first half, but it never sinks in on the first week. Time...

Building Relationships

Hello there! Welcome to another week of this newsletter. This week, we got July 4th Holiday in the US, and I took time off today to be with my family. I hope...

Set up for success

Hello! I hope you had a great week! This past week was a short week for me in the US. We had Juneteenth Holiday. Anyhow, let's get with today's issue!...

Extending Your Network

In the past, I’ve talked with managers and directors about networking for their reports because they generally want to help their teammates improve their...

Personal Investments

During the week, I talked with people who wanted to start as mentors but needed help finding mentees. I’ve also found that it takes work for people to find...

What Is Liminal Space? Liminal space refers to the place a person is in during a transitional period. This past week was an odd one for me from multiple...

This week is short, as it is Memorial Day today in the US. Since I’ve only lived a short time in the US, I still get pleasant surprises from the US holidays,...

Last week was a jumble of thoughts where you feel you’re not being productive enough and stop and wonder why you feel that way. As I left the “hard skills,”...

Second-Order Thinking

Second-order thinking, which relies on thinking of long-term consequences of decisions, becomes a critical skill to learn as we grow our scope or ownership...

Fear, Uncertainty of First Times

If you've ever read, watched, or googled something from Brené Brown, you may have come across this quote she references often. "It is not the critic who...

Picking battles

Hello! The past week I had a set of multiple competing priorities that had to get dealt with. I came to several points during the week where I needed to pick...

Culture, Strategy, Brunch?

Hello! Have you ever sat down and thought about your team culture? Your manager's manager culture? The larger organization culture? What gets rewarded? What...

What you can control

I’ve spent the past few weeks struggling with things I can’t control. What makes it harder for me to deal with them is that it has that tiny glimpse of hope...

Being Effective

For the past few weeks, and as we wrapped up the first quarter of the year, I was doing a retrospective if I was being effective enough in my role. The scope...

This past week has been one of those weeks where work takes you across a journey of multiple roles to play with the different teams I work with, both in the...

Programs and Processes

Hey everyone! Long time no see, the past few weeks, I've been very focused on several topics that took a lot of my time, and I couldn't find inner peace to...

How to tell a (promotion) story

One piece of advice my mentor gave me when I wanted a promotion is to tell a story that you’re consistently executing at the next level. Generally, in tech,...

February 13, 2023

Hello! Long time no see. I hadn’t been writing for a few weeks, something like not feeling right. Probably from all the layoffs within the company I work...

January 23, 2023

This past week was hectic for me, with lots of running around wrapping up roadmaps and goals for the year and helping managers understand the scope and...

Beginnings and Roadmaps

January 16, 2023

During the weekend, my mom returned home after spending three weeks with us. Yesterday I wasn't feeling in a writing "mood," but I wanted to keep to my...

Meeting Overload

January 9, 2023

Hello! Welcome to the new week of 2023! I hope you had some happy holidays if you took time off. Otherwise, I hope you had some rest from your normal day-to-...

Year in Review: 2022

January 2, 2023

I’ve been thinking about how to write this year in review as the year has ended. Things like do X lessons learned this year, but I couldn’t settle on a...

December 16, 2022

Growing Others introduction, past week’s recollection This past week I was part of an incident analysis for most of the week, as well as identifying...

Filling the Gaps

November 7, 2022

Filling the gaps word-count This week I had a chat with my manager, and she told me how she generally sees me working on things where “filing the gap” is...

Heroics and sustainable pace

October 3, 2022

I’m visiting San Diego for GraphQL Summit. So I’m writing this from a hotel room. I think I panicked on the first day of the conference; perhaps I’ve been...

Context Switching

September 20, 2022

I’ve had this topic a few times in the past week, around how I handled it and if I had any tips. I think there are several ways I’ve tried to handle this...

September 12, 2022

Change is always hard, but more recently, lack of clarity has been giving me headaches! It creates such a deep "fog of war" that nobody is able to give a...

Radiating Intent

September 5, 2022

It's Labor Day here in the US. My wife made a quick trip, and I'm alone this long weekend. So I'm writing this new issue next to my dog while he sleeps on...

August 30, 2022

Per the usual night's restlessness, I’m lost for words. I’m looking, not for inspiration, but for motivation. motivation to start and carry on my goal of...

August 22, 2022

As I was trying to write this newsletter and going through what I had done during the week. Writing is always tricky in front of the proverbial "blank...

Collaboration Across Organization

August 15, 2022

For the past few months, I’ve been part of a few programs where another organization within the company wanted and needed to change our system to create a...

Alignment with Authority

During the past few weeks, I’ve noticed that I work away from my manager for long period of times, where I’m still required to provide a proxy to her org, or...

Mind the specifications

February 1, 2022

Mind the spec The first month of the year has gone by. I still feel like the year hasn’t started. For some reason, everything has been very slow-moving...

Keep climbing the ladder

This week I had my “mid-year” conversation with my new manager. As we were having this conversation, we talked about being aligned on vision, as I’m now a...

Digital Gardening

These past few weeks have been very tiring, and I had to work a few more hours than expected. But I also took the time to research tools like Foam or...

What's up with code reviews?

I recently saw this tweet getting on my feed One of the biggest cultural shifts in my experience from Mozilla to Stripe is code review speed. At Mozilla...