I’ve been doing a lot of work around grief lately. Both of my parents died in 2023. Two other friends also died in 2023 - both former coworkers. One was in his mid-thirties and had a rare brain tumor; the other died from COVID. My dad’s death last June came after several months in the ICU. He endured repeated rounds of dialysis, which he hated, and ventilator-associated pneumonia, which I hadn’t heard of before.

Life is growth. If we stop growing, technically and spiritually, we are as good as dead. —- Morihei Ueshiba I started studying aikido about 12 years ago, shortly after I moved to San Francisco. I had no idea how much I would enjoy it, or how much it would change my life. I didn’t know what it was when I first started, but the translation I like the best is “Path of Life Harmony.

This is one of those posts that I’m writing mostly because I’m still frequently hearing people say they’re struggling with the question of how to interview data people. I’ve blogged and spoken previously about the misery of being an interviewee, so suffice it to say I have a ton of empathy for how awful it is to go through a bad interview process, and how disappointing it is to go through a long, grueling interview and not get an offer.