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November 4 & 5, 2024

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September 4 & 5, 2024

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June 16 & 17, 2025

Nickolas Means

Nickolas is VP of Engineering at MedScout.

Nickolas Means loves nothing more than a story of engineering triumph (except maybe a story of engineering disaster). He’s a student of building healthy culture for technical teams and thinks we have a lot to learn from those who have come before us. He hails from Austin, TX, and spends his spare time hanging out with his wife and kids, building keyboards, and pursuing the perfect cup of coffee.

 

You are here: The story of the Barbican

If you were standing in this exact spot in early 1941, you’d be surrounded by rubble. Large swaths of London lie in ruins after the months-long Blitz during World War II, and Cripplegate ward where we now sit was almost completely destroyed. The only building you’d see standing would be a heavily damaged St. Giles Church.

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You can’t actually “do more with less”

The unrealistic expectation of doing more with less has swept through the ranks of the tech industry. How can you maintain efficiency without burning out?

Embracing cycles of productivity for healthier teams

It’s common to equate working at 100% capacity to elevated productivity, but this isn’t true. Nick Means has some ways you can approach team efficiency in a healthier way.

The Three C’s of Company-Wide Collaboration

Nick Means digs into the three crucial things every company can holistically invest in to build an environment that fosters healthy collaboration across their entire organization.

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Three ways to optimize team focus

Scheduling, prioritizing, and context-switching issues may be getting in the way of your team’s productivity. Here are three approaches to overcome these hurdles.

The 9.1 magnitude meltdown at Fukushima

Nick Means takes us to mid-afternoon on Friday, March 11, 2011 when the ground in Tōhoku began to shake. To the operators at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, it seemed like the shaking would never stop. The way their team operated during that fateful week has a lot to teach us about helping our own teams be at their best, both in crisis and out.

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Values: The runbook for leadership

Using values you believe in as a runbook for difficult situations can make you a more consistent leader and help you build a healthier team.

How to run a great retrospective

Accelerating your team with regular, productive retrospectives

Taking the 737 to the MAX!

Nick Means uses the power of systems thinking to dig into how things could’ve gone so wrong (and learn to better see and understand the systems we interact with every day).

How to cultivate a great engineering process

Building a process that works for your team

Pandemic and purpose-built remote work are not the same thing

What we can learn from purpose-built remote companies

Don’t stall your burnout recovery

Acknowledging the signs so that you don't crash

The night the lights went out in Texas

How does the historic power outage relate to engineering leadership?

How to crash an airplane

On July 19, 1989, United Airlines Flight 232 was en route to Chicago when a mechanical failure caused the plane to become all but uncontrollable. In this unsurvivable situation, the flight crew saved more than half of those onboard. How did they do it?

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The Original Skunk Works

Long before Agile and Lean became buzzwords, a scrappy group of aerospace engineers at Lockheed's Skunk Works were using similar practices to produce some of the most amazing aircraft ever built.

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The building built on stilts

In the summer of 1978, structural engineer William LeMessurier got a phone call that terrified him. An undergraduate student claimed that LeMessurier’s acclaimed 59-story Citicorp Center in Manhattan, just completed the year prior, was dangerously unstable under certain wind conditions. The student was right, and it was almost hurricane season.

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Who Destroyed Three Mile Island?

On March 28, 1979, at exactly 4 o’clock in the morning, control rods slammed into the reactor core of Three Mile Island Unit #2, halting the nuclear reaction because of a fault in the reactor cooling system.

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Eiffel's tower

When Gustave Eiffel built his namesake tower, it was nearly twice as tall as the tallest structure on Earth.

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The invisible song of engineering leadership

It's not enough to just hit the right notes

Learning to love meta productivity

Finding the satisfaction in management that you might have been missing from your years as a developer

The race to Mach 2.0 at scale

When Chuck Yeager became the first pilot to fly faster than the speed of sound, he set off a race around the world to do the same with a plane full of paying passengers. The United States, Russia, the UK, and France all wanted a piece of the inevitable fortune to be made building aircraft to cross oceans faster than sound itself.

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Eiffel's Tower

When Gustave Eiffel built his namesake tower, it was nearly twice as tall as the tallest structure on Earth. His crews built it in an astounding 22 months, pioneering new construction techniques to deliver it in time for the opening of the 1889 Exposition Universelle. It was amazing then, and it’s just as captivating today.

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